'Who are you?

The ping was short and very directional, no one else could pick it up. 'Oscar Monroe; I work for ANA. We want to help, we want you to be free to make your own choice. When you're clear and safe, call me. Please. >unisphere code< He smiled at his opponents. 'Go for fuck's sake! he yelled out loud.

'Don't even think it, one of the jade figures snarled.

Araminta finally turned and ran. Behind her there was a thunderclap as the three of them clashed. The impact was almost enough to send her toppling over again, yet somehow she kept her balance, kept scrambling forwards. Another of the eerie dark figures was flying fast above the heads of the panicked mob. The long line of paramilitary capsules came streaking down from above the river, curving round to encircle the park.

She reached the Wurung Transport cab and fell inside, sobbing with relief. It slid smoothly along the rail. Outside, people were running over the road and the rail, their terrified expressions making her flinch. The cab slowed then accelerated in juddering motions to avoid them. Garish light battles raged in and above the park. The sounds were muted by the cab's bodywork. Araminta curled up into a ball on the seat, hugging her chest. Far inside her mind the gaiafield was in turmoil at the outpouring of fear. Living Dream followers were still praying to her — forcibly. She blotted it all out.

After a couple of minutes the cab had outpaced everyone else fleeing the park. The dogfight above the city had finished, and the sickening sounds of raw conflict had died away. She was sliding gently along through the Garlay district with its elegant houses and high toroidal pad malls. She could even see some people sitting under the awnings of the cafes and bars that had stayed open, their drinks and food left ignored on the tables as they looked anxiously towards the Bodant district.

I have to get away. No matter what.

She turned to the cab's node, and keyed in the drive program. 'Francola district, she told it.

It had been a long time since Paula had been to Kerensk. Officially, anyway. Kerensk had been one of the Big 15 worlds during the Commonwealth's first era; the super-capitalist engines which powered the Commonwealth's expansion right up until the Starflyer War. Founded by Sergi Nikolayev, a Russian billionaire, to whom the human exodus from Earth finally provided a way to free himself and his money from Moscow's grasp. Like the other Big 15, it developed into an industrial world whose megacity produced an abundance of cheap heavy engineering and consumer products. Entire continents were strip-mined for raw materials, while those that weren't plundered for their minerals were factory farmed.

After the war the economic slowdown caused by financing the new47 worlds followed by the emergence of Higher culture saw the Big 15 slowly lose their stature. Their populations, always transient, drifted away and their manufacturing fell into decline. Inevitably, given their technology base, they became Higher worlds.

Except for Kerensk. The Nikolayev Dynasty carried too much residual distrust and suspicion of the old central control ideology to knuckle under to Higher influences and ANA's benign guidance. Following Far Away's lead, it rejected both Higher and Advancer culture, removing its representative from the Senate and becoming an 'observer' nation. Those that stayed on in Kaluga, the old megacity, followed their own techno-economic imperative. The rest of the planet was effectively abandoned.

Paula scanned the area around Kingsville curiously as the Alexis Denken descended out of a cloudless sky. The old military base was in the middle of a huge desert on the other side of the planet from Kaluga. A relic of the Starflyer War, it had started out as a training camp for the insurgency teams dropped behind enemy lines to make life hell for the Prime invaders. Of course, it was hard to find ruthless soldier types in the nice civilized first era Commonwealth. The new Navy had recruited heavily amid the criminal fraternity.

Kingsville had trained over thirty thousand troops. Back then it had sprawled for miles over the rocky desert, prefabricated buildings arranged in unimaginative rows, their air-conditioning straining against the harsh sun. After the war it had reduced its size considerably. But with the Dynasties chasing after the new Navy contracts it was politically useful to keep the base going. It became a ship repair and refurbishment yard throughout the Firewall campaign. After that, with Kerensk slowly rejecting the Senate's authority it had been downgraded again. Then again.

However, the base had never been legally decommissioned, so technically it remained Commonwealth territory. It was a reserve station in case the Commonwealth was ever threatened again; its array of emergency communication systems maintained by a smartcore and an ageing regiment of bots. There were no humans there any more.

The sensors showed Paula a cluster of long crumbling concrete blockhouses at the centre of strangely straight lines that stretched out into the desert. After a thousand years exposure to Kerensk's ferocious sun by day and freezing air each night even the strongest construction materials crumbled away. The desert was slowly constricting around it. Only the blockhouses remained intact, switching on a small force field once every couple of years or so when the desert finally summoned up enough energy to spin up another sandstorm.

Kingsville reminded Paula of Centurion Station.

The Alexis Denken touched down on a dedicated landing zone that was simply a flattish area of sand and loose rock. She floated down out of the main airlock, with a trolley-sledge hovering behind her. The air was as hot as she'd expected. She put on a pair of silver sunshades against the violet-tinged sun.

A dull metal door on the nearest blockhouse slid open with a grating sound of small stone particles being crunched somewhere in the actuators. She gave it a glance as she went inside, wondering why they didn't use malmetal. It closed behind her and the trolley-sledge. Inside, there was less evidence of decay, though it had obviously been decades since the air conditioning had been on. Fans were now making odd groaning sounds behind their grilles as power was fed into their motors. Light panels came on in the ceiling, revealing an empty rectangular room with a single lift door ahead of her.

Paula's u-shadow gave the Kingsville smartcore her authority code, and the lift doors flowed open. The base itself was buried three hundred metres below the desert. Thankfully, the lift ride down was a smooth one.

The transdimensional communication systems were housed in eight caverns that radiated out from a central engineering hub. Paula walked past the big silver-cased machines in cavern5, followed by the trolley-sledge. The chamber was completely silent. She couldn't even hear a mild power hum despite the huge energy flows her field scan revealed to her behind the silver casings.

Tucked away at the end of an ancillary chamber was another lift. It took her down another hundred metres to the oldest section of the base, comprising a single fortified compartment. This deep shelter had been designed to survive a nuclear strike by the Primes; it had force fields and molecular binding generators reinforcing the superstrength carbon walls. None of them had been switched on for over five hundred years; the smartcore didn't have the resources to maintain them at combat readiness. It didn't really matter, all they protected was an ancient secure storage vault dating back to the Starflyer War.

The Navy command at the time had estimated loss rates among the insurgency forces would be at least eighty per cent. Because of that the last thing every soldier did before being shipped out to their combat zone was to make a copy of their memories so they could be re-lifed if they didn't return. Kingsville's vault still retained the memories of those thirty thousand soldiers.