Monica Foulkes heard Samuel’s shouted warning and instinctively grabbed a tuft of reedy dune grass. The wind surged with impossible strength. Gravity shifted round until the beach was above her. Monica wailed fearfully as sand fell up into the sky. She felt herself following it, feet pulled into the air and sliding round to point at the interstice surrounding the blackhawk’s nose. The grass clump made an awful slow tearing sound. Her hips and chest left the ground. Sand was blasting directly into her face. She couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. The grass clump moved several centimetres. “OhdearGodpreservemeee!”

A long-fingered hand clamped around her free wrist. The grass clump left the sand with a sharp sucking noise, its weight wrenching her arm out towards the blackhawk. For an eternal second Monica hung splayed in the air as the sand scudded around her. Someone groaned with pained effort.

The wormhole interstice closed behind Udat .

Sand, water, mangled vegetation, and demented fish cascaded down out of the sky. Monica landed flat on her belly, breath knocked out of her. “Oh my God,” she wheezed. When she looked up, the haggard Edenist was crouched on his knees, panting heavily as he clutched his wrist. “You”—the words were difficult to form in her throat—“you held on to me.”

He threw her a nod. “I think my wrist is broken.”

“I would have . . .” She shuddered, then gave a foolish jittery laugh. “God, I don’t even know your name.”

“Samuel.”

“Thank you, Samuel.”

He rolled onto his back and sighed. “Pleasure.”

Are you all right?tranquillity asked the edenist.

My wrist is very painful. She’s heavy.

Your colleagues are approaching. Three of them are carrying medical nanonic packages in their aid kits. They will be with you shortly.

Even after all this time spent in Tranquillity, he couldn’t get used to the personality’s lack of empathy. Habitats were such an essential component of Edenism. It was disconcerting to have one treat him in this cavalier fashion. Thank you.

“I didn’t think voidhawks and blackhawks could operate in a gravity field,” Monica said.

“They can’t,” he told her. “This isn’t gravity, it’s centrifugal force. It’s no different to the docking-ledges they use outside.”

“Ah, of course. Have you ever heard of one coming inside a habitat before?”

“Never. A swallow like that requires phenomenal accuracy. From a strictly chauvinistic point of view I hate to say this, but I think it would be beyond most voidhawks. Even most blackhawks, come to that. Mzu made an astute choice. This was a very well thought out escape.”

“Twenty-six years in the making,” Pauline said. She climbed slowly to her feet, shaking her cotton top, which had been soaked by the falling water. A fat blue fish, half a metre long, was thrashing frantically on the sand by her shoes. “I mean that woman had us fooled for twenty-six goddamn years. Acting out the role of a flekhead physics professor with all the expected neuroses and eccentricities slotting perfectly into place. And we believed it. We patiently watched her for twenty-six years and she behaved exactly as predicted. If my home planet had been blown to shit, I’d behave like that. She never faltered, not once. But it was a twenty-six-year charade. Twenty-six goddamn years! What kind of a person can do that?”

Monica and Samuel exchanged an anxious look.

“Someone pretty obsessive,” he said.

“Obsessive!” Pauline’s face darkened. She leant over to pick the big fish up, but it squirmed out of her hands. “Keep bloody still,” she shouted at it. “Well, God help Omuta now she’s loose in the universe again.” She finally succeeded in grabbing hold of the fish. “You do realize that thanks to our sanctions they haven’t got a defensive system which can even fart loudly?”

“She won’t get far,” Monica said. “Not with this Laton scare closing down all the starship flights.”

“You hope!” Pauline staggered off towards the waterline with her wriggling burden.

Monica clambered to her feet and brushed the sand off her clothes, shaking it out of her hair. She looked down at the lanky Edenist. “Dear me, CNIS entrance standards have really gone downhill lately.”

He grinned weakly. “Yeah. But you know she’s right about Mzu. The good doctor had us all fooled. Clever lady. And now there’s going to be hell to pay.”

She put her hand under his shoulder and helped him up. “I suppose so. One thing’s for certain, there’s going to be a mad scramble to catch her. Every government is going to want her tucked away on their own planet in order to safeguard democracy. And, my new friend, there are some democrats in this Confederation I don’t ever want to find her.”

“Us, for instance?”

Monica hesitated, then gave her head a rueful shake. “No. But don’t tell my boss I said that.”

Samuel watched the two agents on horseback galloping across the beach toward them. Right now he couldn’t even remember which services they belonged to. Not that it mattered. In a few hours they’d all be going their separate ways again. “Damn, Tranquillity really was the only place for her, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. Come on, let’s see if these two have got anything for your wrist. I think that’s Onku Noi on the second horse. The Imperial Oshanko mob are always loaded down with gadgets.”

According to his neural nanonics’ timer function it was high noon. But Chas Paske wasn’t sure how to tell any more. There hadn’t been any fluctuation in the red cloud’s lambent emission since he started walking—hobbling, rather. The black and red jungle remained mordantly uninviting. Every laboured step was accompanied by the incessant hollow rolls and booms of thunder from high above.

He had managed to splint his leg, after a fashion: five laths of cherry oak wood that stretched from his ankle to his pelvis, lashed into place by ropy vines. The thigh wound was still a real problem. He had bound it with leaves, but every time he looked it seemed to be leaking capacious amounts of ichor down his shin. And it was impossible to keep the insects out. Unlike what appeared to be every other living creature, they hadn’t abandoned the jungle. And devoid of other targets, they massed around him—mosquito-analogues, maggot-analogues, things with legs and wings and pincers that had no analogue. All of them suckling at his tender flesh. Twice now he’d changed the leaves, only to find a seething mass of tiny black elytra underneath. Flies crawled round his skin burns as though they were the only oases of nourishment in a barren world.

According to his guidance block he had come two and a half kilometres in the last three hours. It was hard going through the virgin undergrowth which lay along the side of the river. His crutch kept getting snagged by the thick cords that foamed over the loam. Slender low-hanging branches had a knack of catching the splint laths.

He picked the small wrinkled globes of abundant vine fruit as he went, chewing constantly to keep his fluid and protein levels up. But at this rate it was going to take him weeks to get anywhere.

Durringham was his ultimate goal. Whatever resources and wealth existed on this misbegotten planet, they resided in the capital. Scouting it had been his team’s mission. He saw no reason to abandon that assignment. Sitting waiting to die in the jungle wasn’t a serious option. Recovery and evacuation was obviously out of the question now. So, there it was, an honourable solution; one which would keep him occupied and motivated, and, should he achieve the impossible and make it, might even accomplish something worthwhile. Chas Paske was going to go down swinging.

But for all his determination he knew that he was going to have to find an easier way to travel. The medical program was releasing vast amounts of endocrines from his implants, analgesic blocks had been thrown across a good twenty per cent of his nerve fibres. Boosted metabolism or not, he couldn’t keep expending energy at this rate.