When he arrived, puffing heavily, outside the apartment, Marie and Anders Bospoort were getting dressed. He used a black-market customized processor block to break the door’s codelock, and walked straight in.

Marie and Anders looked up in alarm. They ran out of the bedroom. The processor block died in Dariat’s hand and the apartment was plunged into pitch darkness.

“The dark doesn’t bother me,” he said loudly. The sensitive cells showed him the two of them were walking towards him menacingly.

“Nothing will bother you from now on,” Marie replied.

The belt of his toga robe began to tighten round his belly. “Wrong. Firstly you won’t be able to tyrannize me like you did poor old Anders, I’m not that weak. Secondly, if I die Rubra will see exactly what’s been going on, and what you are. He might be crazy, but he’ll fight like a lion to defend his precious habitat and corporation. Once he knows you exist you’ve lost ninety per cent of your advantage. You’ll never take over Valisk without my help.”

The lights came back on. His belt loosened. Marie and Anders regarded him with expressionless faces.

“It’s only thanks to me he doesn’t know already. You obviously don’t understand much about bitek. I can help there as well.”

“Perhaps we don’t care if he knows,” Anders said.

“OK, fine. You want me to lift the limiter orders I put on this floor’s sensitive cells?”

“What do you want?” Marie asked.

“Revenge. I’ve waited thirty years for you. It’s been so long, so very tiring; I nearly broke on more than one occasion. But I knew you would come in the end.”

“You expected me?” she asked derisively.

“What you are, yes.”

“And what am I?”

“The dead.”

Gemal emerged from its jump six hundred and fifty thousand kilometres above Mirchusko, where the gas giant’s gravity anchored it in a slightly elliptical orbit; Tranquillity, in its lower circular orbit, was trailing by two hundred thousand kilometres. Oliver Llewelyn, the colonist-carrier’s captain, identified his starship to the habitat personality, and requested approach and docking permission.

“Do you require assistance?” Tranquillity asked.

“No, we’re fully functional.”

“I don’t get many colonist-carrier vessels visiting. I thought you might have been making an emergency maintenance call.”

“No. This flight is business.”

“Does your entire passenger complement wish to apply for residency?”

“Quite the opposite. The zero-tau pods are all empty. We’ve come to hire some military specialists who live here.”

“I see. Docking and approach request granted. Please datavise your projected vector to spaceport flight control.”

Terrance Smith datavised a sensor access request into the starship’s flight computer, and watched the massive bitek habitat growing larger as they accelerated towards rendezvous in a complex manoeuvre at two-thirds of a gee. He opened a channel to the habitat’s communication net, and asked for a list of starships currently docked. Names and classifications flowed through his mind. A collation program sorted through them, indicating possibles and probables.

“I didn’t realize this was such a large port,” he said to Oliver Llewelyn.

“It has to be,” the captain replied. “There are at least five major family-owned civil carrier fleets based here purely because of the tax situation, and most of the other line companies have offices in the habitat. Then you’ve got to consider the residents. They import one hell of a lot; everything you need to live the good life, from food to clothes to pretentious art. You don’t think they’ll eat the synthesized pulp the starscrapers grow, do you?”

“No, I suppose not.”

“A lot of ships pick up contracts for them, bringing stuff in from all over the Confederation. And of course Tranquillity is the Confederation’s principal base for blackhawk mating flights now Valisk is falling from favour with the captains. The eggs gestate down in the big inner ring. It all adds together. The Lords of Ruin have built it into one of the most important commercial centres in this sector.”

Terrance looked across the bridge. Seven acceleration couches were arranged in a petal pattern on its composite decking, and only one of them was empty. The compartment had an industrial look, with cables and ducts fixed to the walls rather than being tucked neatly out of sight behind composite panels. But then that was a uniform characteristic throughout the Gemal and her sister ships which shuttled between Earth and stage one colony worlds. They were bulk carriers whose cargo happened to be people, and the line companies didn’t waste money on cosmetic finishes.

Captain Llewelyn was lying inertly on his acceleration couch, surrounded by a horseshoe of bulky consoles; a well-built sixty-eight-year-old oriental with skin as smooth as any adolescent. His eyes were shut as he handled the datavise from the flight computer.

“Have you been here before?” Terrance asked.

“I stopped over two days, that was thirty-five years ago when I was a junior officer in a different company. Don’t suppose it’s changed much. Plutocrats put a lot of stock in stability.”

“I’d like you to talk to the other captains for me, the independent trader starships we want to hire. I haven’t exactly done this kind of work before.”

Oliver Llewelyn snorted softly. “You let people know what kind of flight you’re putting together, then start flashing that overloaded Jovian Bank credit disk around, and you’ll be beating them off with a stick.”

“What about the mercenaries and general troops?”

“The captains will put you in touch. Hell, the combat boosted will pay the captains for an introduction. You want my advice, delegate. Find yourself ten or twenty officer types with some solid experience, and let them recruit troops for you. Don’t try and do it all yourself. We haven’t got time, for a start. Rexrew gave us a pretty tight schedule.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re paying, remember?”

“Yeah.” It had taken twenty thousand fuseodollars just to get Oliver Llewelyn to agree to take the Gemal to Tranquillity. “Not part of my LDC contract,” the captain had said stubbornly. Money was easier than datavising legal requirements at him. Terrance suspected it was going to cost a lot more to take the Gemal back to Lalonde. “You sound like you know what you’re talking about,” he said, mildly intrigued.

“I’ve flown a lot of different missions in my time,” the old captain said indifferently.

“So where do I meet these starship captains?”

Oliver Llewelyn accessed a thirty-five-year-old file in his neural nanonics. “We’ll start at Harkey’s Bar.”

Fifteen hours later Terrance Smith had to admit that Oliver Llewelyn had been perfectly correct. He didn’t need to make any effort, the people he wanted came to him. Like iron to a magnet, he thought, or flies to shit. He was sitting in a wall booth, feeling like an old-style tsar holding court, receiving petitions from eager subjects. Harkey’s Bar was full with starship crews hunched around tables, or concentrating in small knots at the bar. There was also a scattering of the combat boosted in the room. He had never seen them before, not in the flesh—if that’s what it could be called. Several of them resembled cosmoniks, with a tough silicon outer skin, and dual—even triple—lower arms, sockets customized for weapons. But the majority had a sleeker appearance than the cosmoniks, whose technology they pilfered; they’d been sculpted for agility rather than blunt EVA endurance, although Terrance could see one combat boosted who was almost globular, his (her?) head a neckless dome, with a wrap-around retinal strip, grainy auburn below its clear lens. The lid rippled constantly, a blink moving round and round. There were four stumpy legs, and four arms, arranged symmetrically. The arms were the most human part of the modified body, since only two of them ended in burnished metal sockets. He tried not to stare at the assembled grotesqueries, not to show his inner nerves.