The voyage had taken three and a half days. There were sixty people on board, and the bitek life-support organs were rapidly approaching their critical limit. The air smelt bad, membrane filters couldn’t cope with the body gases, CO2 was building up, oxygen reserves were almost exhausted.

Trafalgar was five thousand kilometres away when the wormhole terminus sealed. Legally, it should have been a hundred thousand. But a long sublight flight to a docking-ledge would have pushed Ilex ’s life-support situation from critical to catastrophic.

The asteroid immediately went to defence condition C2, allowing the duty officer to engage all targets at will. Nuclear-pumped gamma-ray lasers locked onto the voidhawk’s hull within three-quarters of a second of the wormhole opening.

Every Edenist officer in Trafalgar’s strategic-defence command-centre heard Ilex ’s call. They managed to load a five-second delay order into the defence platforms. Auster gave a fast resume of the voidhawk’s situation. The delay was extended for another fifteen seconds while the duty officer made her evaluation. A squadron of patrol voidhawks closed on Ilex at ten gees.

“Stand down,” the duty officer told the centre, and datavised a lockdown order into the fire-command computer. She looked across at the nearest Edenist. “And tell that idiot captain from me I’ll fry his arse off next time he pulls a stunt like this.”

Ilex swooped in towards Trafalgar at five gees as traffic control cleared a priority approach path ahead of it. Six patrol voidhawks spiralled round it like over-protective avian parents, all seven bitek starships exchanging fast affinity messages of anxiety, interest, and mild rebuke. The northern axial crater was a scene of frantic activity while Ilex chased the asteroid’s rotation, looping around the globular non-rotating spaceport to fly in parallel to the spindle. It settled on a titanium pedestal with eight balloon-tyre maintenance vehicles and crew buses racing towards it, bouncing about in the low gravity.

Lalonde’s navy office personnel disembarked first, hurrying along the airlock tube to the waiting bus, all of them taking deep gulps of clean, cool air. A medic team carried Niels Regehr off in a stretcher, while two paediatric nurses soothed and patted a blubbering Shafi Banaji. Environment-maintenance vehicles plugged hoses and cables into the crew toroid’s umbilical sockets, sending gales of fresh air gusting through the cabins and central corridor. Resenda, Ilex ’s life-support officer, simply vented the fouled atmosphere they’d been breathing throughout the voyage, and grey plumes jetted up out of the toroid, seeded with minute water crystals that sparkled in the powerful lights mounted on the spindle to illuminate the crater.

Once the first bus trundled away, a second nosed up to the airlock. A ten-strong marine squad in combat fatigues and armed with chemical projectile guns marched on board. Rhodri Peyton, the squad’s captain, saluted an exhausted, unwashed, and unshaven Lieutenant Murphy Hewlett.

“This is her?” he asked sceptically.

Jacqueline Couteur stood in the middle of the corridor outside the airlock, with Jeroen van Ewyck and Garrett Tucci training their Bradfields on her. She was even dirtier than Murphy, the check pattern of her cotton shirt almost lost below the engrained grime picked up in the jungle.

“I’m tempted to let her show you what she can do,” Murphy said.

Kelven Solanki stepped forwards. “All right, Murphy.” He turned to the marine captain. “Your men are to have at least two weapons covering her at all times. She’s capable of emitting an electronic warfare effect, as well as letting loose some kind of lightning bolt. Don’t try to engage her in physical combat, she’s quite capable of ripping you apart.”

One of the marines snickered at that. Kelven didn’t have the energy left to argue.

“I’ll go with her,” Jeroen van Ewyck said. “My people need to be briefed anyway, and I’ll let the science officers know what’s required.”

“What is required?” Jacqueline Couteur asked.

Rhodri Peyton turned, and gave a start. In place of the dumpy middle-aged woman there was a tall, beautiful, twenty-year-old girl wearing a white cocktail gown. She gave him a silent entreating look, the maiden about to be offered to the dragon. “Help me. Please. You’re not like them. You’re not an emotionless machine. They want to hurt me in their laboratories. Don’t let them.”

Garrett Tucci jabbed the Bradfield into her back. “Pack it in, bitch,” he said roughly.

She twisted, like an AV projection with a broken focus, and the old Jacqueline Couteur was standing there, a mocking expression on her face. Her jeans and shirt were now clean and pressed.

“My God,” Rhodri Peyton gasped.

“Now do you see?” Kelven asked.

The now nervous marine squad escorted their prisoner along the connecting tube to the bus. Jacqueline Couteur sat beside one of the windows, five guns lined up on her. She watched the bare walls of sterile rock impassively as the bus rolled back across the crater and into a downward sloping tunnel that led deep into the asteroid.

First Admiral Samual Aleksandrovich hadn’t set foot on his native Russian-ethnic birth planet Kolomna for the last fifty-three of his seventy-three years; he hadn’t been back for a holiday, nor even his parents’ funeral. Regular visits might have been deemed inappropriate given that Confederation Navy career officers were supposed to renounce any national ties when they walked through the academy entrance; for a First Admiral to display any undue interest would have been a completely unacceptable breach of diplomatic etiquette. People would have understood his attending the funerals, though. So everyone assumed he was applying the same kind of steely discipline to his private affairs that ruled his professional life.

They were all wrong. Samual Aleksandrovich had never been back because there was nothing on the wretched planet with its all-over temperate climate which interested him, not family nor culture nor nostalgic scenery. The reason he left in the first place was because he couldn’t stand the idea of spending a century helping his four brothers and three sisters run the family fruit-farming business. The same geneering which had produced his energetic one metre eighty frame, vivid copper hair, and enhanced metabolism, bestowed a life expectancy of at least a hundred and twenty years.

By the time he was nineteen years old he had come to realize that such a life would be a prison sentence given the vocations available on a planet just emerging from its agrarian phase. A potentially blessed life should not be faced with such finite horizons, for if it was it would turn from being a joy into a terrible burden. Variety was sanity. So on the day after his twentieth birthday he had kissed his parents and siblings goodbye, walked the seventeen kilometres into town through a heavy snowfall, and signed on at the Confederation Navy recruitment office.

Metaphorically, and otherwise, he had never looked back. He had never been anything other than an exemplary officer; he’d seen combat seven times, flown anti-pirate interdictions, commanded a flotilla raiding an illegal antimatter-production station, and gained a substantial number of distinguished service awards. But appointment to the post of First Admiral required a great deal more than an exemplary record. Much as he hated it, Samual Aleksandrovich had to play the political game; appearing before Assembly select committees, giving unofficial briefings to senior diplomats, wielding Fleet Intelligence information with as much skill as he did the rapier (he was year champion at the academy). His ability to pressure member states was admired by the Assembly President’s staffers, as much for its neatness as the millions of fuseodollars saved by circumventing fleet deployment to trouble spots; and their word counted for a great deal more than the Admiralty, who advanced the names of candidates to the Assembly’s Navy Committee.