Kysandra walked past the booster bunker and along the rows of mod-pig silos. Out of the whole project, these animals were her biggest headache. They had to be fed a very specific diet of substances which their weird secondary digestive tract broke down and rearranged into faeces pellets that were the fuel used by the boosters. She had to track down suppliers right across the continent, seeking out merchants who dealt in powdered aluminium, hydrochloric acid, sodium, liquid rubber and a dozen types of nitrate-based fertilizers. Then she had to arrange to have them shipped to Blair Farm, but not in quantities that would arouse interest. She and Valeri set up dozens of small businesses in towns along the continent’s main train lines, where labels could be swapped and the compounds forwarded in different containers. Then, when they did get here, they had to be mixed in just the right proportions before being fed to the mod-pigs.

The testing shed was two hundred metres past the silos, perched on the riverbank. She plodded over to it, through the shadow cast by the big iron crane of the launch framework. The squat gantries that would support the Skylady and her booster rocket assembly when they were ready to send her soaring back into space had been completed several weeks ago. Five red-painted iron scaffold pillars curved upwards in shallow arcs over a big circular pool filled with river water, to merge into a bracelet-shaped cradle where the crane would hoist the starship. Right now, it was a strange empty construction, as if it had outlasted a building it had once contained.

There were filter masks hanging up under the testing shed porch. Apparently exposure to perchlorates could cause thyroid problems in humans. Kysandra put one on before going in. The interior was simple enough, with a broad bench running along one side, filled with the kind of glassware that told anyone they were in a chemical lab. Nigel and Fergus were standing over a jar of greenish fluid, where a couple of thumb-sized fuel pellets were fizzing like bad beer.

‘Slvasta won,’ she announced.

‘Yes,’ Nigel’s voice was muffled by the mask. ‘We sensed Russell. Most of the county did.’

‘That means it’s going to happen!’

‘Yes.’ He still hadn’t looked up from the sensor module that was scanning the jar and its dissolving pig faeces. ‘That’s up to standard,’ he said to Fergus. ‘Load the booster.’

‘Slowly and carefully,’ Fergus retorted.

Nigel abandoned the bench and put his arm round Kysandra, walking with her out of the test shed. ‘Sorry,’ he said when he’d taken the mask off. ‘Some things just have to be done correctly. I’d hate to wind up sitting on top of a bad batch.’

She nodded earnestly. ‘I understand.’

‘Those pigs are pretty unpredictable.’

‘We get the feed mix right every time.’

‘I know, but I doubt the Fallers ever had this in mind when they designed the neuts.’

It had been the final revelation they’d extracted from the Proval-Faller’s memory. Neuts were their perfect domestic slave race, biological machines created for one reason – to serve the Fallers. Capable of being moulded into dozens of sub-species, from animals that could perform most kinds of physical labour to immobile organ clumps whose enzymes turned them into simple chemical refineries, neuts eliminated the need for an overly mechanized civilization. You just had to know how to format the embryo. That was the second part of the puzzle.

When they assumed human form, the Fallers had thick bundles of additional nerves stretching down their arms to a small wart-like protuberance on the back of the wrist. It allowed a direct synaptic interface to a corresponding patch of nerve receptors at the back of a neut’s head. All mods had an identical patch, through which instructions could be channelled. It was a discovery which had delighted Nigel. ‘So that’s how they operated outside the Void,’ he’d muttered as the Skylady displayed the information through their exovision. ‘Paula will be happy about that.’

It had taken the Skylady a while to work out the sequence, but eventually they got the mod-pig embryo correct. So the fat creatures lay in their stalls, with stumpy legs that were little more than wedges to keep them upright, and a body containing bio-reactor organs that could crap out pure rocket fuel. They didn’t live long; the toxicity of the compounds they ate saw to that. But they had enough of them in the silos, and with regular births to replace the dead, the supply of pellets matched production of the booster casings. There was only one booster left to fill now, and they’d have a cluster that could send Skylady racing over ninety kilometres high. But it would be a ballistic trajectory; her speed would fall far short of orbital velocity. Achieving that still depended on the starship’s degraded ingrav drive providing the final impetus. Nigel swore the figures checked out, and he’d make it to the Forest.

‘Will the last booster be finished in time?’ she asked as they made their way back to the farmhouse.

‘It takes ten days to load the propellant and catalyse the final binding, so yes. Phase one isn’t scheduled for another month. That’ll give us plenty of time for the final stack assembly.’

She turned to look back at the launch framework. ‘What if the weapons are no good?’

‘Come on, Coulan has had drones in there examining them for eighteen months. Their integrity hasn’t been compromised. They’re simply powered down.’

‘They’re three thousand years old, Nigel.’

‘Irrelevant. Their warheads are solid state. All the ancillary components are fragile, granted. We’ll have to refurbish and replace quite a bit, but they’ll function just fine. Stop worrying. You’ll make me jittery, and that’s no good at all.’

His arm went round her shoulder, holding her close. She’d noticed him becoming gradually more tactile over the last year or so.

‘Sorry,’ she said, pouring out insincerity.

‘Yeah, right.’

‘But I do have a question.’

‘What?’

‘I was going through the accounts. Who’s James Hilton? We’ve been paying him an awful lot of money recently.’

‘Ah. Actually, James Hilton was a novelist back on Earth, pre-Commonwealth era.’

‘So why are we paying him a small fortune?’

‘He’s only really known for one book, Lost Horizon; it featured an imaginary valley called Shangri-La, which was sheltered from the rest of the world. I thought that an appropriate name.’

‘For what?’

‘A refuge, in case anything goes wrong.’

‘What can go wrong?’

‘Ah, now there you are. That’s exactly why I was keeping it quiet. If you start having doubts, you always panic.’

‘I do not!’

‘Then why are you worried?’

‘I’m not worried. I’m curious, that’s all.’

‘So now you know. If anything happens, there’s a place where you, me and the ANAdroids can go and regroup.’

‘Right. Thank you. Where?’

‘Port Chana.’

‘Ah! I thought Marek spent a lot of time there just to buy hydrochloric acid.’

‘Clever girl.’

‘Don’t be so patronizing.’

‘You get aggressive when you’re worried.’

‘I’m not worried. I’m concerned you think something can go wrong.’

‘I don’t.’

‘But—’

‘But, I’ve enough experience with life to know that you should always take precautions for other people screwing up. Look, if everything goes right, in a couple of months from now the Void will be gone, and you, me and everyone else on Bienvenido and Querencia will be on board a Raiel ship heading for the Commonwealth. But if not – if something does come along to screw things up – well there are consequences for the things we’ve done. Consequences I’d rather not face. So this is an emergency fallback. Surely that’s sensible, isn’t it?’

Kysandra clenched her jaw. ‘Yes.’

‘See. What do I know?’

‘Every crudding thing.’