‘The managers think the smartcore has been compromised.’

‘Why?’ he asked in genuine puzzlement. The Sheldon Dynasty’s McLeod facility had been tasked with building a hundred and fifty huge exospheric stations that would float just outside Earth’s atmosphere, ultimately providing the entire planet with a T-sphere, allowing practical teleportation anywhere on the surface. It wasn’t a controversial project; ANA: Governance had only commissioned it after a long and no doubt tediously parochial debate amid the many political factions that flourished within humanity’s downloaded personalities.

‘Production hasn’t been disrupted, so it wasn’t sabotage,’ Anine said. ‘Admiral Kazimir believes it may be the Knights Guardians movement.’

One thousand two hundred and ninety-six years old he might have been, and possessing all the phenomenal emotional control only a life so long could bring, but Nigel still let out a sigh of dismay. ‘Not Far Away again? Will that planet never stop being a problem?’

‘Apparently not.’

‘What do they want with the McLeod smartcore?’

‘Navy Intelligence suggests the Knights Guardians want to build their own T-sphere.’

‘Why don’t they just ask us for one? ANA hasn’t restricted the technology to the Central worlds. It’s just horribly complex. I can barely understand the operational theories myself.’

‘Probably because we wouldn’t give them one that’s weaponized.’

‘Oh, that goddamn psycho woman. She’s been in suspension for six hundred years already, and she’s still casting a paranoid shadow.’

‘Never mind, darling. Three more years and our colony ships will be ready.’

‘Yeah.’ It had taken him long enough, but five years ago Nigel had finally decided to do what so many others had done, and leave the Commonwealth behind to start a fresh civilization a long, long way away. The Sheldon Dynasty had sent out transgalactic colonies before, and Nigel had almost gone with them. But there was always one more problem to deal with, one more political fight, one more . . . Until now. Now he was finally going to turn his back on it all for good and find time for himself. This time . . .

‘I’ll see you in a few days,’ Anine said.

‘Good.’

Nigel’s u-shadow ended the link. As the capsule raced away from Port Klye, he saw one of the airbarges lumber up into the sky and fly towards New Costa Junction. It would be using the zero-end wormhole at the station, which opened in deep space, the most convenient and safest place to dump radioactive waste, or some other industrial contaminate material. These days it was used almost exclusively to dump Augusta’s toxic legacy where it would do no harm. That hadn’t always been the case. The zero-end was originally built for discreet disposal to assist the commodities market. Back in the day, surplus harvests or an excess of rare minerals had been quietly shoved out into oblivion, assisting the market price, reaping bigger profits for the financial sectors at the expense of the consumer.

‘What were we doing?’ Nigel murmured as he visualized millions of tonnes of golden grain streaming off into the interstellar night. Cheap food that could have made ordinary people’s lives just that little bit easier and reduced the wealth of people like himself by micro-percentage points.

Those economics were thankfully over. At least in the Central worlds, almost all of which had switched to Higher culture. So many of the External worlds continued to follow the old-style economic and financial patterns. Their politicians claimed it gave them freedom – which Nigel just laughed at. Fortunately, there was a steady migration of citizens inwards, firstly to lead calm and easy lives on the Central worlds before inevitably downloading their minds into ANA, which was the closest the human race had come to a technological version of heaven. So maybe those conniving politicians did have a point. He was too much of an individualist to contemplate a download. It was interesting that most people retreated into ANA after three or four centuries knocking about the Commonwealth, whereas those who pressed on over six or seven hundred years tended to stay in their (heavily modified and enriched) bodies, almost as if ANA was some kind of illicit temptation and if you avoided it you could reach true maturity.

The capsule curved inland, following the main airborne traffic stream for the Cromarty Hills. Other capsules formed a fluid matrix around him, shiny metallic ellipsoids ploughing through the hot clear air, shining so brightly under the star’s blue-white glare that they appeared to have their own halos. Beneath him was the long serpentine ribbon of the ten-lane Medani freeway, standing above the slender river on thick pillars as it followed the floor of the shallow meandering valley all the way back to the hinterlands. Most of the road had been converted now, mutating from a sturdy grey and black ribbon of enzyme-bonded concrete to a weird botanical symbiot colony. With the advent of regrav capsules, New Costa had been quick to abandon its roads. Roads needed annual maintenance dollars spent on them. Air traffic only needed a smartcore controller.

Now bots crawled along the Medani freeway, laying a complex weave of biological arteries around the concrete. More bots tunnelled into the ground below the support pillars, creating a root network to feed the modified freeway. Nutrients pulsed along the new arterial plexus, supporting an incredible diversity of vegetation. The native plants from hundreds of worlds had been genetically adapted so that they could all be sustained by the same nutrient fluid. The end creation was a wild river of jungle winding its way through the shrinking city, curving down to parks along the old off-ramps and intersections in a strangely exotic three-dimensional growth curve that nature could never produce.

Nigel could still remember meeting with the bunch of crazy artists who’d begged him for the opportunity to do something other than the standard flatten-and-replant policy that gripped so many of the Central worlds’ shrinking cities. He’d agreed, not just because such a revamp might well be a truly spectacular art statement, but as a kind of acknowledgement of how different their environment could become. It was also an oblique tip of the hat to the enigmatic Planters, who had left behind truly huge hybrid organic constructs on the worlds they’d visited. Nigel’s Dynasty had finally cracked their nanotech inheritance, adapting it into the biononics which the Commonwealth knew. Biononics gave any and every user command of the very molecules which made up their own bodies, as well as making new generations of replicators possible. Ironically, the technology incorporated within the bots was now also rendering whole swathes of New Costa obsolete.

Yet, for all its population was reducing on a daily basis, New Costa was still home to over a hundred million people. The residential districts with smaller mass-grown drycoral homes where all the low-level company workers used to live had been reduced and turned to parkland connected to the synergistic freeways. But the districts with the larger mansions and elegant condos – those round the fringes of the city, away from the worst industrial excesses – still remained. That was where the majority of people lived now.

Nigel had an estate in the heart of the Cromarty Hills, two hundred square miles of manicured gardens and immaculate old-style parkland on the edge of the megacity. The palace in the very middle was a ludicrous anachronism now, effectively a single-building town that had been capable of accommodating his entire household. That was back when he had a vast immediate family and an entourage of managers and lawyers – all of whom had their own staff – who would travel between his lordly residences on many planets, settling for a few months in one then moving on like some royal procession in medieval times. A life lived in a fashion which made the old French Sun King seem cheap and small.