‘Building blocks of society. If you want to understand how a government works, the laws tell you.’

Now all he had to do was load all the text into the ship’s smartcore. The mod-dwarf was pleased at being given a job which involved sitting down all day, but frustrated with its inability to perform as instructed. Nigel was spending half his time soothing its thoughts. He looked up as she rushed into the room. ‘Zoom where?’ he asked.

Kysandra wrinkled her nose up at his odd sense of humour. ‘My eyes, stupid. Their zoom function is working.’

‘Excellent. The resequencing is progressing nicely. Nice to confirm the Void allows genetic modification to work. How about infra-red function?’

‘Yes,’ she confirmed – though that image was just plain weird. Everything a different colour, with brightness depending on how hot an object was. Still it was better than light amplification for night use, which was even stranger than ex-sight perception. ‘Got it.’

‘Great.’

‘You’re good at calming mods,’ she said, indicating the dwarf, which was concentrating hard on the book.

‘I had a good teacher.’

‘I’m going out to take a proper look at the third barn,’ she told him. ‘I still think we’d be better off demolishing it and beginning again from scratch.’ Nigel had big plans for expanding the compound, starting with building a barn large enough to conceal the spaceship from casual sight. Developing a modest industrial base was all part of his mission to gather as much scientific data on the Void as he could. And Skylady was the key to it. The ship’s smartcore could control dozens of mods simultaneously, using them as remote manipulators. But the ’path its bioprocessor smartcore generated was range-limited. They needed the ship at the farm.

‘Sure thing,’ he said.

‘I had a carpentry memory implantation this morning,’ she assured him. ‘I should be able to tell which purlins and rafters are still solid, if any.’ Commonwealth memory implants were a complete revelation. She’d been accepting four a day – which was as many as Nigel would allow her. The first three days had been spent bringing her knowledge base up to the equivalent of teenagers in the Commonwealth. She understood so many concepts now, but details remained to be filled in. For the last couple of days she’d divided her allowance between practical skills like carpentry and general information.

‘Just go easy,’ he told her for the hundredth time. ‘You need time to assimilate all the new data. It has to settle in properly.’

‘I’m using my storage lacuna so I don’t get brainburn, like you said. I’ll be fine. Besides, I know all about native wood anyway; the carpentry knowledge just adds technique.’

‘Well, listen to the neural expert,’ he muttered sarcastically.

She grinned. An icon flipped up into her exovision. One of the sensors they’d placed round the valley was showing a big cart turning off the public road three miles away, turning down the track to the valley. With the Void distorting electromagnetic communications, bandwidth was poor over such a distance. She couldn’t get a clear picture of the people riding in the cart.

‘We weren’t expecting a delivery until next week,’ she said automatically. ‘The coal’s supposed to be first, and that isn’t old man Steron’s wagon anyway.’

‘That’s not a delivery,’ Nigel said.

Normally, Kysandra had some clue about a person’s emotions, even with a decent shell wrapping round their thoughts. But with Nigel’s impenetrable shell she was completely lost. Looking at him, sitting perfectly still as he sent out a stream of encrypted code to the smartcore, she was suddenly struck by how menacing this man from another universe could be.

A second sensor, further down the track, gave a better image of the cart and its three passengers as it trundled past. ‘Oh, no,’ she groaned. It was Akstan, Julias and Russell – another of the brothers.

‘My fault. I shouldn’t have left such a big loose end,’ Nigel said. ‘That was stupid of me. Maybe I have been a little cautious about exposing myself. Shock, I expect. Well, that ends now.’

‘Are you going to kill them?’ she asked quietly. The weapons available to the Commonwealth were truly astounding, even though half of them probably wouldn’t work in the Void. Ma’s boys with their pump-action shotguns and hunting knives wouldn’t stand a chance.

‘No. That would be a waste.’

‘Waste? So what are you going to do?’

‘Recruit them.’

‘Er, Nigel, they’re pretty loyal to Ma.’

‘Did I say I was going to offer them a choice?’

The cold intensity of his voice made Kysandra shudder. Her u-shadow accessed the feed from various sensors around the farmhouse, building their images to a single picture across her exovision.

*

The wagon came to a halt just outside the gate set in the compound’s ramshackle fence. Julias frowned at the farmhouse, taking in the repaired roof, freshly painted gable bargeboards, fixed windows, pruned climbing roses, the kitchen garden with rows of newly planted vegetables, the half-refurbished first barn.

‘It wasn’t like this a week ago,’ he said. ‘He might have brought in some help.’

‘So have we,’ Akstan said, and patted his shotgun.

The Skylady had a small flock of semiorganic ge-eagles stowed on board. Nigel activated one and downloaded a set of instructions which its small smartcore could follow easily enough. It loaded its ordinance and flapped up quickly into the sky.

Akstan primed his pump-action shotgun with a single powerful motion and climbed off the cart. His brothers followed him down, their own weapons held ready. They kept their shells strong, but neither made any attempt to fuzz themselves. None of the brothers noticed the big artificial bird swooping quickly and silently through the air towards them. To ex-sight, its semiorganic components were identical to living tissue. Only its controlling bioprocessor might have betrayed it, with routines that were fast and precise rather than a bird’s natural impulse-instinct thoughts. But the difference was so tiny that they probably wouldn’t have noticed even if they had examined the bird.

Akstan directed a strong ’path shout at the farmhouse. ‘Kysandra, hey, Kysandra, you want to come out here? Be easier that way.’

She didn’t even turn round.

Akstan looked at his brothers. Russell shrugged.

‘Come on now, girl, you belong to me. Everybody knows that. Your new man in there, we gonna see him off today. He ain’t gonna be around no more.’

A shadow flashed across the group of men as the ge-eagle passed five metres overhead. Julias frowned up at it, clearly puzzled by the strange powerful shape. He was completely unaware of the aerosol it released.

‘You come out here now, Kysandra,’ Akstan ’pathed, his thoughts colouring towards anger at the defiance. ‘If you don’t, we gonna come in and get you. Ain’t gonna be pretty.’

‘What—?’ Russell murmured, and fell unconscious.

‘Huh?’ Akstan grunted, then joined his brother in an inelegant heap on the ground.

‘Now what?’ Kysandra asked as the ANAdroids carried the three comatose men into the farmhouse and laid them out on the floor of the front room.

‘I used a mild domination on them last time, so they’d agree to giving me you and the farm,’ Nigel told her as he stared down impassively at the sleeping figures. ‘Too mild, apparently.’

‘Domination?’

‘It’s a kind of mind-control technique they developed on the other world. Someone called Tathal perfected it.’

‘Mind control? You mean you can order them round like mods?’

‘Not quite. You subvert their loyalty, which makes them want to do everything you ask.’

Kysandra hoped she was keeping her shell firm, because, if anything, that sounded even more unpleasant than simply ordering people around. ‘And you know how to do that?’