Then they were walking toward the plane, Kristen gripping his arm as they reached the collapsible metal stairs up to the hatch. It suddenly hit him that she couldn't have ever flown before, and he led her by the hand to a window seat beside him. In front of them sat Michael and Tom. As the engines began to roar to life, Michael craned his head around the side of the seat.

"Oh, and we got the medical kit delivered," he said. "All the usual things and one or two specialties. We have Kristen to thank for that; her doc did us well. Didn't overcharge, either." He turned back to the front and she smiled happily. Kristen didn't have much idea of where she was going or what these people were seeking, but her new clothes felt just fine and she hadn't ever expected a chance to fly.

The plane jolted into movement and accelerated with agonizing slowness along the runway. Serrin wanted to close his eyes against the mounting panic, but he had to try to seem relaxed for Kristen's sake. Her fingers, stub-tipped with nails bitten almost to the quick, were dug deep into his arm. She was terrified.

With all the elegance of an expiring hippopotamus, the plane finally lifted off the ground with a groan, then rose steeply into the clear sky. Seatbelts unclicked all around and suddenly Michael turned around toward them again, his face a mask of fear.

"Look out! Terrorists!" he hissed. There was a sharp bang from just ahead, the sound of a gun going off. Serrin through his body over Kristen, looking wildly around for the gunman. Michael's face turned to an evil smile as he raised the neck of the bottle toward Serrin, a little wisp of gas still curling from it as the first foamy bubbles began to pour out over the sides of the neck. His other hand proffered paired champagne glasses.

"You bastard," Serrin growled at him. "I might have had a heart condition for all you knew."

Michael hesitated and gave the elf a long, knowing look before Serrin finally took the glasses, blushing a little, leaning forward so Kristen couldn't see his reaction. The Englishman filled them and sat back to sip his own.

"Are all Englishmen champagne addicts?" Serrin asked, trying to think of a suitably childish revenge.

"Obligatory, dear boy. It's one of life's little ironies that even though, as every decent Englishman knows, the French are the most dastardly and treacherous nation of bounders in the history of the world, we buy three times as much of their fizz as any other nation does. More than they do themselves these days, but that's because they're too lazy and indolent to be able to afford it," he replied cheerfully.

"You're a clone. Of Geraint," Serrin groaned.

"Not quite, term. Not quite. I don't have that romantic Celtic thing. At Cambridge, he made out and I made computers. Anyway, enough of that. Read the tourist brochure. Make sure you can identify all the poisonous critters."

By the time the descent to New Hlobane came, Serrin had assumed his familiar dozing-in-flight posture, with Kristen, light-headed from champagne she'd never before tasted, tucked against his shoulder. Michael craned around at them again and nudged Tom. Turning to see their peaceful faces, Tom smiled. Michael looked thoughtful, even a little sad.

"I don't know how this is going to end up, Tom. I don't know what illusions she's got. He doesn't know himself well enough to figure her out," he said fretfully.

The troll looked at him uncertainly. He tended not to like this man who was so sure of himself, so quick with a smart answer to everything, so seemingly devoid of instinct. All of which Michael had sensed from the very beginning.

"Give me a break, Tom. Just because I don't wear my heart on my sleeve doesn't mean I haven't got eyes to see and ears to hear. I just do what I'm good at, and that's this," he said, tapping his temple with a finger.

That made the troll uncomfortable. Maybe that's me too, the troll thought, trying to be good at something and disliking someone because he's so much better at his craft than I am at mine. And if that's it, I'm being small.

"Sorry, chummer. I just take some time to get used to very different folks, that's all," the troll mumbled.

"I noticed. But sometimes I wish I could do some of the things you do," the Englishman said.

Tom was perplexed. "You're slottin' me."

"Well, on second thought, maybe not," Michael laughed. Tom realized that he'd never want to do what this man did for a living either, and began to laugh along with him.

It didn't take him long to check things out. Manhattan had plenty of private investigators only too happy to take nuyen for plowing through airline passenger lists, information that was only minimally protected in airlines' matrix systems anyway. Magellan found himself with four possibles for an elf, a human, and troll; flights to Nogoya, Moscow, Cape Town, and Aztlan. Cape Town stuck out like a sore thumb. It surprised him that they hadn't gone directly to New Hlobane until he remembered from Sutherland's profile that the man had spent time working in Cape Town. Magellan reasoned that Sutherland must have chosen that as a first stop, maybe to look up some old friends, perhaps to get some extra muscle for help when they got to the Zulu Nation. He slipped the encrypter card into his telecom and called Jenna, telling her he was going to shadow them. She said little, was probably in one of her more pensive moods, judging by her curt brevity. He made a reservation for Cape Town and amused himself with the thought that he could always report them to the authorities for traveling with forged IDs. Thompson, Randolph, and Swiftwater, indeed!

With a couple of hours to kill, he checked through his own fake cards and chose the best of them. He also carefully packed the platinum credsticks and a fistful of high-denomination bills into a hidden briefcase compartment. They'd be discovered by customs, of course, and he would go through the ritual of smiling and greasing the palms of the pleased Azanians who would pretend that there was something illegal about importing credit or notes. After checking once more to see that he'd packed everything he might need, he called for a cab and waited.

New Hlobane International wasn't what Serrin had expected. He had vague memories of Johannesburg as a grimy, depressingly Americanized city with atrocious poverty in its satellite towns and enough crime to make New Yorkers feel at home. But the Zulu airport, the drive to the city through suburbia, and the rising skyline of New Hlobane itself had a quite different air. Pietermaritz-burg, as it had been known before the Zulu people renamed it and made it their capital in the accords of 2039, even seemed to have chromed industrial plants ringing it. The country was rich, that much was clear; and if there were pockets of poverty, they were damn well hidden. The impression of elegance and style he'd gotten at the airport was strengthened by the sight of the spacious boulevards of the capital city.

"This is amazing," he muttered to Michael. "So much for stereotypes of underdeveloped nations."

"Second highest per capita income on the continent," Michael said matter-of-factly. "Tourism is a huge industry, because it's safe here. No bandits and poachers to shoot you out on safari. They've got coalfields the size of Nebraska to the north, and the King owns half of PWV into the bargain. They've invested their money well. You'll find a surprising number of Swiss banks with branches here, and not just in New Hlobane either."

"PWV?" Serrin couldn't remember what the acronym stood for.

"Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vaal. The big industrial plex. Pay attention! I thought you'd been here before. It's only the administrative and judicial capital of the Confederated Azanian Nations, after all. It's the one thing that holds them all together, the Cape Republic, Zulu Nation, Oranje-Vrystaat, the Trans-Swazi Federation. No one was prepared to give up the PWV to anyone else."