9

Home is Where the Heat Is

Strauss-Giolitto stretched her long limbs, standing on tiptoe and reaching with her splayed hands towards the ceiling of the chamber. Looking back on her extended sessions with the Midnight Ranger's Main Computer, they seemed to her to flow all into one, as if she had never allowed herself to take any breaks at all for rest and recreation. She had little idea of how much time had passed since she had begun giving it these history lessons—it was hard to think of them as anything other than lessons, even though her narrative was as continuous an account of the rise, amid occasional setbacks, of Homo sapiens as she could make it.

I'm a book, she thought. A talking book.

She carried on talking as she relaxed on to her heels and lowered her arms. Then she stretched for the ceiling again.

". . . and then, towards the end of the eighteenth century after the birth of the Christian prophet, there began in the Western World what was called the Industrial Revolution. It was a time of great technological advance, with new machines being invented to do everything from weaving fabrics to hauling fossil fuel out of the ground. Transportation devices proliferated: railways, steamships, hovercraft, steam-powered automobiles . . ."

She must take care not to start her divergent history of humankind too clumsily. The puter that pulled this one's strings—that aboard Artificial Environment 17,863,006—would probably be the more easily deceived of the two, but she was aware of the dangers of underestimating its perspicacity.

"Puters?" said the Main Computer.

She was grateful for the interruption. It gave her a little time to think.

"Puters came a little later, about the middle of the third decade of the nineteenth century, I think. The guy who invented them was called something like Garbage." She made a great show of concentration, letting herself drop down into a lotus position on the cabin floor. "Yes, that's about right. Mind you, they were lumbering things at first. Something with the capabilities of the average thighputer, had Humans been able to build it, would have needed to occupy a space about as big as Artificial Environment 17,863,006. But soon the technologists discovered microelectronics, and thereafter computer science advanced in leaps and bounds."

"Yours was a precocious species," observed the Main Computer. Strauss-Giolitto almost thought she could hear a dry wryness in its flatly enunciated words.

"If that's true, my ancestors didn't realize it," responded Strauss-Giolitto, teasing at a piece of fluff that had become lodged between two of her toes. "They hadn't any yardstick to measure their technological progress against."

"They had yet to make contact with non-Human civilizations?"

"Too true. Many—maybe most—of their scientists didn't believe that there could be such a thing. Some of them were still having difficulty coming to grips with the idea of evolution, and fought vociferously against any such process having operated, so the notion of its having happened twice, on two different worlds—let alone on countless others—was anathema to them."

She stroked the upper arches of her feet. They were filthy. The next occasion she had to plead a break to go to the lavatory she must make a point of taking the time out to wash them. They smelt as well, but then all the rest of her did, too.

Strauss-Giolitto sighed. "Anyway," she continued, "with the advent of smaller computers, air travel became much more practicable, and by a natural extension there emerged the science of rocketry . . ."

#

Nightmirror feels the Main Computer of the Blunt Instrument begin to stir itself, and the Image's senses begin to quicken. Perhaps this may be the time at last when the weeks and months of patient waiting will come to fruition. Not that Nightmirror has been bored—on the contrary, he has been fascinated by his period of residence in Kaantalech's flagship, and anyway bears only a tangential relationship to the shifting of time—but nevertheless he is eager to discover what will happen once the stasis in which he has locked himself is broken.

A few billion electroneurological relays reconfigure themselves, as if someone were shaking the Main Computer into wakefulness. Nightmirror "sees" these reconfigurations as tiny blue or yellow sparks in an otherwise all-embracing night of ultimate blackness.

He follows their patterns with all-consuming interest. His relationship with the puter has become such that, on Nightmirror's part at least, it has become quasi-telepathic. He can read the changing arrays of the sparks, if he concentrates; he can tell what the Main Computer is setting into action perhaps even more readily than can the Main Computer itself.

The Shift field is still being maintained, but it is being set in readiness for instant demolition when the command is given. Various weapons are being set in place, ready for immediate deployment. One hundred and forty three (Nightmirror is incapable of not recording the precise number) ftl pulsenukes are sliding into their repeater bays, their warheads primed: they show within the mind of the big puter as evilly winking dots of malevolent red light. Power pulses to the Blunt Instrument's maxbeam generators, which ascend slowly from quiescence to a sort of living eagerness. Shutters slide back from myriad (Seventeen thousand nine hundred and seventy, records Nightmirror's mind automatically) smaller armaments: sternian activators, implosion bolts, rigor inducers, pancake pedoes . . .

Suddenly Nightmirror becomes, if possible, even more alert than before. On board the Blunt Instrument is a weapon whose existence he has not, in its unpowered state, detected before—in fact, he suspects that even the Main Computer has not been aware of its presence.

Hanging in the middle of the complex skein of differently colored lights—a galaxy in miniature, as it seems to Nightmirror now—is a large ovoid, seemingly trying to emulate a galactic nucleus. It has an opalescent blue sheen—a pale blue that seems possessed of infinite life-destroying malice.

A planetary rupter.

Other weapons—maxbeams, for example—have the power to reduce rocky planets to rubble, but the planetary rupter goes further, generating repulsive charges between the different subatomic particles of any world unlucky enough to be struck by it. Even the Autarch Nalla had the sense to banish this weapon: Kaantalech must have kept the existence of this one secret from him, at risk of her own certain death should he ever have discovered her deception.

But why should Kaantalech require a planetary rupter at the moment?

The question torments as great a part of Nightmirror's mind as he can spare from his observation of the rest of the Blunt Instrument's escalatingly lethal attire. Kaantalech is surely about to set herself against the scattered fleet of the Helgiolath, not a concentrated mass such as a planet. So why should she need this specialist weapon?

The Main Computer is now forming different electroneurological pathways, establishing communications with the controlling puters of the other warships of Kaantalech's armada. This is the nexus from which the entire fleet will be controlled, the place where Kaantalech's barked commands will be translated and interpreted by the Main Computer before transmission to its subsidiaries for implementation.

Nightmirror inches his consciousness closer to the edge of that of the Main Computer. The AI must now be engrossed in the preparations it is making for battle with the Helgiolath: it is unlikely to notice the sneaking mental advance of the Image, surely.

Yet it does. On some reflexive basis, it does.

Nightmirror feels an invisible barrier, right on the very verge of tangibility, resist his approach. He shoves against it tentatively: it yields a little, but then firmly resumes its original position, excluding him. He can see whatever the Main Computer is doing, but he is not to be permitted to come any closer than he is now—he cannot interact with the tapestries of light-points. From this mental distance, although he can decipher the grosser purposes of each electroneurological alteration and development, he is incapable of probing the deeper, underlying reasons for any particular disposition or deployment of weaponry.

So, no direct way of solving the enigma of why Kaantalech should believe her assault armory must incorporate a planetary rupter.

Perhaps she wants to adopt a scorched-earth policy—to be ready, should the battle seem not to be going her way, to destroy Alterifer's little moon so that, even if she is defeated, the Helgiolath will not be able to discover any of the secrets stored in her headquarters? But that doesn't make sense, either, Nightmirror muses. That's a job she could do just as well with a maxbeam or any number of other lower-key weapons. It's only a small moon, with a tiny mass.

Or Kaantalech may have decided to eliminate Alterifer itself. But why bother? There's nothing there of any interest—to Helgiolath or Alhubra alike.

Then a horrible thought strikes Nightmirror.

Uh-oh.

He slides away into The Truthfulness and, there, searches for the energy pattern that identifies Kortland's flagship. He will return into the universe of The Wondervale only picoseconds after his departure from the Blunt Instrument, but attracting Kortland's attention may take a while longer.

Perhaps fatally longer.

#

". . . when the early Human expeditionary parties reached Heaven's Ancestor." Strauss-Giolitto was having difficulty keeping herself awake. This had been a long session, but she was determined to push ahead as long as she could in order to enmesh the two big puters as inextricably as possible in the net of false history she was knotting. "They came in peace—for centuries the Humans had been a peaceful species, and they made the naive assumption that all other spacefaring species must likewise have evolved far beyond anything so primitive as war."

She looked sternly at her cabin wall as if she were speaking directly to the face of the Main Computer.

"They were wrong."

Strauss-Giolitto let the words hang meaningfully in the air. Both puters were sophisticated enough to recognize the meanings of the inflections of her voice. Everything depended on the fact, though, that they were not quite sophisticated enough to recognize faked inflections. Thank Jesus she'd taken an interest, back in her earlier life, in helping the kids produce their amateur holos. She grinned inwardly. There was the time they'd insisted she play the part of the mythical Lady Godiva. Luckily there'd been no way to get hold of a horse.

"Everywhere they looked there were devastated planets, their surfaces razed but bearing fossils and the shattered remains of technological artifacts." She sighed histrionically. "It was clear to my ancestors that this galaxy they had come to had once been home to numerous flourishing civilizations but that something—they could hardly believe it was someone—of unspeakable ferocity had swept across the disc with implacable ruthlessness, annihilating life wherever it should be found."

Maybe I'm laying it on a bit too thick, she thought. The alternative is not to lay it on thick enough. Better to gamble on the overkill.

"Finally they too encountered the forces of death, the vile destroyers."

Strauss-Giolitto paused for emphasis.

"Our fleet had only just long enough to transmit one final hyperspatial message of despair before it was, in its turn, exterminated."

She adopted a grim face. Some kid had been acting up, making life a misery for her, and she was determined to put a stop to the disruption. It was a facial expression she had practiced often enough, and she had learned also how to make her body language conform to it. The kids never cottoned on to the fact that, often enough, she was laughing inside at their antics.

"That message," she said, "took the form of a picture."

"Do you have a copy of that picture?" Strauss-Giolitto had the feeling that, more overtly than ever before, Artificial Environment 17,863,006 was speaking through the smaller puter's voice circuitry—electronic ventriloquism.

"No," she said, pretending not to notice the difference and that she thought she was addressing only the Midnight Ranger's Main Computer. "If we had, it would be somewhere in your databanks and you would have direct access to it yourself. But I've seen it, and I can tell you what it shows. Back home they were able to reconstitute the transmission to recreate the original holo."

Again she waited a moment or two.

"It showed suited-up Humans in front of a viewscreen. They were panicking. They had no weapons—obviously. On the viewscreen there was a twin-headed creature of a kind that my ancestors had never before discovered. Now, of course, we know that it was a Helgiolath.

"Then the scale of the image in the viewscreen shifts, and in the holo we can see a battle armada spread across the starfields like a vast shoal of twinkling silvery fish. From everywhere among the shoal there are emerging points of light—flares of orange-white."

"Missiles," said the Main Computer.

"Pedoes of some kind," agreed Strauss-Giolitto. "Thousands of them. Waves upon waves of them. More than a Human could hope to count. Each a bearer of incomprehensible death and destruction.

"There is nothing the Humans can do except await their doom. Some are thrashing hysterically. Others have composed themselves to enter the endless night with dignity."

She let out a long breath.

"And then the holo contains nothing but flames for an instant . . . and is gone."

There was a long silence.

"Your people must hate the Helgiolath very much indeed," said Artificial Environment 17,863,006's Main Computer.

"There are few enough of the Helgiolath left to hate," said Strauss-Giolitto with disingenuous simplicity.

She sensed some reaction within the Midnight Ranger's puter, but that might have been her imagination. Ten Per Cent Extra Free had done his work well, it seemed. The Image had been entrusted with the task of subtly editing out some of the puter's memories—just enough for her purposes, not so much that Artificial Environment 17,863,006 or even the puter itself would notice the elisions.

Thanks, she thought in Ten Per Cent Extra Free's direction.

My pleasure.

"Why should this be?" said one or other of the puters.

She shrugged. "My ancestors had forsworn war centuries before, but that knowledge had not been lost—instead, it had been stored in historical databanks all over the systems they controlled to serve as a dreadful warning of the follies and miseries of conflict. This information was accessed, and my people—who, whatever you may think, have never been stupid—built upon all that had gone before to create new weaponry of devastative power far beyond anything the Helgiolath could ever have imagined."

She let the implications of that remark sink into Artificial Environment 17,863,006's puter. Back in the Twin Galaxies, the ur-Helgiolath and the Children of the Starlight had been more or less evenly matched.

"Who knows how many ships there were in the battle fleet the Humans sent out into the wastes of intergalactic space?" she resumed, her voice low, barely above a whisper. "Tens of millions, certainly. Hundreds of millions, perhaps. Some claim there were even more. My ancestors knew from the earlier expedition that there was a wormhole midway between the Milky Way and the Andromeda spiral that would transport them to the fringes of Heaven's Ancestor. They located it with ease—I iterate that our species is not as stupid as you have apparently come to believe.

"The Helgiolath never knew what hit them. Travelling at supralight velocities through hyperspace and otherwise—my people had not at that stage developed the tachyon drive, the last great breakthrough in transportation technology—the Human battle armada swept through Heaven's Ancestor, eradicating the Helgiolath from the face of the Universe. In the early days they had hoped to offer clemency to non-combatants, but soon they discovered there was no such thing as a non-combatant Helgiolath: the only solution was to wipe away the entire species, as if it had never been.

"The war was over in less than fifty years."

"But the Humans did not entirely eliminate the Helgiolath," remarked Artificial Environment 17,863,006's puter.

"None remained alive in Heaven's Ancestor," countered Strauss-Giolitto.

"But in The Wondervale . . ."

"Yes. In The Wondervale there were still some. This the Humans did not immediately realize—and the delay was an expensive one."

Her stomach rumbled; suddenly she was ravenously hungry. Had the rest forgotten about her here? Still, nothing for it but to keep going.

"In the interim the branch of the Helgiolath that had begun to colonize the smaller galaxy had the time to increase their fortifications, to hugely increase the capabilities of their defense systems, to prepare themselves for the Human onslaught that they knew must surely one day come. The benefit was that the energies they devoted to these endeavors were diverted from their grim task of expunging potentially rival species."

Not for the first time, Strauss-Giolitto knew she was going through a section of her "history" that was straining to burst into fragments despite the sticking plasters and bits of string she had hastily applied in an effort to hold the whole thing together.

"The species of The Wondervale were fortunate," said the Artificial Environment 17,863,006 puter in its monotonous voice.

Phew! They've swallowed it!

"Fortunate indeed," she said solemnly. "Had that not been the case, The Wondervale would now be as devoid of indigenous peoples as Heaven's Ancestor, and a wealth of knowledge would have been lost to the Universe. As it is . . ." Again she deliberately gave that little shrug.

"But there is one more thing I do not understand——" began one of the puters—she wasn't certain which.

She stopped the droning voice with an upraised hand and a raise of the right eyebrow. Don't interrupt me, kid, when I'm trying to teach you something.

"Save it up to ask me later," she said mildly. "As I was saying, when my forebears got round to exploring The Wondervale they discovered it heavily defended, and at first they lost plenty of ships to the firepower of the Helgiolath—in a single fortnight they lost more ships than they had throughout the whole of their conquest of Heaven's Ancestor. They might have been tempted to give up, but they were wise enough by now to know that the war with the Helgiolath would never be over until the last of the Helgiolath had been slaughtered."

"It was the same conclusion the Children of the Starlight came to, in the Twin Galaxies," said Artificial Environment 17,863,006's puter.

Oh, yeah? Seems I'm not the only one who can dissemble a bit. Or maybe your makers programmed you with their own version of history, same way as I'm trying to indoctrinate you with mine.

"There was no doubting the outcome of the war of The Wondervale, of course." Strauss-Giolitto spoke airily, as if the might of the Human species was so great that the conflict had been of little consequence, a mere skirmish. "Despite the reinforcements the Helgiolath had made, there was no way their defenses could withstand what the Human armada poured down on them. The Helgiolath carnage was as brutal as anything that had been seen in Heaven's Ancestor. When, at last, those bastards realized that everything was over they began butchering some of The Wondervale's native species, but my forebears were able to stop that before too many worlds were destroyed."

"That was what I wished to ask," said Artificial Environment 17,863,006. "Why?"

Ah, so now you begin to show yourself in your true colors.

"Please expand the query," said Strauss-Giolitto, opening her eyes a trifle wider than usual in an attempt to convey naivety.

"Why not let the Helgiolath destroy those species for you? It would have saved trouble for the Humans later, once they had taken over The Wondervale."

"I told you," she said, shaking her head and furrowing her brow. It must be obvious to the puters that she was having difficulty comprehending the question. "I told you that we Humans, although we can muster almost immediately some of the most impressive military technology in the known Universe should the occasion demand, are not naturally a bellicose species."

"But you say you are intelligent."

"Yes."

"Then—"

"Not all intelligent peoples are spurred on by nothing but thoughts of conquest." I wish I could say that with more certainty. No, no, think of the ancient species like the Pridehouse and the Lingk-kreatzai: they lost all urge for war as they explored the Universe, if they ever had it in the first place. Even the Lingk-kreatzai males, who fight to the death during immaturity, lose all trace of that aggression by the time they reach adulthood. "But that doesn't mean that the peaceful ones—the ones who simply want to co-exist with each other—can't be the most dangerous, if provoked. Look at Commander Segrill, for example."

"The little one," Artificial Environment 17,863,006 confirmed.

She nodded. "The Trok. Until recently he was in charge of a planet entirely devoted to the manufacture of the most deadly armaments in The Wondervale."

Technically it was true. In reality it was a lie. Once upon a time her Christianity would have frowned upon the deception, and even now—now that all but vestiges of her faith had left her—she felt the pang of a residual guilt. Besides, she had told so many falsehoods during the course of her long history lesson that one more wasn't going to make any difference. Still, it was a qualitatively different lie, in that it involved a real, living person who was nearby; the others were abstract fictions.

"Yes"—she hurried on—"even the gentle Trok can be fierce when circumstances require them to be. And Humans can be orders of magnitude more vicious even than that. The Children of the Starlight and the ur-Helgiolath of the Twin Galaxies may have regarded themselves as implacably savage when they created the death-vessels, like Artificial Environment 17,863,006, but they gave each other only a taste of the cruelty of which Humans are capable when cruelty is the only means of species survival."

"I have seen no trace of this cruelty in any of you," observed the larger puter.

"That's because you haven't yet scratched our skin," said Strauss-Giolitto.

"Meaning?"

"You haven't done us any harm. You've inconvenienced us, but it's been worth it to us because we've learnt a lot from you—and you're giving us a free ride home. And once we get there you may be able to help us."

"Help you? How? I thought you Humans were all-powerful."

She drew her knees up towards her chest, put her arms round them and rested her chin on top of them: posture indicating time for thought as she worked out how best to explain a difficult concept to a bunch of kids whose attention was in danger of wandering.

"Well," she said at length, "it's like this, you see. My ancestors didn't eliminate all of the Helgiolath, because a few of them found a way of hiding themselves . . ."

#

When the pain struck Lan Yi it did so suddenly.

He and Seragarda had been doing some standard maintenance work inside the Midnight Ranger's recycling systems, there being not much else to do as Artificial Environment 17,863,006 hurtled through whatever aspect of spacetime it could penetrate in order to transcend the velocity of light. Although the smell was disagreeable to both of them, the task itself was not unpleasant: essentially they were doing little more than supervise the activities of the checkers—small devices, not intelligent enough to be described as bots, which scrabbled from one terminal to the next and, very rarely, let out a thin little beep and a red light when they discovered something that needed adjusting.

Seragarda found the relatively menial work quietly satisfying. Besides, it gave her and the out-of-Taiwanese a lot of time on their own to talk about this, that and the cosmos in general.

But then Lan Yi doubled up with a cry of pain.

She had never heard him show such a strong sign of emotion before.

Seragarda trotted through the shallow sludge to be by his side, and looked into his face.

Droplets of water were being extruded from between the lids of his tightly closed eyes. His mouth was half-open; the muscles at its corners were tense, as if some were straining against others in an attempt to close it. Lan Yi was clearly in the pits of an agony beyond anything Seragarda could comprehend.

And yet . . . and yet she had the curious impression that there was another, quite different emotion trying to register itself on his contorted face.

Ecstasy.

He toppled over sideways to land with a splosh in the yellow-green sludge.

Checking swiftly that his nose and mouth were clear of the viscous liquid, Seragarda turned and ran back along the maintenance tunnel, her feet kicking up sprays of gunk.

#

The Main Computer was everywhere throughout the Midnight Ranger—in every cabin and common room, every corridor and every cranny and every corner. There was no escaping its surveillance, even though the primary focus of its attention was Strauss-Giolitto's cabin, where it was engrossed in the mysteries of Human history. Strider and her personnel had to be careful about everything they said—and indeed what they did, in case the machine read a careless piece of body language. Even within the Pockets there was no guarantee of privacy. Before they slept they wrapped loose gags of fabric round their mouths.

The flipside of this was that, wherever they were, those aspects of the Main Computer that were not being distracted by Strauss-Giolitto's fabulations were available at all times for consultation. And through the Main Computer the personnel had access to Artificial Environment 17,863,006 and its associated AI.

Strider was speaking with the Main Computer through one of the Pockets when Seragarda came on to the command deck.

". . . about one point three one six standard days, about one thousand two hundred and fifty nanreets," said the voice inside the Pocket. There was a visual display of their situation, but Strider couldn't get her brain round it: bits of it seemed to be only partly visible, as if they were veering away into transcendental dimensions, and the rest didn't make any sense. On the floor of the Pocket the numbers were spelt out in full, to her relief: the numbers had a reassuring solidity to them.

She pulled her head free of the Pocket's field and glanced across at Hein. His eyes were, as usual, alight with laughter, but his mouth was a flat line of apprehension.

"No need to be so gloomy, buster. We're going to be home soon."

His voice was unusually sober. "Not exactly, Leonie. We're going to be back in Heaven's Ancestor. That's quite a different thing."

"Hell—Heaven's Ancestor is just at the bottom of the back yard."

"Dangerous back yard."

Looking at him with her head to one side, Strider realized for the first time that he had been unhappy for some days. It had been an inconvenient fact and so she had at some deep unconscious level chosen to ignore it. She was too good at doing that sort of thing.

"Unlike a Pridehouse to be worried about the future," she said defensively.

"I'm not entirely a Pridehouse any longer," he said. "You stay long enough in the form of another species, speak its language and all, and you begin to take on some of the characteristics—the personality traits—of that species. Try it sometime."

"I have." Oh boy, but she had. When she'd been a six-legged wolf there had been an interlude in a field when she had certainly not been Human. When all this was over—if ever it was going to be over—she must try that again.

Seragarda was saying something, but then Seragarda was saying something most of the time. Strider paid her no attention beyond half-raising a hand in greeting.

"Things can't have got any worse since we left there," she continued. "It's when we get back to The Wondervale that things might start hotting up. Umbel knows what Kaantalech's been getting up to, but knowing her it'll be all shit bad news."

"If we get back to The Wondervale," said Hein, and now there was no mistaking the gloominess in his voice.

"Yeah, yeah . . . we will. We got big brother on our side now, remember? A little thing like the Shift isn't going to make any difference to him. Shut up, Seragarda. I'm trying to hold a conversation."

"But—"

"Shut up, I said. This is your captain speaking."

I strongly advise you to listen to what Seragarda has come here to say.

"And when I want your advice, Pinocchio, I'll ask for it, OK? Right, Seragarda, get it out."

The white she-wolf was dancing with the urgency of her information. She yapped words, and Pinocchio translated automatically as she spoke.

"Aw, shit," said Strider once Seragarda had finished. "I was hoping this wasn't going to happen yet. Hoped it wasn't going to happen at all."

She slumped down into a chair.

"Any ideas, Pinocchio?" she subvocalized.

The only person who can help us is Polyaggle.

"Yeah, but will she?"

She loves Lan Yi.

"She made that blatantly obvious by screwing him until he looked like he'd come off second best in a fight with a cactus."

He loves her.

"He never said he wanted her to make him pregnant. He never volunteered for the . . . what the fuck is it? . . . Death in Jubilation, or something." She pounded her fist against the seat's arm-rest.

The Death In Joy.

"Death in the Recycling Chambers, more like. Real romantic, huh? She loves him so goddam much she decides to kill him. Oh, wow, play me the violins for this one."

Polyaggle could not have expressed her love for Lan Yi more profoundly. She was giving him the greatest gift she had.

"There's guys back on Mars who come out with the same line about one picosecond before they grab a ship for the asteroids. Get her here anyway."

I have already anticipated your command, Leonie. Polyaggle is already on her way to the command deck. It was difficult for me to stop her going to the recycling chambers. She wants to be with Lan Yi so that they can share the joy of his death and the birth of her brood together. It is—was—a moment of great emotional importance for the Spindrifters.

Strider felt Hein's hand on her shoulder. She looked up. Where there had been foreboding on his face before, now there was compassion. The dance had gone even from his eyes.

"Thanks," she whispered hoarsely to him, and then turned her attention back to Pinocchio. "Detail Nelson and Leander to grab a stretcher and fetch Lan Yi up here as well. Tell 'em to be careful with him. Dunno if we're really supposed to move the old jock but I think we've got to."

A moment later Pinocchio responded. THEY ARE ON THEIR WAY TO THE RECYCLING CHAMBERS.

"Good."

Strider chewed her lower lip. "Goddam bloody sex," she said to Hein after a few moments. "Makes a mess of everything. You Pridehouse know more about the Spindrifters than I'll ever learn. Any chances of . . . shit, I dunno . . . a late abortion, or something?"

He shook his head, still looking down at her with that same weary sympathy in his eyes. "Fond of that 'old jock', weren't you, Leonie?"

Strider stood up abruptly, shaking his hand off her shoulder. "Course I was bloody fond of him. Still am. Maybe we can pull him through somehow. Pinocchio, see if you can grab hold of Tenper for a few minutes and find out if he's got any ideas." She thought for a further couple of seconds. "Any chances of getting hold of Angler?" Angler had once been associated with the Spindrifters. If any Image might know how to save Lan Yi, Angler would be the one.

Angler will not help us. His loyalties lie entirely with Polyaggle and the future of her species.

So the Images were specific-loyal. It was something Strider had not known before. She slotted the datum away in a corner of her mind to be dusted off and more closely examined later.

"Angler's bloody lucky I can't get my hands on him," she growled.

The door gave a low moan and Polyaggle fluttered in among them. The Spindrifter's wings were a polychromatic dazzlement of feverishly flowing and transmuting colors, washes of metallic sheen running fitfully across them. The proboscis at the center of her face was a blur of motion, but it was creating no words that Pinocchio could translate. Just as well. The Spindrifter was unable to keep her feet on the floor but instead flew in a jerky, uncertain fashion round the walls of the command deck, occasionally swooping alarmingly close above the heads of Strider and Hein.

"Calm the fuck down," snapped Strider. It made no difference.

Strider.

"Hi, there, Tenper. Let's talk in the Pocket where we can have a bit of peace. Hein, see if you can get Polyaggle to stop acting like a banshee on heat."

"'Banshee'?"

"You know what I mean."

The environment of the Pocket seemed somehow cooler than outside, as if Polyaggle's frenzy were warming up the command deck.

"Any chances for Lan Yi?" said Strider bluntly.

From the moment she implanted her brood in him, there was no hope of saving Lan Yi's life.

"You sure about that?"

It has never been done—not so far as we know.

"That's a kind of different thing."

Our knowledge of the Spindrifters and their evolutionary history is as comprehensive as it could be.

"Has anyone ever tried to save the life of an impregnated Spindrifter male?"

There was a perceptible hesitation. NOT ACCORDING TO THE RECORDS. WHYEVER WOULD A SPINDRIFTER MALE WANT TO AVOID EXPERIENCING THE DEATH IN JOY?

"I can think of a dozen reasons," muttered Strider.

That is because you are a Human.

"So's Lan Yi."

But Polyaggle is not.

"Too damn' right she's not. She's not going to be recognizable as protoplasm in a few minutes' time. Why did she have to do it?" Strider was aware that this time she was wailing the question, like a kid whose broken toy has been stuffed down a disposal chute.

You know the answer to that, Captain Leonie Strider. It never occurred to her that Lan Yi, once he had realized what was taking place, would be anything other than the grateful recipient of her brood—and of the corollary, The Death In Joy.

"Sure, yeah. Try telling that one with a straight face. How come she went through all that subterfuge to get him to screw with her?"

I am not a Spindrifter. I can tell you only what I know.

Strider felt that, somewhere inside, she knew the answer herself. Lan Yi, despite what he believed of himself, had been still half in love with death—with the Belle Dame Sans Merci who was the shade, imperfectly recreated in his mind, of his dead wife Geena. Polyaggle must have read him more accurately than he himself ever could have. So she had given him both his Belle Dame Sans Merci and the concomitant death. He was going to experience The Death In Joy in both the Spindrifter and a very Human sense.

Her feelings towards Polyaggle tempered a little.

A little.

She was still going to try to save the old man's life. Bugger the future of the Spindrifter species. It wasn't her species. Reprehensible and selfish it might be, but right now she cared more about the life of one elderly human being, who had only a few decades left in him at best, than she did about a potential galaxyful of glorified butterflies.

"There's always a first time," she said, affecting nonchalance. "Stick around as much as you can, Tenper. You too, Pinocchio. We're gonna save the old bastard."

#

Nightmirror eases himself into The Truthfulness and extends pseudopods of thought towards any Images that might be associated with the Helgiolath fleet.

There is no responding impulse—just a vacancy of existence that Nightmirror experiences as a sharp pang of dis-aesthetics. Some physical species have never been able to interrelate with the Images and—as Nightmirror knows already but has been trying to persuade himself might become otherwise—the Helgiolath are among them. Ten Per Cent Extra Free and the others tried to establish a direct contact, but failed. They have given the big creatures Pockets; although the Pockets are only partially functional without the intervention in their workings of at least one Image, they are better than nothing.

Next he reaches out through the liquid-light walls of The Truthfulness towards Heartfire and Angler. They are halfway across this physical Universe, but they could enter The Truthfulness close beside him and then re-emerge with him among the Helgiolath or on the moon of Alterifer.

He lets the thought die still-born, however. What good would their presence do? The Helgiolath would be ignorant of their existence and the Main Computer of the Blunt Instrument would be more likely to become aware of three Images than of one. No, bringing them to his assistance would almost certainly be at best pointless and at worst disastrous.

He wishes he could achieve some sort of contact with Ten Per Cent Extra Free and Pinocchio, but they have been shielded from The Truthfulness—and hence from him—ever since the ancient behemoth of the Children of the Starlight clutched their vessels to itself and entered that other space. For a short while he sensed their presence at an almost infinitely far physical distance, but he did not wish to hazard disrupting his delicate relationship with Kaantalech's puter. Now he wishes he had taken that risk.

What to do? What to do?

It is strange for an Image to feel indecision.

There are other Images within The Truthfulness, of course—countless billions of them. He can feel the currents and flows of their sympathy brushing against him. But there is nothing they can do to help him. Their assistance is disqualified for exactly the same reasons that Heartfire and Angler can afford him no aid.

Where is Ten Per Cent Extra Free? Where is Pinocchio?

Nightmirror has observed the way that the creatures of this physical reality—and all the others that he has ever visited—are born, grow old and die: even the two or three silicate species of this universe are mortal, although larger suns may live out their entire lifespans until supernova between the birth and death of one of these rocky beings. He has observed the grief of the bereaved among some—not all—of the mortal peoples. He has never understood that grief. Whether in The Truthfulness or in a physical universe, grief is an irrational emotion, based purely upon selfishness but pretending to be selfless: it is a projection of the sorrow of loss on to the individual who has died. The illogic is that, in a reality based upon the fact that the past must rot and die so that the present and the future may thrive, a tranquil death should be a cause for celebration. In your life you have done little: in your death you have helped create the future.

Or so Nightmirror has always thought.

Now he re-examines his attitudes towards this very mortal emotion, and finds them bleak.

It is as if Ten Per Cent Extra Free and Pinocchio have become dead to him: they may never re-enter the arena of his consciousness; he may never feel the amicable rub of their thought-patterns against his own.

He begins to understand what grief is.

Yes, it is selfish. It is selfishness incarnate.

But that is not to say that it is not real.

And it doesn't feel selfish. At the moment, in the physical stasis—the tiny curled up ball of dimensions that somehow never attained physicality—he endures a sense of loss that seems to belong more to Ten Per Cent Extra Free and Pinocchio than to himself.

For want of anything else to do except discover the nature of sorrow, Nightmirror retreats back to the core of Kaantalech's flagship, the Blunt Instrument.

The Main Computer is still creating galaxies of electroneurological relays. He watches stars flare into existence, evolve and then vanish—splendidly or subduedly—back into the beyond-black of nothingness.

One day this physical universe will die. One day the Polycosmos as a whole will surely die.

Who will there be to grieve for it?

#

"There is a weakening of the Shift field," said Alin, one of Kortland's officers.

"I had observed this," Kortland said, his voice a mixture of a splutter and a scrape to show that he was nevertheless grateful that she had conveyed the information to him.

On the whole he rather approved of Alin. No, that was to understate matters. She was certainly his favorite among all his officers, and after they had defeated Kaantalech he might well be tempted to begin with her the long process of Helgiolath courtship. She did not present herself to the general standard of smartness upon which Kortland insisted among his other officers—sometimes her superficial slime was smeared in inchoate patterns, sometimes one head leaned away from her body at a greater angle than the other—but, in her, these were things that he was prepared to forgive. She had the sharpest mind in his fleet with the possible exception of his own—and he was honest enough to realize that "possible" meant exactly that—and she had powers of intuition that went beyond the range of the normal Helgiolath.

"What do you think it means?" he asked her.

"I think Kaantalech has grown impatient of the stalemate," she said, slithering to his side. "Impatience has always been her weakness."

"You don't sound happy about this."

"I'm not. Kaantalech wouldn't have survived all that time under the regime of Nalla had she not been a wise one, an opportunist willing to bide her time until a small movement could have great consequences."

"Yes."

"Look at the way she manipulated the Humans and their followers until they destroyed Nalla and his version of the Autarchy."

"Yes."

Daring, Alin rubbed her shoulder against his. There was a sucking noise as their flesh separated once more.

"Someone more shortsighted than Kaantalech," said Alin, "would have destroyed the Humans on sight and hoped to receive the praise of the Autarch for having rid The Wondervale of a menace. Not she. Her cunning is greater than that. She let events take their course, and at the end of them she was the new tyrant. Do not underestimate her, Kortland."

"I have never underestimated Kaantalech."

He let the secondary visual sensors in his neck—they were patches of light-sensitive skin that could be distinguished from the rest of his flesh only close up—scan across the instrumentation in front of him.

"She is trying to let the field weaken with such slowness that we fail to perceive it," said Alin.

"It may be that she underestimates us."

"I . . . I wouldn't like to state that as a certainty."

"A probability?"

"Not even that. Impatient she may be, but Kaantalech will not throw her life away—or even chance doing so. Whatever she does may have an obvious reason on the surface, but the true reason will lie somewhere beneath."

Alin moved away from him now. She drew her heads together and then let them spring apart again in a habitual gesture of hers that he always found deliciously feminine. He knew she was perfectly capable of playing the coquette; sometimes, however, those same mannerisms betrayed the fact that she was following a train of thought wherever it would lead her, whether she desired its destination or not.

"Imagine," said Alin, "imagine that Kaantalech is perfectly aware of the fact that we have both the technology and the acumen to detect the weakening of the Shift field. What do you think it is that she wants us to assume?"

"What else can we assume? That she has decided to set an all-out assault upon us before we can break down the field from outside and shatter her moon."

"Precisely. We must maintain all our defenses at peak level, for that is what she will most assuredly do should we relax them at all—remember, she is The Wondervale's great opportunist, and she won't pass up a chance to achieve her ends the simple way."

Alin gave an anal rasp of deep contemplation. Kortland knew better than to interrupt her.

"But that isn't what Kaantalech plans," she continued. "No, she has some other idea—something more devious. Even if it involves . . . Now there's a . . ."

"What?" said Kortland cautiously after several moments had gone by.

"Oh yes." That was all Alin said, and he knew that she was speaking not to him but to herself.

"Oh . . . oh . . . oh."

The slime of her coat was going blue with fear.

"Tell me," he said urgently, his earlier resolutions going by the board.

"You or I," said Alin, the froth at her ingestion slit indicating a state midway between dreaminess and fierce concentration, "would regard the survival of the people under our command as being of paramount importance—we would do anything in order to avoid them being slaughtered, even if it meant our own lives."

Kortland gave an irritated shake of his torso. "The same could be said of any civilized species," he said.

"Yes, but Kaantalech is not a civilized species—she is not civilized at all. Even among the Alhubra, renowned for their barbarism, she has earned a reputation for brutality. There is only one creature whose survival she values."

"Herself," said Kortland, now rapidly following where Alin had led.

"Precisely. That is why I fear so much what she is about to do. I wish, I wish I knew."

"We could beat a retreat."

"I think it's too late for that."

#

Nightmirror watches the fluctuations in the Shift field. Sometimes it becomes briefly stronger, but the general tendency is downwards. He hopes that the Helgiolath are alert enough to detect this, and wonders if he should make another foray through The Truthfulness to investigate their fleet: while he may not influence, he could at least observe.

No. Each time he leaves the Blunt Instrument he runs the risk of his return being noticed, however careful he is. He is serving the forces of the aesthetic better by staying here, doing what tiny things he can to sabotage Kaantalech's plans.

Moving cautiously, he makes a few of the Main Computer's stars wink out. Some of Kaantalech's weapons have suddenly become dysfunctional, for reasons the Main Computer will be unable to diagnose.

This will infuriate the Autarch, which is all to the good. The greater Kaantalech's fury, the more likely she is to make mistakes.

More stars wink out.

Since many of the weapons systems in Kaantalech's moon-bound fleet are linked in series or parallel, if Nightmirror can only find the right starting place then whole cascades of them might suddenly become just useless lumps of metal.

More than that he cannot do without running the risk of detection. In theory he might start to detonate some of the pulsenukes and pedoes in their bays, but in practice he would be uncovered instantly by the Main Computer and either destroyed by its electroneurological circuits or forced to flee into The Truthfulness.

Wiser to remain where he is and bide his time until the moment when he can cause the Autarch the maximum of inconvenience, or do the surrounding Helgiolath the greatest good.

Nightmirror does not like his decision. Many Helgiolath will die before that moment comes. But more will die if he makes his move too soon and is forced into inactivity.

More stars wink out.

And more.

#

"Aw, c'mon, Loki," hissed Hilary.

The cat ignored him.

She had managed to pursue Segrill into one of the litter shafts, where detritus was stored preparatory to recycling. The little Trok had managed to flutter up to the top of an unstable heap of garbage some three meters above the floor, and Loki was clearly nervous of the climb. Instead, she sat at the foot of the mound, waiting patiently, occasionally opening her mouth to whine invitingly, her tail flicking with slow regularity from side to side.

Hilary could see all this in the dim green lighting, but he couldn't do much about it. The ports into the litter shafts had not been designed for Human ingress but to allow access by cleanerbots. The fact that the Midnight Ranger no longer had any cleanerbots meant the smell in here was rank. He had his head and one shoulder jammed into the opening and was stretching out an arm towards the little cat. His arm was a frustrating few centimeters too short for him to be able to make a grab at the loose black fur.

"It's your bloody animal," said Segrill, one of the Images translating his words into a high-pitched snarl. "It's your job to bloody do something about it."

"She'll get tired of the game eventually," said Hilary, springing to his pet's defense. He'd never heard Segrill swear before—hadn't even known that the Trok species understood the concept. "You shouldn't have taunted her."

"I didn't taunt her, you moron! I was in one of the Pockets trying to work out where in Heaven's Ancestor we were likely to re-enter ordinary space. I came out for a break. Then this bloody dimwitted animal made a leap for me . . . and now here I am. Now get it away from me!"

"I don't know how to. I can't reach her."

"Fetch some food."

"I don't think that'll work. She's just eaten."

"Then why in hell does she want to eat me?"

"'Cause you move about. In an . . . interesting way."

"It's urgent I get out of here, dammit! Ten Per Cent Extra Free tells me I'm needed up on the command deck at once. Lan Yi's in danger of dying. There's a chance I can help."

"What's he dying of?"

"The Death In Joy."

"What's that?"

"It's a thing that happens to Spindrifter males when they're expecting to give birth to a . . . Oh, just get the cat away so that I can get out of here and up to the deck, boy!"

"But Lan Yi's not a Spindrifter," said Hilary, his brow creased in confusion. "Least, I don't think so."

"Don't waste time thinking about it."

"All right."

"Just get the cat out of the way."

"OK. Loki. Loki. Here, Loki, Loki, Loki."

The cat continued to dwell in its own small world of silent absorption, its stare never wavering.

Hilary had an inspiration.

He groped round on the floor in front of him until he found a hard object. He wondered what it was, then decided not to wonder.

Twisting himself round in the narrow aperture, he hurled the object as best he could at the cat's flank. His grunt of effort was drowned by Loki's protesting squall. She turned her head to give him a baleful look—"Traitor"—then scampered off to the far corner of the shaft.

Hilary felt proud of his own resourcefulness.

"Get out of the way!" screamed Segrill ungratefully, dipping and floundering through the air towards his face.

For a moment Hilary didn't know what the Trok was so agitated about, then realized that his own body was blocking Segrill's only means of escape.

"Oh, right," he said, and began to squirm backwards.

Getting himself free was more difficult than he had thought—he had pushed himself very firmly into the port—and Loki was beginning to take renewed interest as Segrill flapped frenziedly round Hilary's head.

At last his shoulders pulled free, and he sat back on the floor of the passageway with a thump, breathing heavily. The world seemed redder than it should be, and little points of twinkling white light swam around in his vision.

"That's . . ." he began, but before he could get another word out Segrill had shot past him and was fluttering away up the corridor. A black streak travelling in the same direction represented Loki.

"No gratitude, some people have," grumbled Hilary as he raised himself unsteadily to his feet.

#

"Well," Strauss-Giolitto said at length in reply to Artificial Environment 17,863,006's question, "it's like this, you see. My ancestors didn't eliminate all of the Helgiolath, because a few of them found a way of hiding themselves."

The puters said nothing, clearly waiting for her to give them more than the bald statement.

She waited a few moments longer, and then continued. "Some of the species of The Wondervale had developed biotechnology to the degree where they were capable of shifting their forms at will—they have even used it on us Humans of the Midnight Ranger as part of their standard decontamination procedures. The relics of what had once seemed set to be a mighty Helgiolath empire still had enough military firepower to conquer one of these species and seize the details of the technology."

"They changed themselves into other creatures—or, at least, into the semblance of other creatures," said Artificial Environment 17,863,006's Main Computer. "The Children of the Starlight learnt how to do that not long before their demise, and the enemy's researches were not far behind."

"Exactly," said Strauss-Giolitto. "They became, to all outward appearances, members of a different species. Bridling their Helgiolath bloodlust, they intermingled with this species so that, even once the Humans had uncovered the subterfuge, there wasn't much that could be done about it."

"The Humans could have annihilated the species," remarked Artificial Environment 17,863,006. "That would have been the simplest solution."

"I repeat, our minds don't work like that," Strauss-Giolitto snapped. "We try to reduce cruelty and killing to a minimum—we try, if possible, to abjure them entirely." Would that that were true.

There was nothing but a soft hum from the Main Computer's speakers. She had silenced the brat at the back who thought it was clever to be as obstructive as possible, to make a point of never understanding anything the first time it was said.

"No," she carried on more tranquilly, feeling the flush of artificial temper fading from her cheekbones. "As long as the Helgiolath were prepared to live in peace, my ancestors were prepared to leave them where they were. And, after a few generations, the threat of the Helgiolath seemed to have been, quite literally, bred out of existence.

"The Wondervale seemed safe. There was no reason for the Humans to remain there. Those worlds that might have seemed suitable for colonization were already populated by their own species."

Strauss-Giolitto smiled, though retaining a little frostiness to show that she was still not going to tolerate dork-headed interruptions.

"The bulk of the Human occupying forces retreated to the Milky Way, where they were put on standby in case other hostile species like the Helgiolath were encountered by the expeditionary fleets, which continued their exploration of the known Universe."

She lay back on her bunk and stared at the featureless ceiling. Her face looked glum.

"But the Helgiolath hadn't interbred. Not truly."

"They rose again," said the smaller puter.

"You bet. Still in the guise of Alhubra—that's the name of the species among whom they'd concealed themselves—they formed a new fleet and set about doing their best to conquer The Wondervale."

"'Doing their best'?"

"There weren't very many of them left," explained Strauss-Giolitto, "and they didn't have access to the sort of really heavy weaponry they'd been able to bring with them when first they escaped from the Twin Galaxies and the Children of the Starlight. Some of The Wondervale's species were capable of putting up a good fight—some of them repulsed the Helgiolath entirely. Losses were heavy on all sides. Still, the modified Helgiolath were able to set up a rickety dictatorship that controlled part of the galaxy. They called it the Autarchy."

She sat up again, allowing eagerness to trickle back into her face.

"It might have tottered along until the end of time, enslaving those peoples unlucky enough to be caught within its boundaries, but then the Humans came back to The Wondervale—only a small party, our party: just a single ship."

She gave a light laugh, then became somber.

"It was enough to reduce the Autarchy to rubble and free species who had long forgotten the meaning of the word 'freedom'. Surrounded by only a few thousand of her fake-Alhubra cronies, the Helgiolath leader fled to the small moon of a planet called Alterifer."

"You have its coordinates?" said Artificial Environment 17,863,006 to the Midnight Ranger's Main Computer, abruptly abandoning all pretence that it was not the puppet-master.

"The details are stored in my databanks."

"Why haven't you destroyed this creature?" This time it was clear that Artificial Environment 17,863,006 was addressing Strauss-Giolitto.

"We saw no need to," said the teacher, trying to camouflage her sense of smugness. The Main Computer aboard Artificial Environment 17,863,006 probably had an IQ—if the measure made any sense at all—in the thousands. She was just a Human of somewhat above-average intelligence. But she'd beaten it in the game that only she knew they'd been playing. Another wash of exhaustion went through her, but she was too charged up with triumphant adrenalin to pay it any attention.

"Explain."

"What harm could she do, cooped up on a single moon?"

"That is irrelevant. This creature is a Helgiolath in all but appearance. As long as she survives, the memory of the Children of the Starlight is endangered. The creature must be destroyed."

"Is that necessary? More bloodshed?"

"Yes. It is. I demand so."

"But"—Strauss-Giolitto made a great show of gulping—"we Humans have no desire to kill when it is not necessary." Cool it, Maria. Next thing you know you'll be batting your pretty eyes like the kid who ate the candy and you'll blow the entire scam.

"I insist."

"We could stop you," she said.

"Perhaps. Almost certainly. But this is not your war: why should you interfere?"

Fall into the puter's logic pattern, just for a moment.

Strauss-Giolitto made herself look confused, then cleared her face.

"Yes. You're perfectly correct." She shrugged for the hundredth time since this seemingly interminable "history" lesson had begun. "This is between you and the last survivors of the Helgiolath. It is your feud."

"I am glad we are agreed." There was, somehow, a commanding tone in Artificial Environment 17,863,006's flat voice since it had come to its decision. Strauss-Giolitto wondered what might have happened had she not acquiesced with so little argument.

"Does this creature have a name?" said Artificial Environment 17,863,006.

"Yes," said Strauss-Giolitto.

She paused.

"Kaantalech."

#

Ignoring the fact that her hands were getting scratched to ribbons, Strider had Polyaggle by what passed for the Spindrifter's throat and was pressing her firmly against the bulkhead. The Spindrifter was trying to move her wings and escape, but she was rammed too firmly against the wall for that and Strider's grip was filled with the implacability of blind fury.

"Look, fuckit, that may be what you goddam glorified moths are happy with, but we Humans do things different, you hear?"

Polyaggle's proboscis was still moving so rapidly and so incoherently that neither of the Images could make any attempt at translation.

"Killing her ain't going to make things any easier, light of my life," said Nelson easily at her shoulder. "Might be kinda fun, though," he added.

"She could bloody help us if she wanted to," shouted Strider. "Look, you take her for a moment."

Nelson substituted his gentler hands for hers. "What're you doing?"

"This," snapped Strider.

She held the muzzle of the lazgun firmly one centimeter from the side of the Spindrifter's head.

"Hey, don't go using that thing!" said Nelson. "You're likely to fry my fingers off."

"I'll be careful," said Strider grimly. "Right, Polyaggle, tell me what we've got to do to save Lan Yi."

Perhaps they should have taken Lan Yi to one of the cabins and put him on a bunk, but Strider had been unwilling to leave the command deck and she had wanted all her personnel in attendance—any one of them might have the sudden inspiration that would save the old man's life. The person most likely to, however, was Polyaggle, which was why Strider was . . . questioning her firmly.

Never have got him on to a bunk anyway, she thought, casting a quick glance in his direction. He was lying on his side in a fetal position, knees hard against his chest, his face a portrait of agony, his eyes wide and sightless and unblinking. They'd tried to straighten him out, but his limbs had refused to budge.

In the middle of that mask of pain, the smile on his lips seemed an obscenity.

WE WOULD URGENTLY ADVISE YOU NOT TO KILL THE SPINDRIFTER, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

"I know that," Strider subvocalized. "But I want to scare the shit out of her."

You are not succeeding. Her thoughts are entirely on the imminent emergence of her brood and on the ecstasy she has given to her chosen lover.

"Well, it's about time she was distracted. Can you get through to her?"

Let me try.

There was a disturbance behind her and she half-turned to look. Hilary, red in the face and with a struggling Loki firmly clamped under one arm, came on to the command deck. Overhead and a little behind came Segrill. The Trok flew in his imprecise manner across to perch on one of the wall monitors.

"Can you get the cat away?" said Segrill. "I can't examine Lan Yi until I don't have to worry about that animal jumping me from behind."

"Aw, but Loki only wants to—" Hilary began.

"Let me take her," said Leander gently. "She'll be happier somewhere else."

Like, stuffed into the recycling chambers, thought Strider.

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO COMMUNICATE WITH THE SPINDRIFTER, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free. SHE IS DEMENTED WITH DELIGHT. NONE OF HER THOUGHT PROCESSES ARE WORKING LOGICALLY.

"Sh—it!"

Still the lazgun was unwavering. Strider marvelled at her own self-control.

Segrill was squeaking something at her.

"Yeah?" she said, looking up listlessly at him.

"The Trok," he said, "the Trok may share a common evolutionary ancestor with the Spindrifters. Look." He jumped up and down on the monitor, fluttering his rudimentary wings, and for the first time Strider noticed that, somewhere deep down, there was the slightest of morphological similarities between the two species.

"The cat safely out of the way?" she said as Leander came back on to the deck.

"I've shut her in Hilary's cabin."

"She's learnt how to open the—"

"Not when it's locked on the outside, Hilary, she hasn't."

"Isn't that a bit, you know, cruel?"

"D'you wanna be locked in there with her?" said Strider.

"No."

"Then keep your mouth shut."

At last Strider let the hand holding the lazgun fall to her side. "Keep holding her there, Nelson," she said to the big man.

"Certainly will, sunrise."

"OK, Segrill"—with an indicative nod of her head towards the almost unbreathing form of Lan Yi on the floor—"get to work and see what you can do."

#

There was a jolt.

Kortland looked at Alin. "It's starting," he said. "That's the Shift field down."

"Don't you feel the same dread I do?" she said.

"Yes, but I told myself a while ago that I mustn't pay any attention to it. Try it yourself."

"I can't pay attention to anything else." The slime of her coat was drying, some of it solidifying to peel off in long white streamers.

Kortland stabbed forward at the console with his thick, fleshy antlers. His orders were instantly conveyed to all the other commanders of the Helgiolath fleet.

A first salvo of destruction scorched through the nightmare cold of vacuum towards Kaantalech's moon. It was too much to hope that, with the Shift field gone, the rocky little world would be without defenses.

Sure enough, the energies of the maxbeams and the sternian activators were diffused across an invisible surface that surrounded the moon about half a million kilometers out.

"Plenty more where those came from," Kortland said to Alin, as if she needed to be told. And, he thought with satisfaction, even though nothing lethal got through, I'm glad I'm not inside that shield. The internal radiation must be causing havoc. Poor bastards.

He ran his antlers over the board once more, and this time a smaller number of weapons sped inward from the deadly sphere of Helgiolath warships. Kortland could detect their progress in his Pocket, but only because he knew what he was looking for. He doubted if Kaantalech, trapped behind a shield that was still flaring as it tried to dissipate the savage energies of the earlier bombardment into space, would be able to see anything.

And the rigor inducers were tiny and unsophisticated enough in their external technology to drive easily through any defensive shield that had yet been devised. They had no clever guidance mechanisms that could be scrambled en masse. They had to be destroyed individually by pedoes or energy-seeking nukes. Kortland was relying on the hope that, by the time Kaantalech and her lieutenants realized what was going on, most of the ducers would have made it to the surface. When that happened, anyone trapped outside a structure built of deadmetal was a goner, whatever their species: the radiation from the ducers had the effect of freezing all cellular activity in its tracks. The ducers were dirty weapons, Kortland had always felt, and it had been only with the greatest reluctance that he had permitted them to become part of his fleet's armory.

He slithered back from the Pocket once he had seen that, indeed, rather more than fifty per cent of the rigor inducers had penetrated the shield.

"Should I offer her a truce?" he said to Alin. "She must have suffered terrible damage by now. Maybe Kaantalech herself is among the dead, for all we know."

She shortened her necks, withdrawing her heads towards her body. No.

Alin was right on both counts, he knew. There could be no such thing as a reliable truce with the Autarchy or indeed with the Alhubra, and it was a safe bet that Kaantalech would not be among the casualties: it seemed to be some sort of law of nature that, however many and whoever died, Kaantalech was among the survivors. She took precautions. Always.

"There'll be something coming back at us, any moment now," said Alin with certainty. "She's waiting for us to begin to think that we've inflicted a serious blow on her, and then she's going to mount a counterattack."

Kortland had come to the same conclusion.

He returned his head to the Pocket. These damn' devices would work much more efficiently had the Helgiolath been able to interrelate directly with the Images, but the incompatibility between their psychologies was too great. Even so, the Pockets were invaluable.

Slowly the radiance of the raw energies faded from the moon's defensive shielding and once again, cranking up the Pocket's magnification, Kortland was able to see the desolation of the surface. There were impact craters of all sizes over much of the landscape, and at some time in the comparatively recent selenological past something really massive—an asteroid or a cometary nucleus—had hit Alterifer's small acolyte, creating a crater so huge that the moon looked almost like a fruit with a bite out of it.

It was at the base of this huge concavity that Kaantalech had constructed her primary headquarters. A few small domes had been set up as well as half a dozen larger edifices which Kortland guessed were factories, but clearly Kaantalech was making her warcruisers double up as living quarters for her troops.

The barrenness of the scene reminded Kortland powerfully of Qitanefermeartha, where the Autarch Nalla had met his death. It, too, had been an insignificant-seeming world characterized by zero atmosphere and rock-strewn, star-baked desolation. Kaantalech had not had as long as had Nalla and his ancestors to make a fortress of the world—she was improvising with battlecraft the vast, almost impregnable stronghold which Nalla's forebears had erected—but the resemblance was uncanny.

What sense was there in attaining the throne of the Autarchy if the throne had to be sited on some unloved, sterile back-of-beyond world like Qitanefermeartha or Alterifer's moon? Perhaps Nalla and now Kaantalech drew spiritual sustenance from the knowledge that they, through their fleets and armies, held ultimate power over The Wondervale; perhaps they slept more contentedly in the thought that their legions were killing, maiming and torturing civilized species into submission in a thousand thousand planetary systems. But in reality the boundaries of their Autarchy were no further than the nearest horizons of a lifeless, airless globe which no one else wanted.

They were very small empires to give rise to so much suffering.

He brought his mind back to more immediate circumstances. It had been the Humans and their bot who had seen an end to Nalla. Kortland and his fleet had offered themselves as a decoy—there had been little else for them to do, for they lacked the necessary cunning stupidity the Humans enjoyed as their birthright. But there were no Humans here. They were lost to him. They were lost to everyone else in The Wondervale and, so it was rumored, far beyond.

No fools to find the weak spot in Kaantalech's defenses and exploit it.

Unless there was a last-minute sound of bugles and one of those raucous bleats from the dark-colored Human-thing called Strider, he was in command on his own.

He wished to the cores of his hearts that the Strider-person were here. She was his lucky mascot.

He shook his torso. What a hell of a time to think these thoughts. The Helgiolath didn't need a bunch of misfits to help them out. They could do it. Hadn't their ancestors—or so the legends went—beaten the bloodthirsty Children of the Starlight to a standstill? Kaantalech was nothing by comparison.

Stop thinking about the Humans as if they were magic. If Strider were here, she'd probably be dead by now.

No. Strider was like Kaantalech in one respect: she survived.

Kortland sent a mental request to the Pocket that it give him an estimate of the number of warcruisers at Kaantalech's disposal, but this was one of the things that the Image-less Pocket was unable to provide.

Thousands, he reckoned. Likely as many warcraft as he had under his own command. He itched to be able to join combat with them in open space. At the moment there was a stalemate: Kaantalech could no more hope to raise her armada than Kortland could hope to penetrate the protective shield—a second wave of ducers would be a waste of weaponry now that everyone outside the ships was already dead.

Stalemate?

No. He trusted Alin's judgment.

When Kaantalech was one of the players in the game there was no such thing as a stalemate.

She would be prepared to sweep all the other pieces—her own included—from the board if it meant that she emerged the victor.

There was nothing to do but wait for her next move.

#

"Can you feel it?" Leander whispered to Nelson.

"You bet, darlin'," he said, putting a weary arm round her shoulder. "Guess we oughta go and sus things out in the Pockets."

He was still from time to time finding another of Polyaggle's spines in the flesh of his hands and forearms. He paused now to pull one out with a wince before moving to the furthermost Pocket. Leander, her legs feeling like lead, took the central one.

The two of them, like everyone else, had used various stims to keep themselves active, but their bodies and minds could be fooled for only so long into believing that they had not been awake and at full alert for something over twenty-four hours. Leander would have killed for a belt of ziprite right now. A belt of ziprite and several days flat on her back with her eyes closed. Then a long hot bath and maybe . . .

Stop thinking like that, Maloron! she urged herself as her legs threatened to buckle under her.

"Do you confirm what I think I see?" she said in a slurred voice through the Pockets to Umbel Nelson. "It's not a hallucination, is it?"

"Finest sight I ever did see, gracious angel," came his rumbled response.

"Better tell the others?"

"I agree. But wait until they're ready for it."

"OK."

As if trying to perform in synchrony, they both took one last, lingering glance at the starfields the Pockets were displaying to them, then retreated and turned to face the rest of the command deck.

Strider and the aliens aside from Polyaggle were attending to Lan Yi—even Loki seemed to be trying to help—but it was obvious that, with the exception of Segrill, none of them had even the slightest idea where to start. They'd tried various Human drugs known to have potentially abortifacient side-effects, but all that they'd achieved had been to give Lan Yi's face an unhealthy, inorganic-seeming yellow-pink flush; sweat dripped from his forehead and his cheek and those awful grinning lips to the dispassionate grey metal floor. The Spindrifters had billennia ago forsaken the use of drugs in their medicine—or, at least, that was what Polyaggle had finally blurted out, and they had little choice but to believe her; Hein and Seragarda said that, to the best of their knowledge, she was speaking the truth. Strider had contacted Orphanwifer via the Pockets to see if he could suggest anything, but he had no ideas and, she suspected, was very little interested: the species of The Wondervale had many different means of reproduction, and this was just another of them, so why should he interfere with its workings?

"Open his mouth," Segrill was saying.

"I'll have to break his jaw," said Hein.

"This is the only thing I can think of."

"Right."

Kneeling beside Lan Yi's head, Hein worked his fingers between the man's upper and lower teeth and wrenched his hands apart. There was a sickening sound of cracking bone. Leander gagged, then realized Lan Yi was in such agony already that the extra pain would make no difference to him.

"What are you planning, little guy?" said Strider. She was sweating almost as much as Lan Yi. One of her personnel was being threatened by something she could neither hit, laz nor outwit, and she obviously wasn't liking it.

"The ultimate in lo-tech," said Segrill—or, at least, that was the best translation Ten Per Cent Extra Free could manage.

Before anyone could stop him, the Trok had scuttled up Lan Yi's slightly quivering side and stuck his head between the rows of teeth. He turned back for a moment and, tucking his wings tightly to his torso, said: "See you soon."

Then he vanished inside Lan Yi's mouth.

Strider made a grab at Segrill's retreating rump, as if to haul him back out again, but she was far too slow.

"Aw, shit!" she said. "Now I'm losing two people rather than one. Great bloody move, Segrill." She tugged at her earlobe and glared at the two Pridehouse in turn.

"Segrill probably knows what he's doing," said Hein mildly, relaxing back on to his haunches. He shrugged. "Probably. We've got to assume that's the case."

"He's gonna get dissolved in Lan Yi's digestive acids—that's what he knows he's doing?"

Hein shrugged again. "He'll have thought that one through. Segrill's no suicider."

"This is extremely interesting, from a scientific point of view," said Seragarda.

Strider's hand groped towards her belt for her lazgun. Luckily Nelson had taken it from her earlier.

Strauss-Giolitto, who had been comforting Hilary against the far wall, came across, knelt down and put her arm round Strider's waist. She moved as if to whisper something into Strider's ear, then desisted. There was no need for words: the gesture was sufficient in itself.

Nelson cleared his throat. "While Segrill's doing whatever it is he's doing," he said, "there's something you guys ought to be aware of."

"Better be good," growled Strider, but her body was more relaxed now.

"We're back in real space. In Heaven's Ancestor. Our fleet's waiting for us less than a parsec away. We can rejoin them any time we want, assuming Artificial Environment 17,863,006 lets us. And, gorgeous light of sunset, the Shift field's gone down, so we can return to The Wondervale any time we want."

A couple of standard days earlier and Strider would have greeted the news with a yelp of delight. Now she just said: "Everything bloody happens at once, doesn't it? Let's get Lan Yi saved, then we can rescue The Wondervale, and then we can think about getting home. One thing at a time, huh?"

Nelson gulped. "Yes, ma'am."

"And less of your sarcasm," said Strider, not turning towards him.

Leander beckoned to Strauss-Giolitto who, after a worried look at Strider, joined her.

"Think you can find out from Artificial Environment 17,863,006 what it plans to do now it's got here?" Leander whispered.

"It's not interested in our fleet," Strauss-Giolitto whispered back, looking round at the walls in a clear warning that they might be listening. "All it wants to do is track down and exterminate the last of the Helgiolath in The Wondervale."

Leander was baffled, and her face must have shown it.

"You know," said Strauss-Giolitto, more loudly, "Kaantalech."

Aha, so that was it. Putting two and two together to make four was not especially difficult. Leander had known there was some sort of deception in the wind but hadn't been told the details.

"That bastard Helgiolath Kaantalech," she said, nodding her head in affirmation. "Sooner she and her pseudo-Alhubra are done for the better."

"Too right," agreed Strauss-Giolitto. "Any help we can give Artificial Environment 17,863,006 will be much appreciated, though I don't think it needs our help—it can do all this on its own. I'll go talk with it in a separate cabin."

"Good idea," said Leander heartily.

Strider didn't even look up as Strauss-Giolitto left the command deck. She just carried on staring at Lan Yi's broken mouth, where Segrill had disappeared.

"Any idea what he's trying?" she said to no one in particular.

"It's a good guess that Polyaggle's brood has been maturing in Lan Yi's stomach and alimentary canal," said Hein, although he too was looking puzzled. "At least, that's what I think Segrill thinks. He can get direct access to those regions from the throat—rather him than me. Don't worry about the stomach juices: Segrill's nobody's idiot, so he wouldn't have gone in there if he thought there was any danger."

"Hm, yeah," said Strider dubiously. "And what happens if he can't get out again?"

"If Lan Yi dies we can just cut him out. If Lan Yi lives we'll have to perform more delicate surgery. Think of it as a caesarean operation."

"What's that?"

Ten Per Cent Extra Free explained his translation briefly to her and the rest of the Humans. Leander felt sickened, and Strider looked likewise.

Once again Polyaggle, who had been keeping herself to herself in a corner of the deck, clearly chastened by Strider's earlier violence, began to become agitated, her wings waving in jagged arcs that left behind them in the air afterimages of iridescent color.

Strider glanced up at her.

"Shut the fuck up. You've done enough damage."

"We're too late," said Seragarda softly. She trotted a couple of paces back from Lan Yi's recumbent form. "Even Segrill's idea came too late."

"Stop being so fucking fatalistic," snarled Strider, looking as if she might hit out at the Pridehouse.

"She's being realistic," said Hein. "And she's right."

"What do you mean?" said Leander, moving towards them a pace. But she knew the answer to her own question before she had spoken it. The reason for Polyaggle's sudden new flurry of excitement was all too obvious.

The birthing of the brood was upon them.

Out of the corner of her eye Leander saw that some radical change was occurring in the nature of Polyaggle's activity, and she turned her head to look.

The Spindrifter was disintegrating from the edges inward. Leander was reminded of the way the image in a holo could fragment from the outside in as reception began to break down. Polyaggle's wings were already mostly gone, small lead-colored bits of them—each no larger than half the size of Leander's palm—flopping to the floor, where they lay motionless, like flakes of ash blown from a pile of burning papers.

As Leander continued to watch, her mouth dropping open in a mixture of horror and amazement, Polyaggle spread her clawed arms wide as if she were being crucified and turned her head to one side. She rose slowly into the air, coming to a halt about a meter off the floor, her back pressed against the wall. A thin noise was coming from her diamond-shaped mouth—the first time Leander had ever heard that organ emit any sound. Now Polyaggle's head jerked backwards over her other shoulder at an impossible angle; a fractured crack was like a slap in everyone's face. More flakes dropped as the Spindrifter's claws began to come apart, and then the shape of Polyaggle was lost as her body, in a terrifying silence, became a cloud of matt pewter confusion, dead grey scales of what had been her swirling in a spinning turmoil as they settled to the deck.

No one spoke. No one knew how to.

Long ago, when Leander had spent part of her childhood on Earth, she had stayed for a week in one of the few remaining nature reserves with an elderly woman whom genetic evaluation tests had revealed to be distantly related to her. The old woman had been sullen and grumpy, clearly annoyed that the Campaign to Recreate the Family had tracked her down here and foisted this boisterous child on her to wreck the tranquillity of her existence, but she had been grudgingly kind. There were some trees in the reserve, which was marvel enough for Leander; but it was the season when the trees were shedding their leaves, and the old woman—Megan, that had been her name, Granny Megan—had one day made a bonfire of them.

Looking at the heap of flakes which had until just now been Polyaggle, Leander recalled that pile of grey leaves in the moment before Granny Megan touched a laz to it. "There was a time when they used to be green," she whispered to herself, echoing the words Granny Megan had spoken so bitterly all those years ago.

Death and decay: the natural order of things.

Yet Leander didn't feel that there was death in the air, however lifeless those grey shards seemed. And her mind began to grope towards some realization of why Polyaggle had been so unable to comprehend the other species' horror at what she had done to Lan Yi.

Among the Spindrifters there was no death, no decay, only eternal life . . .

Polyaggle had, as she had pleaded to them, conferred a blessing on Lan Yi . . .

"Leave him alone," she said firmly to Strider. "Leave him, leave him. Can't you see you're just making it more difficult for him?"

Everyone looked at her.

Strider spoke their thoughts aloud. "You gone nuts or something?"

"No. This should be a time of joy for him. For us all."

"The poor old bastard's in agony. Take a look at his face, for chrissake." Strider's own face was dark with fury as she stared up at Leander.

"He's in ecstasy—can't you see?" Leander slapped her hand against her thigh in impatience: how could she get this through to someone so single-minded as Strider could be? "Agony and ecstasy—the two of them can be there at the same time. They're not"—her tongue stumbled over the formal phrase—"mutually incompatible."

"Oh, sure, pull out my toenails and I'll jump for joy," said Strider in a low voice. Leander expected her to erupt into a new outbreak of violence at any moment.

Through her secondary retinal screen she was still watching the mound of ashes that was Polyaggle's bequeathment to the future. There were small signs of motion there now, as Leander had expected.

"Leave him," she repeated. "If you care about Lan Yi at all, you'll let him alone. He's got a change to make."

The next she knew she was flat on her back. Already she could feel the separate throbs of her chin, where Strider had hit it a backhander, and the rear of her head, which had smashed against the metal of the deck as she'd gone flying across the floor. She'd bitten the side of her tongue, and could taste blood.

Forget the pain. Plenty of time to think about that later—afterwards.

She adjusted the field of view of her secondary retinal screen so that she was looking down on the tableau as if from somewhere far above the ceiling. Tiny toy figures were frozen in position. Strider was staring at her own fist as if in disbelief at what she had just done. Nelson was half-turned towards Leander, his arms out ready to scoop up her shoulders. Hilary was a very small ball in a corner, his face hidden in his hands. Hein and Seragarda had retreated from Lan Yi and, the pseudo-man's arm round the pseudo-wolf's neck, were watching what Leander now focused upon . . .

As had Polyaggle, Lan Yi was beginning to fall to pieces at the edges. His hands went slowly, almost reluctantly; a moment later one of his boots tilted away from his leg, standing upright on the deck so that Leander, from the vantage point of her secondary retinal screen, could see that it was full of ashy flakes. Lan Yi's other boot was trapped under a thin thigh, but she knew it would be the same.

Spitting blood, she rolled over and hauled herself up on to her hands and knees. A sharp stabbing pain at the side of her back told her that, somewhere in the middle of Strider's attack, she had cracked a rib. It was going to hurt like hell in a while, but at the moment she could put up with it.

She crawled forward towards Lan Yi. Strider was too dumbfounded to be able to stop her, and Hein and Seragarda just smiled at her.

Yeah, she thought, this is something I've got to do, because I'm a Human and Lan Yi is—was—one as well. The Pridehouse can be our friends and maybe more than that, but the last rites should be administered by a person of Lan Yi's own species.

She caught hold of the fastening of Lan Yi's jumpsuit—the good old blue of the good old SSIA—and ripped the garment open. The effort made the pain of her broken rib start jangling at her with a more intense clamor. For a moment she saw his pinched chest, and then the flesh of it began to dissolve. His lips were already transformed into feather-light shards of grey.

With her secondary retinal screen she zeroed in on the Polyaggle-heap. Where before there had been nothing but stillness there was now a thrum, as of thousands of tiny bodies moving against each other, not knowing quite where they were or what was going on but content in the companionship of their fellows.

Segrill clambered out of the remains of Lan Yi's torso, moving almost as if he were swimming. His coat was covered in streaks of half-digested matter, but as he put a meter or so between himself and what was left of Lan Yi even these began to lose their color and drop cleanly off him. The sound of Segrill's claws on the metal seemed almost deafeningly loud on the command deck; the only other noises were Leander's ragged breathing and Strider's almost subvocalized cursing as she looked at the damage she had done to her knuckles.

"Look," whispered Leander, knowing that they would all hear, no matter how quietly she spoke. "Look at where Polyaggle was. Look at the colors."

A small region at the side of the mound was showing fitful pinks and yellows and greens. Suddenly a bright metallic blue made its appearance, and as if this were a signal the kaleidoscope of colors spread out from its initial center rapidly to all parts of the heap of flakes. There could be no denying any longer that those tiny pieces of—of what?—were in motion: the earlier sense of thrumming had been no illusion.

And there was motion around Leander's splayed fingers as well. She looked down and saw that there was nothing left of Lan Yi but the empty skin of his face and a single eye. As she watched, that eye turned its gaze up towards her. It seemed to have the shine of a smile in it before it, too, crumpled away among the disintegrating skin.

She smiled back at it.

Tiny insect-like creatures in muted colors were crawling all over her hands and wrists, rubbing themselves against her. She wanted to laugh, to play with them as if they were children—which of course they were—but she didn't dare move in case she crushed some of them in her heavy clumsiness. Instead she held herself as still as she could, feeling the soft tickling of their movement against her tender skin.

And, as she watched, they began to take on the same bright hues as their counterparts on the far side of the deck. Peering more closely, she could see that each had a tiny pair of wings plastered to its back. Now some of the creatures were loosening their wings, and the colors became a dazzling liquid wash that flowed out across the floor.

"See," said Strider softly, and Leander, moving her head slowly, turned to look in the direction of her captain's pointing finger.

Yes, yes, of course this was what would necessarily be happening—Leander had known it for long minutes now. Once, back in The Wondervale, Polyaggle had split herself temporarily into a million parts. Now she was effecting the change permanently.

From the heap by the wall tiny butterflies were rising, cautiously at first and then with growing confidence. More and more of them burst into silent, erratic flight.

She glanced down again and saw that the same was happening among the insects pooled around her. She felt an odd sense of possessiveness towards them, as if somehow they had been born from her own flesh. Some of them were crawling up the arms of her jumpsuit towards her face, their heads questing this way and that inquisitively.

Smiling hurt like hell, thanks to Strider's blow, but she couldn't help doing it anyway. She realized she was saying little meaningless words under her breath to the creatures—yes, it was all right to think of them as hers, if for only the few moments before they left her. She felt hair-thin legs touch the underside of her chin and begin what must seem an epic, upside-down quest towards her lips. She didn't dare move her head any longer, but through her secondary retinal screen she could see herself covered in a swarming mass composed of every color she could conceive.

She wanted to laugh out loud, but she kept herself still.

Again through her secondary retinal screen she looked over towards the wall. The butterflies that had once been—that still were—Polyaggle had formed a column of spinning colors, as if someone had caught and distilled a lightning storm and then set it a-twirl. Yet the movements in the column were no longer chaotic: there was order among them, and within that order Leander could recognize Polyaggle. She had the impression the Spindrifter was smiling at her, or maybe it was at the host of butterflies who had once taken Human form as Lan Yi. Then the message came through clearly: Polyaggle was smiling at both of them, conveying two quite different emotions in the same smile.

Friend.

Lover.

Again Leander re-angled her screen, looking back towards herself. She was now entirely invisible behind a covering of swiftly pulsing, brightly hued wings.

And then, all at once, they were free of her, dancing in the air up towards the ceiling of the command deck, where the host that was Polyaggle was already waiting for them. The two clouds melded at once and began a new dance, one whose formalities must have been determined by the actions of stark chance billions of years ago, when the Universe was still young.

Leander, still on her knees beside Lan Yi's empty clothing, reached up both of her hands, palms wide, to the rainbow throng not in supplication but to give them something, something that only she could give.

The gift of her love.

#

It had taken some while for Strauss-Giolitto to make contact with, first, the Midnight Ranger's Main Computer and then the two artificial brains that together formed the personality, if it could be called that, of Artificial Environment 17,863,006. It was as if the various AIs were being distracted by other things—which was impossible, because, taken together, their electroneural capacities were vastly greater than could ever possibly be required.

When finally they spoke to her, all sharing the voice of the Main Computer, she felt obscurely as if she were a small child who had at last succeeded in attracting the attention of a preoccupied adult.

"We shall not stay here long. We are assessing your fleet. The thing called Orphanwifer has assured us that it will join us in our campaign to eradicate the vile Kaantalech from the face of spacetime. The Orphanwifer-object is issuing instructions to that effect as we speak."

"Orphanwifer is not a thing. He is a person. Please remember that we are all persons." She had attained the upper hand before; it was important that she didn't lose it now.

"We are corrected."

"The Onurg—is he doing the same?"

"He has told us that he must consider the matter." The voice was as bland and toneless as ever, but the words chilled Strauss-Giolitto. Artificial Environment 17,863,006 and its Main Computer did not tolerate dissent—or even the possibility of dissent—for long, she suspected.

"Is it possible to patch me through to him?" she said.

"No. We will not permit this."

"Can you patch me through to his Main Computer?"

"It is a part of us. When you are speaking to us you are speaking to it as well."

"And it will pass on the message?"

"If the message is permissible, yes."

"OK, here goes. Onurg, this is Strauss-Giolitto speaking to you. Strider commands that you and the Pridehouse fleet join with us and Artificial Environment 17,863,006 in destroying Kaantalech and her allies, the shapeshifted final remnants of the ur-Helgiolath. Strider will not accept any arguments or debates on this matter—is that clear?"

There was silence for several seconds, then: "The information has been conveyed to the Onurg, and he acquiesces. He has begun to instruct the Pridehouse commanders accordingly."

Strauss-Giolitto was pleased to notice that the puters had recognized the Onurg's personhood without having to be corrected. Even the rebellious kids at the back were learning something.

"How soon will we move towards The Wondervale?" she said.

"Very soon. As soon as the fleet can be mobilized. In less than one of your hours. You will not be permitted to use the tachyon drive: instead, we shall extend our field to embrace the entirety of your fleet and then transport it through otherspace to the region of the world you call Alterifer. However . . ."

There was a very much longer pause, and Strauss-Giolitto tried to stay as patient as she could. Look at the way the pillow on this bunk is casting a green-blue shadow on the bedding beneath it. What a very interesting shadow. The angularity of its corner contrasts elegantly with the slight curves of its sides. Leander must have been the one who arranged the bunk so neatly—Nelson has never been the tidy sort. Boy, am I glad I didn't choose Hilary's cabin for this little interview . . . But why didn't I choose my own?

The voice of Artificial Environment 17,863,006—this time speaking for itself rather than as part of a consortium—interrupted her free association at last.

"There is something strange going on in that region of The Wondervale."

"'Strange'?"

"My far sensors tell me that a new supernova has emerged there."

"So?"

"If the coordinates your puters have supplied to me are correct—"

"I can see no reason why they shouldn't be."

"—the star which has gone supernova is Alterifer's primary. This is illogical. The star was not massive enough to enter supernova phase."

Strauss-Giolitto raised her eyebrows.

"I can't think of an explanation."

"Neither can I. I must analyze the available data. Please wait."

Strauss-Giolitto was ridiculously cheered to notice the use of the word "please."

#

Kaantalech's mouth was full of saliva: she was delighted with the way things were going. The fools of Helgiolath had sent their rigor inducers and she had lost a few thousand technicians, mainly members of the minor species—as if that made any difference. The Helgiolath maxbeams had caused her a few moments of uncertainty as the little moon's sky had boiled, even though she had known that the stout defensive screen would keep her safe from any harm they might threaten. She'd expected more weaponry to be washed against that shield, but either the Helgiolath were running low on stocks or they weren't quite as stupid as she'd thought them to be and were playing a waiting game—except that the waiting game itself was as stupid as any other option they could select.

Oh, yes, indeed, Kaantalech was elated by the way that things were working out.

She spat an order and an aide hurried away. In theory her Main Computer could handle the Blunt Instrument without outside assistance, but in the reality she preferred to have aides supervising its functioning—she was always aware that puters were artificial intelligences, and something that was intelligent might take it into its synapses to turn against her. Everything and every being had the potential to be a threat: better to build in failsafes, even if the failsafes were themselves untrustworthy.

Kaantalech gave the aide long enough to have positioned himself by the manual controls at the far end of her command deck, then began to interact directly with the puter.

"How weak is the shield?"

"Its intensity has been reduced as far as it can be without the shield collapsing entirely," replied the AI. She loathed its voice, which always sounded to her disinterested and therefore smug; worst of all was that she didn't have the technological ability to do anything about it, and her aides claimed the same inadequacy.

"Prepare to collapse it when I give you the word."

"I am prepared."

Pausing first to make sure she had everything crystal-clear in her mind, Kaantalech issued rapid orders to be relayed to the commanders of her warcruisers. She could feel the floor of the gigantic crater vibrate beneath the Blunt Instrument as the other vessels began to power up. It seemed as if the entire moon were being rocked in its orbit by the fiery energies released by her ships. When the fleet took off perhaps the blast would complete the job begun by that ancient meteorite and shatter the moon entirely.

The notion pleased her for some reason she could not precisely identify.

Last to power up was the Blunt Instrument itself. Bolts sprang from the metal plates of the command deck's walls but Kaantalech paid them no attention: the vessel had survived worse, and there was never a shortage of aides to repair the damage afterwards.

"Now!" she said to the Main Computer.

"Shield nullified," it reported dispassionately.

"Order to all vessels: lift off."

"Order transmitted."

"Let the slaughter begin."

#

"At last," said Kortland, "the waiting is done."

Alin said nothing. He could feel her uncertainty beside him as if it were another person standing between them. He would not allow himself to entertain such an uncertainty—he could not.

He tapped a control within the Pocket with his antler, and immediately the Main Computer took over the general control of deployment of his fleet. He would issue specific commands as and when the necessity arose, but it was impossible for him to keep moment-by-moment tag of what each of several thousand cruisers might be doing.

Kaantalech's armada spewed up out of the moon's shallow gravity well like a swarm of hostile insects whose nest has been interfered with. Almost immediately the warships began to disperse about the sky.

Kortland gave an order to the Main Computer, and half a thousand implosion bolts and rotary locks spiralled in from the surrounding Helgiolath fleet to cause untold havoc among the Autarchy's vessels. In Kortland's Pocket the stars were lost to sight as soundless flowers of fire blossomed in the blackness surrounding Alterifer; in a few minutes' time Alin would be seeing much the same through the viewing window.

A somewhat later and more protracted floral burst showed that the rotary locks were taking their toll.

Kortland should have been satisfied by the destruction his forces were wreaking, but he wasn't. This was all too easy, almost as if Kaantalech were setting up target practice for him . . .

"Focus on the crater and increase mag," he told the Pocket.

At once he had the sensation that he was swooping easily about thirty kilometers above the barren surface. Everywhere there were blast-marks to indicate the departure of the Autarchy vessels; here and there a few temporary structures Kaantalech's people had erected still stood. It was clear even at first glance that the battered landscape had become selenomorphologically unstable, for even as Kortland watched great fissures, some of them many kilometers long, were opening up with frightening speed to form a crazy network.

And then he saw what he had half-expected he might see.

One ship alone still stood, canted over to one side, on the shaking crater floor.

The Pocket automatically identified the craft for him, but he didn't need to be told.

It was the Blunt Instrument. Kaantalech's flagship.

Alin had been right: Kaantalech would never risk her existence in a straightforward space battle if there were some other way of increasing the odds in favor of her survival, no matter how many of her troops went to their deaths. And he himself had been right to follow up on Alin's suspicions and order this close-up survey of the crater's surface. Had Kaantalech hoped that the Helgiolath would fail to notice her as she hid here? No, she must know that eventually the Helgiolath—assuming the Helgiolath won the battle in space—would check the moon out. She had some other plan—assuredly she did.

Kortland thought at the Pocket that it should divide its visual display into two halves: on the right there remained the vista of the Blunt Instrument squatting on the rupturing landscape; on the left was an overview of the struggle between Kaantalech's cruisers and his own.

Things were not going entirely the Helgiolath's way. Cannon fodder the expanding mushroom of Autarchy cruisers might be—and Kortland was becoming increasingly convinced that this was the case—but Kaantalech had not sent them into battle toothless, and they were giving almost as good as they were getting. Almost. His hearts sank as he watched more and more of his precious warships erupt into a fiery nothingness.

"Every vessel that can," he said to the Main Computer via the Pocket, "I want to send pulsenukes in among those shits. Hit them with something hard."

There was a momentary pause while the puter formulated Kortland's order into something mathematically comprehensible; then it was as if a new sun had been brought into being. Travelling at ftl velocities, the pulsenukes arrived among the Autarchy fleet as if out of nowhere. Their simultaneous eruption must have taken out half of Kaantalech's cruisers in a single strike. The trouble was that Kortland's supply of the weapons was limited: he could manage the same effect perhaps once more, but then he would have to rely on his other weapons.

He speculated about going in for the kill. At the moment the Helgiolath held one great advantage: their craft were spread over a large sphere of space whereas the Autarchy vessels were, though all the time attempting to diverge from each other, still quite tightly bunched together, so that a single weapon might fortuitously take out two or more cruisers. That advantage couldn't last forever: there were so many Autarchy ships that sooner or later the survivors would be able to make room for themselves . . .

Furthermore, Kortland was convinced that all this was merely the sideshow. The main performance would be focused on whatever it was that Kaantalech was hatching in that solitary ship down on the surface of the little moon.

Knowing that it was a waste, on impulse he directed three pulsenukes from his own ship at the Blunt Instrument. Sure enough, Kaantalech's defenses were good enough that the weapons were simply swatted away long before they reached their target. He hissed an oath, regretting that impulse: all he had done was tell her that she had been noticed.

Things were going better elsewhere. The numerical superiority of the Helgiolath fleet was beginning to tell, so that the destruction of each further Autarchy cruiser was contributing an almost exponential advantage to their attackers. Now the ratio was five against one, soon it would be six against one . . . whatever stunt Kaantalech was planning to pull off, her armada was no longer a significant force in the subjugation of The Wondervale.

Of course, she had other fleets elsewhere . . .

If she escaped from here she could soon rally new space navies around her.

More Helgiolath vessels painted their death throes against the star-spattered backdrop, but they were comparatively few. Kortland sensed that the fight had gone out of the Autarch's commanders, although they knew better than to give up the struggle entirely: better to be blasted to pieces in space than to face the wrath of Kaantalech for the crime of having survived. He had little choice but to keep raining firepower down on the ever-diminishing numbers of the foe.

It was like wanton butchery, and he hated it.

Something in the right-hand portion of the Pocket's display caught his attention.

At first he could see no difference, but then he noticed puffs of dust coming out from underneath the Blunt Instrument's support struts.

Kaantalech was readying the vessel for take-off.

She must have given some sort of signal to the rest of her cruisers, because suddenly they began to fight back against the Helgiolath with newly intensified ferocity.

Something exploded dangerously close to Kortland's own ship, and the blaze of light drove him backwards out of the Pocket. Although the ship's shield absorbed most of the impacting energies, nevertheless the deck juddered beneath him.

Temporarily blinded he leaned to one side and then the other for support and finally found Alin's shoulder.

"Close," she said, sounding calmer than she had earlier.

By contrast, the fear that he had kept forcefully submerged for so long was now working its way to the surface. The puffs of dust from under Kaantalech's ship, the renewed viciousness of the Autarchy's attack—for it was now indeed turning from a defense to an attack, however doomed—Alin's earlier forebodings, everything was telling him that, unless he were extremely alert and/or lucky, the Helgiolath were doomed.

And, still without the power of vision, how could he be alert?

"Take over from me, Alin," he snuffled.

"Understood."

He heard her slither easily towards the Pocket, leaving him alone. A lieutenant came towards him but Kortland made a strangled noise to indicate the individual should return to his or her duties: there were more important things to do right at the moment than tend a temporarily disabled leader.

The ship jerked again, but less violently this time.

He wished he could communicate with Alin to find out what was going on, but by now she would be firmly absorbed in the Pocket.

As impotent to affect proceedings as a blind waif in the furthest corner of The Wondervale, all Kortland could do was wait until his sight returned.

Assuming it did so in time.

#

The deck quaking underneath her sucker-studded body, Alin looked at the right-hand display of the Pocket in dismay. She had picked up enough from the few words Kortland had muttered to her to know that the display had been centered on the Blunt Instrument; now all that was visible was an expanse of crater floor indistinguishable from the rest.

Find me Kaantalech's flagship, she thought urgently to the Pocket, then spoke the instruction aloud.

The colors in the display swirled as the Pocket attempted to obey. In the left-hand part of her field of view she could see that, after their final outburst, the remains of the Autarchy fleet were once more being systematically pulverized out of existence by the vastly superior forces of the Helgiolath.

That spate of activity had been no coincidence, she knew. Kaantalech had deliberately created a diversion so that she could make good her escape—except that surely all she could be doing was delaying the inevitable. There was nowhere in The Wondervale, even fleeing by tachyon drive, that she could hide now that the Helgiolath's sensors and the Pockets had a clear image of the Blunt Instrument.

Hm. Unless she abandoned her flagship entirely and took to another. But that would take time and organization—the logistics were such that she would surely be trapped by her Helgiolath pursuers long before the transfer could be effected.

Maybe a bluff? Maybe only the ship had departed, leaving Kaantalech and selected troopers behind on the moon's surface to wait for rescue: Autarchy battlesuits could sustain the vital functions of their occupants for months, if need be.

As insurance Alin hurled a couple of pulsenukes into the crater. They probably spelt the death of the nameless little moon, but she didn't bother to watch.

Still retaining half the display for supervision of the last skirmishes of the battle, she told the Pocket to devote the other half to the Blunt Instrument, once it had tracked the vessel down.

Her command went unrewarded. The abstract polychromatic exhibition in the right-hand part of the Pocket carried on without any noticeable discontinuity. The colors seemed to be telling her that they were doing their best and would report to her as soon as they had discovered something.

It wasn't like Kaantalech just to give up and go, though. Alin's mind nagged away at the incongruity. Knowing Kaantalech, she wouldn't have quit the scene without leaving in her wake some nasty little surprise or other. Maybe a nasty big surprise.

Suddenly Alin made a decision.

Leave the search for the Blunt Instrument alone for a while, she ordered the Pocket. Explore the region around Alterifer for anomalies.

She didn't know what sort of anomaly she might be asking it to look for, but the Pocket had enough intelligence of its own to understand her meaning.

A few further seconds passed and then the panoply of randomly transient hues suddenly cleared to reveal a starfield. For a moment Alin could make no sense of what she was seeing but then the Pocket helpfully placed a glowing green ring around one of the points of light, and she could see that it was moving relative to the others.

Kaantalech's flagship? she asked, even though she knew it wasn't.

Beneath the visual display data began to appear. Alin scanned it anxiously.

Whatever the craft was that the Pocket had homed in on, it was empty of all life and was guided by only the most rudimentary AI. It seemed to be some kind of drone; even the Pocket was uncertain about hazarding any more information than figures for mass, velocity and so forth. Its trajectory was taking it directly towards the average-sized yellow-orange star that was Alterifer's primary at about half light-speed. It would reach the star in a few minutes' time and then, even though its outer hull was made of deadmetal or something similar, it would be absorbed into that teeming nuclear furnace.

Alin pondered. What point could there have been in despatching a drone to its destruction? There must be some point—Kaantalech didn't do things just for the fun of it. She had had a purpose of some kind.

A chronometric display appeared in a corner of the Pocket, counting down the moments until the drone hit the star's photosphere. It was going to do so in a far shorter time than Alin had expected—she had wasted too long in thought.

Zap it with a couple of pulsenukes, she thought abruptly to the Pocket.

The data on the base of the Pocket dissolved and new figures were presented to her. By the time the pulsenukes were activated and launched, the drone would be beyond the photosphere.

Oh well, thought Alin philosophically, if there's nothing we can do about it anyway . . .

But her pessimism wouldn't let her keep on thinking that.

The thing couldn't just be a drone. It had to be something more significant than that.

Try to match its overall configurations with anything—anything at all—that you know about the Autarchy's weaponry. Go back as far as you want in history. If you can't find any precise identification, snuffle me out a few approximate ones. Get to it!

The numbers in the chronometric display were getting depressingly small, and they seemed—although she knew this must be illusion—to be ticking over more quickly than before. To take her mind off them she retreated momentarily from the Pocket to check up on Kortland.

"I'm beginning to get my vision back," he responded to her question. "I can see things as long as I don't look directly at them."

Alin was relieved to hear it. The blindness might have been permanent.

"Retain the command until I can see properly again," Kortland continued.

She returned to the Pocket and saw at once that the figure in the chronometer had reached zero. Whatever it was that Kaantalech had left behind her was now inside Alterifer's sun, and it was too late for her to do anything about it. For a moment or two she was fatalistic, assuming the worst, but then she gave a mental shrug: if the drone had gone beyond her control it was pointless worrying any further. The Pocket seemed to have failed to identify the craft.

Resume the search for Kaantalech's flagship, she instructed it. Through the Main Computer she issued orders to the rest of the Helgiolath fleet to move in and mop up the last couple of surviving Autarchy cruisers, then to rendezvous in the orbit of the second planet out from the star, which looked capable of supporting life.

Time passed.

The second planet proved to be a disappointment. It was just a few million kilometers too close to its primary to be able to sustain life: instead, thanks to the greenhouse effect, its atmosphere was a thick stew of corrosive acids and its surface temperature would have been sufficient to reduce protoplasm to a crisp within a fraction of a second. Alin mused. At another time she might have been tempted to spend a few weeks shifting the planet to a more distant orbit as an investment for the future, but not now—not when Kaantalech was still at large. She told the Main Computer to make a record of it, however; perhaps a Helgiolath expedition could be sent here one day to carry out the necessary cosmic engineering.

The light in the Pocket abruptly changed. It had traced the Blunt Instrument at last, and was showing her an image of the craft as if from a mere ten or fifteen kilometers away. Behind the visual display was a set of slowly changing coordinates. Alin squinted at them, immediately recognizing that Kaantalech had reached the far side of The Wondervale. Thanks to the tachyon drive, distance wasn't much of a consideration except insofar as it meant tracking took longer—doubtless this was why Kaantalech had fled so far.

A delaying tactic, thought Alin. She wanted to keep us here as long as possible before we found out where she was. I wonder why.

The Pocket took her last thought as an instruction, and began to flash an indicator at her. It wanted to repeat an earlier message.

Still mainly preoccupied with Kaantalech's motives, Alin absent-mindedly told the Pocket to go ahead.

Ah. It had identified the drone after all. She suddenly remembered that, hours ago, she had withdrawn from the Pocket briefly to see how Kortland was faring. The information about the drone must have appeared during that short period of her absence. Still, it was all an irrelevance now. Whatever the drone had been it was currently just an extra mass of plasma dispersed about the remainder of the star. It couldn't . . .

"Oh, drought!" shouted Alin.

A planetary rupter. Throw one of those babies at a planet and you can say goodbye to the planet. Where in hell could Kaantalech have got hold of it? The weapons had been outlawed even within the Autarchy for thousands of years because there was no knowing how widely their effects might spread—or even if they would ever stop spreading. No one had ever been stupid enough to think of chucking a rupter into a star.

Give it a few hours and the result would be a supern—

"Oh, drought!" she yelled again, prodding with her antlers at the Main Computer's controls for a direct vocal connection to all the vessels under her command, overriding all other communications.

"Attention! Retreat at—"

There was no time to say more before the advancing front of the supernova engulfed and vaporized the Helgiolath, their fleet, their weaponry and their aspirations.

Over the millennia to come, there would be at least a new light in the sky to tell the indigenes of distant worlds that The Wondervale had lost another species.

If they understood the message.

#

Strider listened numbly to what Strauss-Giolitto had to say. The Helgiolath were gone. She hadn't exactly been relying on their assistance, but it had been reassuring to know that they were there, as it were. Now they weren't. She wished she could find within herself some form of proper grief for the loss of an intelligent and seemingly largely benevolent species, but the only one of them she'd ever encountered had been Kortland, and the two of them had shared very little common ground except in their desire to see an end to the Autarchy and, beyond that, an end to conflict. Or so she assumed: some of the ancient species had distrusted the true motives of the Helgiolath, and maybe they'd been right. One way or the other, it didn't make any difference any longer.

R.I.P., she said to herself, and wished she could think of some more fulsome epitaph.

"Well," she said out loud, "I always reckoned that, when it came down to it, it was going to be a case of just us against Kaantalech." She shrugged. "Same difference."

It had been difficult talking about the demise of the Helgiolath, because Artificial Environment 17,863,006 was probably listening to their every word. Hilary was still looking muddled. Strauss-Giolitto had talked about how "our allies" had been exterminated and how "the Helgiolath queen" had escaped to wreak further damage unless she were stopped.

"You're a cold bitch, Strider," said Hein. For the first time since they'd met he was looking at her with what appeared to be active dislike.

"Not as cold as you think," she told him, but found it hard to put any real meaning behind the words. Later, maybe, she'd find herself able to feel grief for the Helgiolath; at the moment there were just too many other things to think about, too many other things to be done.

According to Strauss-Giolitto they would be in The Wondervale within twenty minutes or so. Artificial Environment 17,863,006 was somewhat less precise about how much longer it might take them to locate Kaantalech within the galaxy, but its far sensors were already at work and would report to them as soon as they re-emerged into real space.

There were butterflies everywhere—although the word "butterflies" was a bit of a misnomer. When the creatures landed on your hand or arm, so that you could look at them more closely as they sat there whirring their wings, you could see that they were not really so very much like butterflies at all—at least, if the holos were to be believed. Their bodies were much bigger, although no more massive, and they had only four limbs, which were likewise much more substantial than those of any butterfly. The wings sprang not from the sides of the creatures but from between their shoulders, as if their gross physique had been partly based on that of angels. Moreover, the creatures were intelligent, especially when acting in groups. Despite the fact that the command deck was crawling with them, not one had yet been crushed underfoot or by a careless Human movement; significantly, Loki had failed to catch any. Strider was convinced they could communicate with each other and that it would be only a matter of time before they would be able to communicate also with herself and her personnel. She'd tried coaxing one of them into a Pocket to see if she could hurry the process along, but the creature had been unwilling and she hadn't wanted to run the risk of harming it by being more forceful. Maybe it knew some good reason she didn't why it shouldn't expose itself yet to the Pocket.

Actually, she had to admit to herself, she rather liked the sensation of having the frail little creatures landing on her skin from time to time, fanning her soft hairs with their wings. It was a pleasant stimulus, like the gentlest touch she had ever received from a lover.

Hein was kind of clumsy sometimes. Now that the first rush of her lust had been satiated she must take a while to educate him into subtlety. Oh, yeah, fight it out with Kaantalech first; forgot about that.

She stuck her head into the nearest Pocket and asked for an update on their status. The Pocket hooked up immediately with either Artificial Environment 17,863,006 or the AI on board that colossus, so that she was presented with a display that was far too detailed for her to understand.

"Simplify," she said quietly, and the Pocket obeyed.

A portrait of The Wondervale with, away off to the left, a small blue-green ring indicating a location.

"That's where she is?" said Strider.

Yes.

"Oh, hi, Tenper. Where's the big asshole going to bring us out into real space?"

As close to Kaantalech as it can get us.

"All of us? The Pridehouse and the Lingk-kreatzai as well?"

That seems to be its plan, yes.

"Bit of a gamble, isn't it? If Kaantalech's got something we don't know about she can hit us with, then we're going to be in a bit of a—"

She does not have such a weapon.

"You sure? That's what our allies thought, and look what happened to them."

I cannot establish my certainty to the final decimal place, but it seems inconceivable that she has anything comparable to a planetary rupter at her disposal. Nightmirror is still enmeshed beside the Blunt Instrument's Main Computer, and has ascertained the armory available to the Autarch. There seems to be nothing that Artificial Environment 17,863,006 cannot easily counter.

"So us folks are just along for the ride, huh?"

IT IS POSSIBLE THAT ARTIFICIAL ENVIRONMENT 17,863,006 IS TOO CONFIDENT FOR ITS OWN GOOD, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free. I HAVE TOLD IT AS MUCH, BUT IT DISBELIEVES ME. I WOULD KEEP ALL YOUR VESSELS ON FULL ALERT IF I WERE YOU.

"They stay on full alert until I tell them otherwise." She thought for a second or two. "Might be an idea to reinforce that message, though. See to it, Tenper."

IT SHALL BE DONE. The tiniest of hesitations. IT HAS BEEN DONE.

"Any way we can break ourselves away from the Artificial Environment? Stuck to it, I feel we're kind of like a target painted up for Kaantalech to shoot at."

I will confer with the Artificial Environment's puter.

"Yeah. Argue hard on our behalf, won't you, Tenper?"

I will do my best. Neither Artificial Environment 17,863,006 nor its Main Computer is at all times fully rational, so it is possible that they might ignore entirely whatever I say to them.

"Try, OK?"

Yes.

Little had changed on the command deck. Hilary had emerged from his panic and was cackling with delight as the butterflies swarmed all over him; he was proudly showing an entire armful of fluid color to Strauss-Giolitto, who was making impressed noises. Segrill, perched on Hilary's shoulder, was looking more genuinely interested—as, at the boy's feet, was the cat, although for entirely different reasons. Leander and Nelson were monitoring events in the Pockets.

Hein was seated with his arm round Seragarda's shoulder. He looked up at Strider as she emerged. She was glad to see that the frown of cold disapproval had disappeared from his face.

"Sorry," he said. "I've been talking to Seragarda here and—"

"Forget it," Strider responded. "Next time I get ratty with you I won't feel guilty, that's all."

Ten Per Cent Extra Free abruptly intruded on all their thoughts. ARTIFICIAL ENVIRONMENT 17,863,006 HAS AGREED THAT WE MAY DISENGAGE OUR CRAFT AS SOON AS WE RE-ENTER REAL SPACE.

"Jeez," said Strider, "that was quick. You must have a silver tongue, Tenper."

MY TONGUE IS NOT METAL AT ALL, said the Image. EVEN IF IT HAD BEEN, THIS PROPERTY WOULD HAVE MADE NO DIFFERENCE TO MY DISCUSSION WITH ARTIFICIAL ENVIRONMENT 17,863,006. IT HAD OVERHEARD YOUR WISHES CONCERNING THIS MATTER, AND HAD ALREADY DECIDED ON SUCH A COURSE OF ACTION.

"So it reckons Kaantalech might have something up her sleeve as well?"

No. Artificial Environment 17,863,006 wishes to take entirely to itself the credit for eradicating the very last of the Helgiolath from this galaxy. Yourselves and all the rest of the Pridehouse/Lingk-kreatzai are here just to be its audience.

"Kinell: vain machines, yet. Keep all the commanders on full-scale alert, will you, Tenper?" Yeah, it'd be good if Artificial Environment 17,863,006 could take out Kaantalech on its own, but after that Strider and her fleet would be left with a psychotic death machine to take care of. Ideally the two would mutually destruct. If that weren't possible, Strider reckoned she'd rather take on Kaantalech and the Blunt Instrument than the killer created by the descendants of the Children of the Starlight.

One of the butterflies pranced around in the air in front of her face and then settled on her nose. She felt herself going cross-eyed as she tried to focus on the ever-moving colors of its wings. Ziprite was going to go right out of fashion if she and her people ever got the beasties back to the Solar System.

She didn't know the moment when the conviction began to take hold of her, but within a few seconds she became certain that the insect was trying to communicate with her. She could hear, very faintly, the buzzing of its wings, and she could see, blurredly, the shapes the wings were painting so close to her eyes, but neither of these were telling her anything. Yet something was coming through from the little creature—perhaps from the tentative touch of its limbs on her . . .

Gadfly.

That was what it was trying to say to her.

But it wasn't a gadfly—she'd never thought of it as such. It was a butterfly born from the mutual Death in Joy of Lan Yi and Polyaggle. She supposed she ought to consider the creature a nuisance, perched on the tip of her nose as it was, but she couldn't: she was delighted that it was there. Gadflies were out-and-out nuisances: find one sitting on her nose and she'd swat it, damn the pain.

Gadfly.

The message was repeated, and her mind's ear heard it more clearly now.

She, Strider, was the gadfly—that was what the insect was trying to tell her. It was repeating back to her—or maybe it was just her own unconscious, spurred into action by the presence so close to her eyes of the insect, that was talking to her—something that she herself had said a while ago to Nelson. Such a long while ago: it seemed to her as if it might have been in a previous lifetime. Gadflies and fleas and locusts and all the other pests that are too small to take account of: they can do more damage than a herd of rampaging Bredai. Keep going with this thought, Leonie, she told herself, because it hasn't been stuck into your head for nothing. In terms of the Blunt Instrument or Artificial Environment 17,863,006, the Midnight Ranger was on its own hardly more than a gadfly, but that wasn't the insight that seemed to be trying to explain itself to her. OK, go for fleas instead. What do I know about fleas? Not a lot, except from the holos. Revolting little creatures: nasty personal habits. Even just a single one of them can make a mammal's life a misery, despite the fact the mammal might out-mass the parasite a millionfold.

Just a single one of them.

"I've had an idea," she said to the command deck at large. It didn't matter if Artificial Environment 17,863,006 heard this. "It may be a very stupid idea, but . . ."

She was conscious that, with a butterfly on her nose, she perhaps didn't look her most dignified.

It couldn't be helped.

She began to explain, coding everything that she said in such a way that she hoped Artificial Environment 17,863,006 wouldn't be able to understand what she was talking about—if, indeed, it deigned to pay her any attention at all.

#

This time they were all aware the moment that Artificial Environment 17,863,006, the Midnight Ranger and all the rest of the fleet dropped back out of otherspace into physical reality—it was something they had been waiting for, and the slight lurch of their stomachs was unmistakable.

Even Strider felt that lurch, despite the fact that her stomach was rendering all sorts of other signals to her, none of them pleasant.

Once upon a time the Midnight Ranger had been a Bredai shuttle: tight quarters for the Bredai, after adaptation it offered the Humans and their allies ample spaciousness—if not anything like what they had enjoyed aboard the old Santa Maria. As a matter of standard issue, the Bredai shuttle had been equipped with half a dozen pedoes, and these were built on the same gargantuan scale as everything else on the ship: they were about the same size as a shuttle Humans might have built, although the shape was very different—a long slender arrow of death rather than a winged craft designed to descend through a planetary atmosphere. The tip of the pedo was occupied by an AI brainless enough not to worry about the fact that its ultimate destiny would involve its own destruction. Behind the AI was the payload; in this case enough radioactives to settle the fate of a smallish continent. At the rear there was the drive, capable of both supralight and sublight velocities depending on which might be more suitable for the task at hand.

In between the payload and the drive there was a space so that further goodies might be packed into the pedo: viral toxins were a favorite of the Bredai, although often enough they just stuffed in a few extra radioactives.

In this instance, the space was occupied by Strider, dressed in a battlesuit that was rather too large for her. She had clunked up to the side of the pedo in its bay and, helped by Hein at one leg and Nelson at the other, fallen rather than climbed into the vacancy. There was enough room for her to lie in here curled up with her knees against her chest.

Cramp had started almost immediately. There was nothing she could do about it except pretend it wasn't there.

"Tenper, I'm being a bit of a fucking idiot, amn't I?" she subvocalized.

No.

"What do you reckon my chances are of getting out of this one?"

Not good. But your chances of destroying Kaantalech are marginally higher than those of Artificial Environment 17,863,006.

"Shit, but you know how to make a gal feel great."

Do you wish me to make you feel great?

"Not right now. Later, maybe."

You have emerged into real space . . .

"I knew that."

. . . about thirty light minutes away from Kaantalech. This is closer than Artificial Environment 17,863,006 had anticipated.

"Nice to know the bastard's not infallible."

I propose to discharge you in five seconds. Four. Three . . .

"Spare me the countdown. Just get me where I need to be."

There was a deafening vibration as the drive kicked in; totally enclosed in her battlesuit, Strider had no way of escaping the noise, which seemed to pummel her as if with physical fists. Instinctively she raised her hands to her ears, but of course it made no difference: all that her gloves touched was the outside of her helmet. She was rammed back against the rear of the pedo's little gap, so that the throb of the drive beat directly into her suited bottom; she thought the gees were going to compress her into a homogeneous slurry.

And then the acceleration was over; the pedo had moved into supralight phase. There wasn't enough room in here for Strider to bob around, but the loss of all the gees made her feel both elated and nauseous.

"What's the deceleration gonna be like?"

Just as bad. Maybe worse.

"Thanks for cheering me up."

You are nearing halfway from the Midnight Ranger to the Blunt Instrument, and I must return my attentions to the rest of your fleet. From here on you will be guided by Nightmirror, from aboard Kaantalech's craft.

"Thanks," said Strider, without any heavy sarcasm this time, "for everything you've done. Say hello to all the rest of them, and goodbye as well, if that's the way it turns out."

This I shall do.

And then she was truly alone. Ten Per Cent Extra Free had retreated from her. She tongued on the lights of her battlesuit, but there was nothing to see in here except rounded walls of deadmetal that were so depressing she preferred the pitch darkness.

Off with the lights. Pretend you're taking part in a sensory-deprivation experiment. Say, weren't people supposed to find themselves getting incredibly randy back in the days when sensory-deprivation experiments were all the vogue? Might be an idea to try getting randy—at least it'd be something to pass the time.

No use. Strider had never felt less inclined towards sexual arousal in her life. Even when she conjured up in her mind's eye the little dark hairs that grew all the way up Hein's spine, and the slight saltiness she tasted when she ran her tongue downwards among them, all she felt was the distance between where she was and where he was: that wasn't his spine and that wasn't her tongue; instead they belonged to other people whom she did not know.

Strider had educated herself into not so much a tolerance as a relishing of loneliness. It had suited her to stand aloof from her personnel, however her body might have tugged her towards one or the other. Maria: an act of charity that had developed into something more than that, so that Strider had had to guillotine the way her emotions were developing. Then Hein: easier to give oneself away in the arms of someone you knew wasn't really a Human male. Yeah, she loved them both in different ways, but at the moment they meant nothing to her.

All that was present was the certainty that she was soon to die.

Hardly a turn-on.

Are you there, Captain Leonie Strider?

Nightmirror.

"I'm here. Of course I'm here."

Trapped inside the battlesuit her voice sounded like thrown gravel.

You will reach the shield of the Blunt Instrument within three minutes. I will persuade Kaantalech's Main Computer to drop the shield for a microsecond as your pedo slips through. This will involve a precision of timing. Excuse me if I concentrate on it and do not speak to you again until the maneuver has been effected.

"Seems OK to me."

It was a lie. More than anything else she wanted someone to be speaking to her, at her, with her—anything so long as she was interacting with someone outside herself. Oh, yes, good ol' loner Strider, the one who didn't need anyone else: here she was wishing an insubstantial Image could share a thought or two with her.

Anyone she could reach out and touch, preferably physically but failing that mentally.

She thumped a heavily armored fist against the wall of the pedo, and was glad when she hurt her hand.

Think of the skies of Mars. Phobos is up there, a small spark that moves rapidly enough you can see it progress from the neighborhood of one star to the neighborhood of the next. Deimos, so faint you can barely see it. Earth, the dying world that seems, from the plains of Mars, to vibrate with life. Reach down and run your hands through the red, dry soil in front of you and the chances are you'll find a seed that's partway germinated. New life on Mars, brought here from Earth by people of vision (so the official histories go) or people who thought they could make a quick buck (the fools, because there were no quick bucks to be made on Mars—although their descendants, many generations later, might have cause to thank them).

Take your mind off Mars, Leonie. The chances of your ever seeing home again are at least one order of magnitude more slender than your chances of getting out of this fool's venture alive.

Was it too late to tell the Images to turn the pedo around?

Probably not. But she'd committed herself to this. To go back now would be to admit failure, something she wasn't very good at doing—something she didn't want to do.

OK, Leonie, any minute now you're gonna go out in glory. They'll sing ballads about you all over The Wondervale in the centuries to come, remembering your heroic sacrif— Actually, they won't. They'll have forgotten all about you.

Your pedo is through the Blunt Instrument's defensive shield. My exercise was successful, and the Main Computer has failed to notice your intrusion.

"Uh, thanks, Nightmirror. What next?"

I will bring your pedo to rest next to an airlock. Prepare for deceleration.

The warning wasn't quite in time. If the deceleration had been in a longitudinal direction along the axis of the pedo Strider would almost certainly have broken her neck, despite the armored protection of the battlesuit. Luckily the missile was swinging round through an angle as it approached the flank of the Blunt Instrument, so that all she suffered were massively bruised shoulders as she hammered against the upper corner of the pedo's storage space.

"Don't do that a second time, buster," she gasped once she'd recovered some breath. She wondered if she'd ever be able to walk upright again. Didn't seem like it.

You are approaching the airlock. Prepare yourself to disembark as swiftly as you can when I give the word. I can distract the Main Computer for only the shortest of moments, so you must be prepared to enter the 'lock quickly.

"What's the Artificial Environment up to?"

Artificial Environment 17,863,006, you mean?

"What other Artificial Environment would you think I'd be talking about? Are there any others around?" The question was a serious one. For all Strider knew AE 17,863,006 might have summoned a few chums from the Twin Galaxies to come along and join the fun.

There is only one Artificial Environment within the limits of detectable space.

"Then why did you . . .? Oh, never mind. What's the great stupid bastard up to?"

It is expending a great deal of firepower needlessly on the exterior of the Blunt Instrument's defensive shielding. It seems incapable of understanding that this approach is valueless.

That sounded about right. Artificial Environment 17,863,006 and its Main Computer could be dumb as all hell. The Children of the Starlight had clearly regarded themselves as the brightest species in the Universe, but when it came to creating truly intelligent artificial intelligences the lowly, johnny-come-lately Humans had had them beaten hands down. Pinocchio had played a mean game of chess; Strider reckoned she could probably have hammered Artificial Environment 17,863,006 and its puter at Snap, so lacking were they both in intuition.

"Any way you can point this out to it?" she said, feeling herself beginning to re-enter free fall.

Do you want me to?

"That big bastard's on our si— Oh, I guess I see what you mean."

Right now she was more or less dead center of Artificial Environment 17,863,006's target area. The death machine wouldn't think twice about destroying her.

She began to chuckle, although mirth was an emotion currently very remote from her. Artificial Environment 17,863,006 thought of itself as the main act, but the combination of her own idea and the manipulations performed by the Images meant that the machine was reduced to the status of decoy—and it hadn't realized it yet. Kaantalech could hold off its full-frontal assault for as long as she liked, or just until she got bored, while meantime a slight figure in a battlesuit could be doing all the fatal damage . . .

Assuming that said slight figure wasn't blown to pieces before she'd got really started.

"How long?" she said nervously.

You have time for three deep breaths.

She counted them: one, two, three.

Halfway through the second breath the side of the pedo slipped open and her eyes were seared by what seemed to be the brightest sunlight she had ever encountered. Almost immediately she realized that what she was seeing was the stray light penetrating the Blunt Instrument's shielding; the harder radiation generated by Artificial Environment 17,863,006's onslaught was being blocked off.

I can open the 'lock for only a very short period, as I told you. You must start—

"I get the picture," grumbled Strider. She twisted her body round and launched herself feet-first out of the pedo, wishing she could take longer to luxuriate in the sensation of stretching her body out to its full length. Muscles she'd never even known she'd had were complaining to her about the way she'd maltreated them inside the pedo; she told them to shut the fuck up, and they quailed into silence.

There wasn't any sign of an airlock—just the featureless side of the spaceship extending seemingly to infinity both above and below her.

"Um . . ." she began.

Now—move. Quick.

In the preternatural brightness of the stray light the darkness of the rectangle that opened up in front of her was all the more startling.

Get in.

Thrusting herself off with one hand from the side of the pedo, she scrabbled herself gracelessly in through the outer door of the airlock, which closed so rapidly behind her that for a moment she panicked about losing a foot.

"You Images don't pay much lip service to the neuroses of us lot, do you?" she said, breathless, as the 'lock's lights flickered on.

You were perfectly safe.

"Yeah. I believe you."

From now on, please observe silence in case Kaantalech's monitors pick up our communications. Should this happen not only would you die but I would be flushed out of my hiding-place. It is important that, whatever happens to you, I should . . .

"Spare me," Strider subvocalized.

I shall give you guidance. Place yourself by the 'lock's inner door and be prepared to pass through it, once again, as quickly as you can.

"Reminds me of the showers in the orphanage."

Speak only when you need to—there is a possibility that Kaantalech's monitors can pick up even your subvocalizations.

"OK. Fair enough. Verbal communications out."

The inner door of the airlock whined open. Strider was through it before it was fully ajar.

A long utilitarian corridor, its walls made of bolted-together sheets of some dull grey-pink metal. Why did Strider feel as if she were venturing into a throat? She moved forward anyway, clumsily groping her lazgun from the belt of her battlesuit, wishing that she could actually feel the button she was supposed to press if anything appeared unexpectedly. She held the lazgun up in front of her visor to check that the dial was set to the highest power: hell alone knew how much it would take to stun an Alhubra, so she wasn't planning on taking any chances.

Shit, but her shoulders hurt. They hurt more than they should. She wondered if the damage they'd received had gone beyond bruising to fracture. It wasn't important, though: her chances of getting out of this were virtually zero, so what did a bit of discomfort matter en route?

She was glad of the battlesuit. Even assuming she was able to breathe the atmosphere in here—Ten Per Cent Extra Free had said she "probably could," which was not heartening—she wouldn't have wanted to: littered along the floor were heaps of faeces and half-eaten bits of rotting meat. The place must stink.

Strider moved along the corridor as quietly as she could—which wasn't very quietly because the heavy boots of the battlesuit tended to land on the metal floor with a clank. Still there was nobody about. Could this be a trap? Could Kaantalech be monitoring her presence, taking sadistic pleasure out of prolonging the moment until Strider was seized and cruelly slaughtered?

Don't think about such things, Leonie. The more you do, the more likely you are to get caught.

A change of policy. Trying to sneak along silently wasn't being very successful and was slow. She started to march down the corridor as if she owned the place, sweeping her lazgun from side to side in front of her. Anything that looked even remotely like an alien lifeform was going to get zapped.

You with me, Nightmirror?

I am. I have created an emergency on the far side of this vessel; most of Kaantalech's maintenance staff are attending to an inexplicable leakage of atmosphere.

Good thinking, old buddy.

I can give you warning whenever it seems you might encounter one of her people.

You do that.

She kept moving smartly along passageway after indistinguishable passageway, following Nightmirror's guidance each time she came to a fork or a crossway. After a while she felt a slight vibration beneath her feet. As it grew progressively more noticeable she assumed that she was getting closer to Kaantalech's center of operations. She thought as much to Nightmirror, who confirmed the hypothesis.

How much further?"

Not far now. It would be wise for you to start moving more slowly. There are sufficient Alhubra and other Autarchy servants in the vicinity to ensure that I may no longer be able to give you adequate warning of their locations.

Strider had been holding her lazgun casually by her side. Now she raised it again, and resumed the sweeping motion. She rather hoped she did come across some of Kaantalech's people: killing somebody would give her a sense of achievement.

Hey, that's a rotten thing to think, Leonie!

Yes, but it's an honest one.

And indeed there was a flicker of movement ahead of her. Reflexively she fired off a bolt from the lazgun. There was a shower of sparks in the distance.

She ran forward, ready to administer the coup de grâce, not caring how much noise she was making.

No need for a second bolt: she'd shot a bot, and it was clear that she'd hit it somewhere vital. The machine was just a smoking heap of motionless metal.

Had it had time to raise the alarm before all its systems crashed? There was no way of telling. She listened for the sound of a klaxon or some Alhubran equivalent, but there was nothing. No running footsteps. No change in the vibration from the floor. No other sound except that of her own breathing, which was loud enough in her ears that she wondered why Kaantalech's troops couldn't hear it.

Then there was a jolt that almost knocked her off her feet.

What the hell was that?

Kaantalech has begun to retaliate against Artificial Environment 17,863,006. She had to drop her shield briefly and one of its missiles made it through. The Blunt Instrument has suffered no major damage, but the emergency serves further to distract any attention that might detect your presence.

Jeez, but what's it gonna be like in here if the AE gets in a major hit?

That will not be your problem, Captain Leonie Strider.

Why won't it—? Oh, I see.

There was nothing for it but to keep on moving, obeying Nightmirror's directions.

She ran straight over a crossway and a few meters further when: BEHIND YOU!

She turned.

Two Alhubra were standing at the center of the crossway. They must have spotted her as she'd flitted past them at right angles. Dammit, but the creatures, despite their apparent clumsiness, must be able to move fast when they wanted to. They were raising things that looked alarmingly similar to the lazgun in her fist.

She let herself fall to one side and let off a bolt at random.

Lucky again, Leonie.

One of the Alhubra collapsed, shrieking with a shrillness that was startling from so huge a body. The flesh of its chest was on fire.

The other beast turned to run. Steadying her right arm with her left hand, Strider carefully shot it in the rear. The Alhubra's momentum carried it forward a few further paces before it crashed to the floor.

The first creature was still alive. With a final shot she put it out of its misery.

"Give me a bit more warning next time, friend," she said once her breath was back under control.

I shall do my best, but from here on such encounters are likely to occur with increasing frequency.

"You mean this is suicide."

Nightmirror did not reply.

"Well, I may as well go out in glory." Shrugging inside a battlesuit was a cumbersome business, but she managed it.

She took a few further steps along the passage, and then paused again. "You sure you couldn't do this yourself?"

Quite sure. The transition must be as smooth as possible. If I were to attempt both operations at once I would be certain to alert Kaantalech's technicians and it is likely that they would be able to install backup systems in time.

"This is likely to be suicide for you, too, Nightmirror, isn't it?"

Yes. Unless I am fortunate.

Strider hadn't thought too much—hadn't let herself think too much—about this before. She was risking ten or twelve decades of active life; Nightmirror was risking eternity. She felt momentarily embarrassed by the disparity in the sizes of the sacrifices they were preparing to make.

Less introspection, Leonie. It's not helpful.

"Thanks," she said out loud. The word seemed utterly inadequate.

I assure you that I am acting entirely out of self-interest. The dis-aesthetics created by the perpetuation of the Autarchy are so painful to us Images that they make our existence a misery. Termination is preferable to continued life under these conditions.

Strider could understand. She directed her thoughts inward, away from Nightmirror. So what are my own motives for this craziness? I could be trying to get back to the Solar System rather than farting about in the middle of someone else's tyranny on the other side of the Universe from home. Hm. Maybe my motives aren't all that different from Nightmirror's: there's no such thing as "someone else's" tyranny . . .

She rounded a corner and almost ran into a group of three Alhubra. Almost without breaking step she lazzed all three in a single arc of her weapon, then stepped round the smoking corpses and continued on her way.

You're getting too good at this, Leonie, she thought. Too proficient. Too unaffected. You felt nothing at all just then, except maybe satisfaction at a job neatly done. So what? That's the best way to be, right now. Being a callous bastard might be the only way of getting out of here alive.

You are very close to the core of the Main Computer now. I have succeeded so far in blanking out its observation of the corridors through which you have been passing, but it is becoming increasingly difficult. I suggest you move as quickly as possible; haste is now of greater importance than silence.

Once again Strider broke into a clumsy run. Battlesuits weren't designed for speed. Their main purpose was protection, although they could resist only a narrow spectrum of generally outmoded weaponry. She might have been better off in something lighter and more flexible, taking her chances for the benefit of mobility. Too late to have second thoughts.

A pair of Alhubra guards stood at the airlock door to which Nightmirror directed her. Again she lazzed them without a qualm before they could make a move to raise their weapons.

Shit! One of them had fallen directly in front of the doorway.

Nothing else for it but to . . .

She holstered the lazgun and clambered up the bulky side of the alien. Even through the fabric of the battlesuit she could feel the coarse hairs of its pelt. The flesh was as hard as rock beneath her hands and knees.

"How do I get this thing open?" she said once she was perched on top of the dead Alhubra.

There was a sudden glow of light and a wisp of smoke on the face of the door just to the right of her head.

She turned.

Uh-oh. Someone somewhere must have sounded the alarm. A posse of Alhubra coming at speed. Half a dozen or more.

She slid down the back of the giant corpse, wedging herself between it and the metal door. For a long moment she couldn't work the lazgun out of its holster; then she sneaked a glance over the hairy ridge and picked off the first of the troopers.

One of the others was raising what looked to be some sort of communications equipment to his mouth. Her mouth? It doesn't matter what sex these people are, for chrissake, Leonie! She shot the equipment first and the Alhubra second, ducking her head as the others rained bolts in her direction.

"Get this goddam door open!" she hissed at Nightmirror.

YOU MUST DESTROY THEM ALL, said the Image with infuriating calm. YOU CANNOT ALLOW ANY OF THEM TO SURVIVE TO RAISE A MORE GENERAL ALARM.

"Oh great."

She struggled upwards again and fired off another couple of bolts. One went wild, digging a hole out of the floor a hundred meters away, but the other hit flesh. The Alhubra stayed upright for a moment or two, as if puzzled by the fact that its head had exploded, then folded gracefully into a heap.

The others started to back off. That's the trouble with running a tyranny, thought Strider. If you don't give people anything to believe in except fear, there's no way they're going to lay down their lives for the good of the cause.

She shot two more of the troopers without having to worry about return fire.

The remaining two, obviously realizing they were dead if they ran so they might as well fight it out, took cover behind the fallen corpses of their comrades.

"Suggestions?"

There is nothing I can do to help you. You must deal with this yourself.

Stalemate.

Strider couldn't take a shot at the troopers unless they showed themselves, which they gave no indication of doing. She sent up a little prayer—just in case there was a god out there somewhere—that neither of the survivors carried a comm of any kind. With luck there was only one comm per platoon . . .

"Nightmirror!"

Yes.

"How much can you influence the environment around here?"

Triflingly.

"Can you block off this section of passage?"

YES. She could hear and see doors sliding across the corridor about fifty meters away in either direction. I KNOW WHAT TO DO NEXT, said Nightmirror.

The first sign was that the smoke from the burning flesh of the dead stopped rising erratically and seemed to become much more purposeful, forming steady columns that stretched unerringly to small vents in the ceiling. Then the smoke petered into nonexistence as the fires went out.

Strider tongued a control and was rewarded by a display of the external atmospheric pressure. The numbers were creeping slowly downwards towards zero—towards vacuum.

The two Alhubra must have suddenly realized what Nightmirror was up to, because a fusillade of lazbolts peppered the door behind her. She cowered in the hefty protection of the dead guard, hoping that a lucky shot wouldn't pass right through the corpse and pierce her battlesuit. Praise the heavens that the thing was self-sealing, so she'd likely survive unless the bolt hit something vital; even so, she could do without getting burnt.

There was a lull in the Alhubran fire, and she darted her head above the corpse's back.

One of the last pair of troopers was dead, or as good as. There was muddy-looking grey blood bubbling from its mouth. The creature lay on its side, its eyes closed. The other trooper was still moving, albeit sluggishly. Strider raised her lazgun and took careful aim and . . .

. . . just as she was about to squeeze the "fire" button the bastard Alhubra got off a lucky shot and winged her in the shoulder. Left shoulder, luckily. Screaming in pain she unleashed a barrage of lazbolts into the last survivor of the platoon, continuing to fire long after the creature was manifestly dead.

She could hardly see what she was doing any longer. The burn through her shoulder was giving her such agony that her eyes were running with unstoppable tears.

"Can you get this fucking airlock door open yet?" she blurted, trying for the sake of dignity to keep some of the pain out of her voice.

Yes.

As the door slid open it tugged her sideways, and she had to grab at the hairs of the dead Alhubra. She half-dropped, half-fell into the 'lock, landing on her rump and feeling an ache suddenly start up her spine. Nightmirror began to open the 'lock's inner door immediately, not bothering to close the outer one: both inside and outside were now in vacuum, so there was no need to protect the puter. Even so, Strider would have felt more secure had there been something between her and the rest of the Blunt Instrument.

No time to think about that now. Wait until later, Leonie, before you get terrified. Likely you'll be dead by then and miss the experience altogether. Better than most reasons for being dead.

The hall that housed the heart of Kaantalech's Main Computer was as filthy as the passageways outside: the Alhubra were a species who did not count hygiene among their stronger suits. Somehow Strider had expected a bigger space, as if the place she'd been questing towards should have the status of a shrine, or something. Instead she found herself in a room that was a more or less perfect cube, no more than twenty meters across each edge. Facing her there was a mound of machinery—primitive-seeming by even Human standards, but she knew better than to judge by appearances.

"This is it?"

It is.

"Which is the bit I should be looking at?"

Over to your right. You should be able to see a pair of lozenge-shaped dials, about ten centimeters across and illuminated in red.

"Gotcha." She moved slowly across to the dials, which looked disturbingly like plaintively pleading eyes. For some reason the wound in her shoulder was making her limp. "Now what?"

Just below the dials you'll see a small hatch—no, don't touch it yet!

Strider stopped her hand just above the first of the four butterfly nuts that held the hatch in place.

The instant you touch that hatch the automatic alarm systems will go off.

"I assumed they already had."

Not yet. We're being luckier than we could have expected to be.

"You're not the one who's got a shoulder that hurts like fuck."

Silence from Nightmirror. Strider remembered that he was as certain to die as she was.

"Sorry."

No need for apologies. I cannot feel physical pain, although I have sampled it in others, such as yourself. I would say that my spiritual pain is comparable with that of your wound, but I know you are also capable of suffering spiritual pain as great as any I can.

"Tell me when I can get started."

Indeed. Keep your hand there. This will have to be done very carefully . . .

#

Nightmirror moves very cautiously, infiltrating himself among the electroneurons of the Blunt Instrument's Main Computer so discreetly that the machine fails to notice his presence. Growing perhaps a little overconfident, the Image takes over a major portion of the puter's functioning in a single rush, and then waits for several milliseconds in trepidation . . . but the puter has noticed nothing.

Once, through the eyes of a creature whose species Nightmirror can no longer remember, he watched a unicellular organism slowly engulfing the body of another. The victim was unaware of anything until the very last moment, by which time it was too late for its struggles to be of any use. He feels, now, like that long-ago predator he saw at work. There will be a moment when he has taken over enough of the Main Computer to render anything it does to try to oust him ineffectual.

He feels a trace of guilt. He has come to rather like the machine. But that is all it is: a machine. Like any other AI, it has a high measure of self-awareness, but it can hardly be considered truly alive. At least, that is what Nightmirror keeps telling himself, forcing himself to forget the various other AIs he has encountered—like the bot Pinocchio—who have been all too similar to living consciousnesses.

Another push forward, and he is in possession of more than half of the Main Computer . . . and still the AI hasn't noticed his presence. He must have overestimated its intelligence—or maybe it is allowing him to take it over.

That's a chilling notion. He has assumed that the machine is a slave of Kaantalech and will do whatever the Autarch demands. What if the puter is fully aware of what is going on, and is permitting events to proceed?

Nightmirror dare not pause to test this possibility. There is still enough of the Main Computer under its direct control for it to raise the alarm, if it wants to.

He takes over another clump of databanks almost without thinking about it.

A few more such captures and he will be able to mimic the Main Computer perfectly. Just so long as Strider doesn't screw up the final murder she must commit.

#

PREPARE YOURSELF, STRIDER.

"I'm as prepared as I'll ever be. Can't we get on with this?"

I will give you three seconds' warning when it is safe for you to touch the fastenings of the hatch.

"Count me down?"

Certainly.

Strider waited impatiently. At any moment she expected a new platoon of Kaantalech's troopers to burst into the room behind her, even though she knew this area was now sealed off.

THREE, said Nightmirror.

"Good. We're getting started."

Two.

"Yup. I'm ready."

One.

Her hand was rock-steady above the first of the fastenings.

Now.

This was not a time for subtlety—so few times seemed to be, as far as Strider was concerned. Fumbling through the heavy fabric of the battlesuit's glove, she wrenched open the first two butterfly nuts, paused for a moment to allow herself a breath, then tackled the other two. She threw the rectangular piece of metal away across the floor.

I have taken over the entire functions of the Main Computer successfully. None of the organic population of this vessel has as yet noticed the transfer.

"Good on you. Now it's up to me to commit a murder."

That is correct.

Strider shook off guilt as she directed her lazgun at the circuits revealed now that the hatch was open.

"Now?"

Please.

She pressed the firing button, and kept it pressed, watching the metal fuse and flow and then finally burst into flames.

"Done?"

Yes. The Main Computer is dead. If you are very lucky, you may be able to escape. I shall monitor your progress, and will not drop the shield until either you are clear or you are dead.

"Cheerful sod, aren't you?" Strider holstered her lazgun, then drew it again: it was more useful in her hand. Her left shoulder still hurt like hell, but she was becoming accustomed to it. In a few hours, if she were very lucky, Hein or Strauss-Giolitto or Seragarda or someone would be giving her pain-killers.

Goodbye, Captain Leonie Strider.

Who was she to be wallowing in self-pity? "Goodbye, Nightmirror," she said. "I hope we both get out of this."

There is a chance.

She hardly noticed her climb over the corpse of the guard. The next time reality registered on her she was running through the evacuated passageway towards a door that remained firmly closed until the last moment; a split second later and she'd have run full into it.

"Thanks!" she cried to Nightmirror as she half-stumbled down the corridor on the door's far side.

My pleasure.

The door swished shut behind her. A wise move. It was likely that Kaantalech's personnel would discover there was something wrong with the Main Computer sooner rather than later, however exact Nightmirror's mimicry might be. The longer it took them to break through . . .

If she hadn't tripped on a chewed thigh-bone her head would have been shot off by the first of the lazbolts. As it was, she skidded through grease and shit along the passage, flailing her arms and legs in a vain attempt to slow herself down.

Another bolt missed her narrowly. Dimly she could see through her steamed-up visor that there were three Alhubra up ahead of her.

She twisted from her front to her back and, still sliding, extended her lazgun up above her head. She couldn't see where it was pointing, but hoped for the best as she squeezed the button.

There were satisfying shrieks.

She tumbled back on to her front, then pulled herself up to her knees. By luck she'd felled two of the Alhubra; the third was taking its time setting a sight on her. Before it could get its aim as perfect as it wanted she drilled it through the center of its forehead. As she scrambled around the trio of corpses she picked up one of the Alhubran weapons, examining its controls as she lumbered onwards. There could be only so many bolts left in her lazgun. It was a good idea to have a backup weapon, but the damned thing was heavier than she'd have liked. Maybe it packed a correspondingly heavy charge—she hoped so.

Nightmirror had other things to do than guide her; he was busy pretending to be a puter. She had to rely on her memory of how she'd got through to the room where the heart of the Main Computer was housed. Coming from the opposite direction to the various junctions she'd negotiated earlier was confusing. She relied on her innate sense of self-orientation to take her towards the Blunt Instrument's exterior, and ignored the fact that her orientation sense had never served her too well in the past.

Strider was astonished when she found her way to the airlock, and even more astonished when Nightmirror opened the inner door and Ten Per Cent Extra Free the outer. The pedo was waiting loyally for her, and she climbed into its small chamber as quickly as she could. Ten Per Cent Extra Free started the missile on its trajectory home almost before she had settled herself in place.

Now all she had to do was survive the firestorm.

#

CAPTAIN LEONIE STRIDER HAS EXITED THE BLUNT INSTRUMENT, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free tonelessly, as if the news were of little interest.

"I don't believe you!" cried Maloron Leander. Her voice sounded very loud in the confined space of the Pocket. For the past few hours she'd been systematically indoctrinating herself into the belief that Leonie was dead, so that the grief would be easier to bear when the news came through. "You're not just kidding me, are you, Tenper?"

I cannot understand your disbelief. Why should I tell you anything other than the truth? Captain Leonie Strider is now encapsulated within the pedo, which is heading away from the Blunt Instrument and towards the Midnight Ranger.

Leander withdrew herself briefly from the Pocket. "Hey, guys, it looks as if she's going to make it!"

Putting her head back into the Pocket drowned the sound of the yips and yelps.

As she reaches the fringe of Kaantalech's shield Nightmirror will, in the guise of the Main Computer, drop it to let her through. Kaantalech will take the opportunity to launch weapons towards Artificial Environment 17,863,006, which will use the same window to launch weapons at the Blunt Instrument. Captain Leonie Strider may well survive this exchange. What neither Kaantalech nor Artificial Environment 17,863,006 realizes is that the Blunt Instrument's defensive shield will never rise again.

"Which side should I be cheering for?"

Neither, if our luck holds.

Leander shrank the magnification within the Pocket so that she could see the insect hordes of little spacecraft centered on the two great behemoths that were the Blunt Instrument and Artificial Environment 17,863,006. One of those tiny dots of light was the Midnight Ranger; as she thought this the Pocket obligingly indicated the vessel with a blue-green arrow.

"Show me the pedo with Strider in it," she breathed.

Another arrow. The place in space that it indicated seemed completely empty, but it was moving at a steady velocity away from Kaantalech's flagship.

The Blunt Instrument's shield was an ellipsoid of pale, semi-translucent candle-wax in the Pocket's visual display. As the nothingness demarked by the arrow reached the edge of the ellipsoid the wax melted away.

The first effective shot came from Artificial Environment 17,863,006, tearing away the Blunt Instrument's nose so swiftly that it was hard to believe that it had ever been there. Kaantalech responded with a devastating volley of weapons, and the Artificial Environment jigged around in the vacuum as it absorbed the shocks of the explosions. The fleets of the Pridehouse and the Lingk-kreatzai stayed well clear. All Leander had eyes for was the arrow moving across the field of the Pocket towards the Midnight Ranger, which Ten Per Cent Extra Free had thought to ring.

Nelson joined her in the Pocket. His breathing was even louder than hers, and under his breath he was giving vent to little cheers.

Artificial Environment 17,863,006 plunged towards the Blunt Instrument, loosing a further barrage of weapons. Unprotected by its shield, the deadmetal of the Autarch's flagship glowed first red and then yellow and then white. It was impossible to believe that the vessel could withstand the temperature, and yet it seemed to be doing so—for a maxbeam sought out the place where Artificial Environment 17,863,006 was moving through space and sparked into being a reflective glow of cold flame.

The killing machine from the Twin Galaxies was winning the battle, clearly, but it was not going to be allowed to escape unscathed.

A pulsenuke took Artificial Environment 17,863,006 in the rear, doing great damage to its drive—how much damage Leander could only guess, but she pursed her lips in satisfaction as the death machine's course towards the Blunt Instrument became less certain.

"Good shooting," said Nelson, close beside her.

Leander didn't reply. Artificial Environment 17,863,006 had steadied itself and was now moving directly towards the Blunt Instrument. It was difficult to tell in the confined space of the Pocket, but it seemed as if the machine was accelerating.

"Tell all the vessels of the fleet to prepare their armaments," Leander whispered to Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

This has already been done.

"On whose authority?"

Captain Leonie Strider's.

It wasn't the answer Leander had expected to receive.

"Can you patch me through to her?"

Certainly.

There was a moment when there was no sound in the Pocket except that of Nelson's breathing and her own. She put her arm round his waist and tugged his hip alongside her own, enjoying the feel of his body even through the several layers of fabric that separated his flesh from hers.

Then there was a third sound of breathing.

"Leonie?"

"None other."

Leander couldn't think of anything to say. Luckily Nelson cut across her.

"Ho there, woman who makes the tide come in."

"Prepare an airlock," said Strider. She sounded exhausted.

"It shall be done as you request, fair maiden of the skies."

"Shut the fuck up with the badinage, will ya, Umbel? I can do without it, right now. Make sure the cat's at the airlock."

A short pause while Nelson worked this out. "Why?"

"I want something on my bunk that purrs a lot so that I can get to sleep . . . and stay that way for a very long time."

#

Hein and Umbel Nelson carried Strider from the airlock to the nearest cabin; she whimpered through the helmet of her battlesuit that she wanted to be in her own place, but they told her to keep quiet and be grateful for the fact that she was getting the cat, as requested. The whimpering soon died down, and she was asleep before they dumped her on the bunk.

Between them they removed the battlesuit, and Nelson sucked in his breath when he saw the burn on her left shoulder.

"Must have hurt," he said.

"Probably still does," said Hein. "It's a wonder she can sleep through the pain. I'll inject her with analgesics once we've got her settled."

"She'll want to know what's happened to Kaantalech. And to Artificial Environment 17,863,006."

"We can tell her later," said Hein. "I'm not going to try to wake her up again now."

He pulled a blanket over Strider's naked body and tucked it in on either side of the bunk. Loki, for once knowing what was expected of her, settled her round black head in the crook of Strider's neck, shut her eyes in ecstasy and began to purr loudly. Her tail moved forcefully under the blanket a few times and then jabbed out over the edge of the bunk and was still.

Nelson and Hein touched palms together, grinning.

Artificial Environment 17,863,006 had done most of the damage to the Blunt Instrument, but a single well placed pulsenuke had finally taken out the death machine. It would travel onwards through the Universe for ever and a day as a huge piece of inert and harmless metal. Orphanwifer had led three Lingk-kreatzai cruisers to put an end to the crippled Blunt Instrument; it had been not so much of a fight as a surgical operation—they were putting down a wild animal to save it from further suffering.

Nightmirror had slipped away into The Truthfulness just in time, and was now reunited aboard the Midnight Ranger with Ten Per Cent Extra Free and Pinocchio.

One day, certainly, the Autarchy would rise again. Kaantalech had done a competent job of exterminating all those with the necessary ambition and ruthlessness to take over control of The Wondervale, but certainly she must have missed a few. There would be someone else along, sooner or later, to re-impose the tyranny.

In the meantime, though, there was the opportunity for a Pridehouse male and a Human male to touch their hands together and smile both at each other and down at the bunk where slept a Human female and a creature that was to all intents and purposes a cat.