CHAPTER SIXTEEN

There were a number of medical modules attached to Hal's torso, clustered around the red-weal wounds and surgical scars. Some of them were integral with patches of artificial skin that were busy melding with his spoiled dermal layers, infusing regeneration virals into the plexus of capillaries. Others were more complex systems, sprouting slim tubes that penetrated the scars, pumping specialist fluids in and out of damaged organs, supporting them until he could be given replacements and proper treatments. He wore a baggy white shirt to cover them, but the modules were too bulky to hide completely. It was as though his torso was busy growing plastic tumors.

He sat in his high-backed leather seat, head lolling against the side cushions as if his neck didn't have quite enough strength to hold it upright. Every time one of his friends came into the hotel's small private staff lounge that they'd taken over to care for him he grinned at them and made a happy grunting sound. Edmond went over and gave him a high five. Just watching Hal's hand wavering unsteadily through the air as he concentrated hard to make contact made Lawrence chill deep inside. The others were looking away, their expressions grim as they were reminded of Hal's state.

Only Dennis stared unflinchingly. And Lawrence knew he'd been taking too many of his own sedatives lately.

Amersy was the last in. He closed the door and gave Hal a quick thumbs-up, the way anyone would to a longtime pal. It was his eyes, flicking away quickly, that betrayed what he must be thinking.

What was left of Platoon 435NK9 turned to Lawrence.

"First off," Lawrence said. "Don't worry about getting Hal back up to the Koribu. I have a contact at Durrell spaceport."

Hal let out a long wheezy groan. His jaw started to move, chewing on air. When Hal had come round after Lawrence's ragtag medical team installed the biomech heart he'd lost all sensation and movement down his right side. Since then, feeling had been returning slowly, as with a recovering stroke victim. If that was his only complication Lawrence would have been happy. But despite the superoxygenated blood in his brain, there had been some starvation damage. The kid's thoughts were slow and muddled, coupled with memory lapses. With the paralyzed muscles and the difficulty he had putting words together, watching him try to speak was painful. Most of the time he knew what he wanted to say, but grew angry with himself when the words refused to form. Sometimes the anger would cause him to punch the arm of the chair with his good arm, tears of frustration leaking down his cheeks.

"Thank. You. Sarge," he grunted out. Tendons stood proud from his throat with the effort of forming three words.

"That's what I'm here for, Hal." Lawrence glanced around at the other faces in the room, trying to judge the collective mood. They were all quietly expectant, curious what he'd brought them together for. Since the court-martial and the firing squad they'd been directing their shock and anger at Z-B in the form of Captain Bryant and Ebrey Zhang. Resentment and the sense of betrayal hadn't manifested in any coherent form, but they'd become difficult to command. Not that the rest of the platoons in Memu Bay were any more disciplined right now. But with a ruined Hal to rally round and help, 435NK9 retained a degree of internal cohesion. They did what Lawrence told them, not because they were orders from Bryant, but because Lawrence wanted them carried out.

He couldn't have asked for a group of men more suited to help achieve his personal goal.

Funny how things work out.

"The reason I have a contact at Durrell is something I was going to share with you at some time anyway. Might as well be now. I think there's a big asset out in the hinterland that Z-B doesn't know about. I want to collect that asset."

"For Z-B?" Karl asked quickly.

Lawrence smiled without humor. "Not a chance."

Lewis clapped his hands together. "Fucking-a."

"More like it."

"What kind of asset?" Amersy asked. He sounded more cautious than curious.

Lawrence pulled out a desktop pearl. Its pane unfolded and began to display a satellite image of the plateau behind Memu Bay. "This is Arnoon Province. I went up there last time I was on Thallspring, a patrol that was sent on a sweep through the hinterlands. According to Memu Bay's official records, the people living up there harvest willow webs in the forest and turn the stuff into sweaters and blankets, crap like that. What we found when we got there was a nice little village in the woods, with a very decent standard of living. It was like a five-star holiday resort. I've seen the same kind of isolated community on several worlds. No big deal. But there were a few things wrong about this one. You'll have to take my word on this, but there's no way they could afford the standard of living I saw by just selling blankets. Every house was crammed full of gadgets and electronics, all of it top-of-the-range gear. There were a lot of people living there as well, more than Memu Bay knew about, and too many for their community income to support. And none of them were ill, either. I'm not talking about hospital cases. I didn't even see a kid with a runny nose. They were the healthiest group of people I've known."

"So you're saying they've got another source of income?" Amersy said. "Lawrence, I've seen communities like this, too. They'll have some kind of illegal scam running up there in the forest, away from the city police and, more important, the taxman. It won't be anything we can take home."

"No, they have money on a scale that goes way beyond anything like that. I'm talking orders of magnitude, here. They're probably the richest people on this planet"

"How do you figure that?"

"It took me a while to realize, because they've used the best camouflage there is: put your biggest secret in plain sight. I thought they were Regressors that first time. I saw them eating fruit from a tree." He smiled softly at the platoon.

"So?" Lewis asked. "They are Regressors. Nobody else does that kind of thing. It's filthy. Decent people eat protein cell food."

Lawrence chuckled. "Which just proves my point. You can't see it either. Willow webs are a local plant. The forest up there in the hills is indigenous. Arnoon Province wasn't gamma soaked."

"No way," Dennis said sharply. "Terrestrial plants won't grow in alien environments. For a start, the soil bacteria is all wrong. That's why you have to gamma soak the land and re-seed it with our own bacteria."

"Exactly," Lawrence said. "But I saw it. I saw them pluck fruit from a bush and eat it. From what I remember, it wasn't even a terrestrial bush."

"Then you didn't see it, Sarge. Sorry, but humans don't have a biochemistry that is compatible with this planet's indigenous organisms. I might have flunked my degree, but I did manage to take in stuff that basic."

"I know. But I've seen this happen on one other planet as well. You weren't with us then." Lawrence cocked an eyebrow at Amersy. "You remember Calandrinia?"

"Hardly likely to forget her."

"She was a new-native on Santa Chico," Lawrence told the others. "They ate fruit that was growing on trees. I called them Regressors, too. But I was wrong there as well. Calandrinia told us that the biotechnology experts who emigrated from California eventually worked out how to blend the terrestrial and alien gene pools. It made Calandrinia's generation what they were, and it gave them food the old-fashioned way, so they weren't dependent on food refineries. That was a big part of their philosophy, liberating themselves from machinery. So it is possible."

Dennis pulled a face. "Maybe. On Santa Chico I could believe it. But here, on Thallspring? Christ, Sarge, the most advanced thing ever to come out of Memu Bay is a new shape for a windsurfing board."

"Yeah. And according to Calandrinia it took decades for Santa Chico to develop the gene blend. Decades of work by hundreds of the greatest geneticists and biotechnicians Earth ever had. Yet here we are, in the middle of the hinterlands on a planet thirty-seven light-years from Santa Chico, and I see the same thing. How do you explain that, Dennis?"

"You think they bought the genetic blending technology from Santa Chico. Don't you?" Amersy asked.

"There's nowhere else it could have come from. And it would have taken a lot of money. You'd have to travel from here to Santa Chico carrying a complete range of Thallspring botanical and bacterial samples. Then you'd have to employ a team of geneticists to adapt the techniques. That takes serious money. Billions in anyone's currency."

"Santa Chico's cut off," Edmond said. "Everyone knows that."

Lawrence shook his head. "I was on Thallspring before I went to Santa Chico. This must have happened thirty, forty years ago, maybe even longer. Back when credit meant something to Santa Chico."

"All right," Amersy said. "I can accept that it's theoretically possible for the Arnoon villagers to have trees that produce terrestrial food. But where did the money come from?"

"Two possibilities," Lawrence said. "The first is they're exiles. A group of billionaires setting up a colony inside a colony. Essentially, they're self-sufficient—that's where the food trees come in. They have a high standard of living, which they support by quietly buying in all the consumer goodies that a relatively advanced world can provide. The problem I have with this idea is billionaires don't live like that. You don't work your ass off amassing that kind of fortune and then spend it on some forest idyll community. Earth is their element, with its stock markets and stakes and boards."

"So what's the other possibility?" Odel asked.

"That Arnoon began exactly the way they said it did. A group of honest people looking for a quiet life who harvested willow webs for a living. They start their community, establish some decent tenets to live by. Then suddenly they find something valuable. Fabulously valuable. This is the mother-lode of all motherlodes, here. What do they do? If they tell the rest of their world, everyone will want a piece of the action. Arnoon Province is developed and industrialized. Their way of life will be wiped out. So they decide to spend it on safeguarding that good quiet life they've got for themselves.

"A few of them buy passage to Earth on a Navarro house starship. Then fly on to Santa Chico. Several years later, when the gene blending has been accomplished, they come back the same way. After that, it's easy. They can expand their population without the local authorities knowing about it, because they have an independent food supply. Buying in every civilized luxury is relatively easy; they set up a couple of wholesale companies down here in Memu Bay, maybe another in the capital. They're fronts so they can send the products up to the plateau without anyone knowing."

"How did they know about Santa Chico?" Amersy asked. "We damn well didn't until after we landed."

"We didn't know how far they'd carried the modifications," Lawrence said. "We knew about the modification project. It was the big difference that the settlers were so proud of. Santa Chico was not going to be colonized the same way as every other planet. They made that very clear right at the start and went out of their way to advertise the fact. Even on Amethi I'd heard of Santa Chico."

"All right, maybe you did, but a bunch of willow web farmers?"

"They had datapool access and money. It's a wonderful combination; it always gets you what you want in the end."

"I don't believe hundreds of people can keep a secret that big for so long. One of them would come down into Memu Bay and blow his wad in a marina club. Word would leak out."

"Nobody knows about them," Lawrence said. "So the secret has been kept. Simple logic."

"I don't see how."

Lawrence didn't know what else to say to convince him. You couldn't dispute the plain facts.

"Hey, Sarge," Karl said. "What do you reckon this motherlode is?"

"That's where it gets interesting. The survey satellites never came up with anything on the plateau other than the bauxite. So, geologically speaking, it's got to be something that shouldn't be there, an anomaly. Expand on Arnoon," he told the desktop pearl AS. The picture flowed. Snow-capped mountains rippled up as the focus shifted past them. Huge tracts of forest swept by until the AS centered on a valley with a circular lake. There was a small island in the middle. "I saw this, too, when I was there last time. I didn't recognize it then, because you don't often see these all covered in trees and grass."

"Oh, my goodness," Odel murmured. "It's a crater."

"You got it. And it's impact, not volcanic. That island is the central peak. A chunk of some asteroid or comet hit the plateau a few thousand years ago, maybe less. The cliff on the west side is still almost sheer. There's been very little movement or erosion since it happened."

"So what hit it?" Karl was leaning forward, staring intently at the pane.

"I'm betting on metal," Lawrence said. "A near-solid lump of it. That would survive the flight through the atmosphere, and the impact. It also gives the Arnoon villagers something to mine."

"What kind of metal?" Karl wanted to believe. Manna from heaven mixed in with a great treasure hunt. He was buying in heavily.

"I don't know for sure, but it's got to be one of the precious ones. Gold, platinum. Or maybe I'm wrong, and it was an ordinary carbonaceous chondritic that fused into diamond from all that heat and pressure during the impact."

Karl slapped Odel's shoulder. "You hear that? There's a diamond mountain in them there hills, and it's all ours."

Odel gave him a pitying look.

"Maybe it's there," Lawrence said. "And that's what you've got to decide. By yourselves. I need to know if you're in or out. All I know for certain is there's evidence of a lot of money up on that plateau, and there's an impact crater in the same place. To me that's more than coincidence, but I can't guarantee anything."

"What sort of proposition are you offering, Sergeant?" Odel asked.

"Equal share for everyone who goes up there with me. We also have to pay off my contact and a spaceplane pilot."

"How do we get there?" Amersy asked.

"We've been assigned a hinterland patrol, leaving oh-eight-thirty tomorrow. Estimated duration two days."

"Jesus." Amersy gave a surprised, slightly troubled grin. "That's some contact you've got. Our assignments come out of Zhang's office."

"I've been planning this for a while" was all Lawrence said. Even now he wasn't about to trust anyone else with Prime.

"Man, we're covered," Lewis said as his smile broadened. "We're going to be up there on an official mission. And the villagers are going to be the last people to protest about some private asset realization. They can't let on they had anything worth taking in the first place." He looked at Lawrence in admiration. "Fucking-a, Sarge. Count me in."

They all turned as Hal began his loud grunting. "I'm. With. Sarge," he ground out. "Need. Money. To. Be. Better. Not. Live. Like. This."

Edmond patted his friend. "It's okay, man. You get a share anyway."

"Actually, if we go we have to take him with us," Lawrence said. "There's nobody here to give him the kind of care he needs. He can ride in the back of the jeep."

It surprised them, but they didn't object.

"I'm on for it," Karl said. "Fucking Z-B. If there's really any of that metal up there, I can walk away from the bastards."

"Sign me up," Odel said.

"Me too," Edmond agreed.

"You're not leaving me behind," Dennis said.

"Congratulations," Amersy said. "That makes it a full set."

Denise had managed to keep her emotions in check for so long now, she'd almost forgotten they were there, squatting at the back of her mind. She'd told herself her immunity from distraction was due to the d-writing she'd undergone; that objectivity and rationality had been installed along with all the other enhancements. The news about Josep had exposed that for the self-deception that it truly was. Ray had called her an hour after he was supposed to have left the spaceport, saying he hadn't reported in. Then his Prime started intercepting heavily encrypted messages flashing between the spaceport and the East Wing of the Eagle Manor, where Z-B's intelligence staff had set up office. Several of them referred to "the prisoner"; they covered requests for personnel and equipment, mainly from the medical department.

"They're getting ready to interrogate him," Ray said.

Denise fought hard to suppress the dismay that had risen from nowhere. "Do you mean torture?" she asked levelly.

"No, it'll be drugs and brain scans. That's why they want the medical people."

"Can you get him out?"

"I don't even know for sure where he's being kept, yet, but I'm pretty sure it's the spaceport. They disconnected it from the datapool fifteen minutes ago. Which gives us a problem in trying to track down his physical whereabouts inside. And even if I did, it would take time to retrieve him. He'll be under the heaviest guard they have. Denise... I don't think I'll be able to get him out and safeguard the mission as well."

"I see."

"He knew that. You and I both knew this was a possibility, too. We've always accepted this risk."

"Yes." Stick to the mission, she told herself. "So now what? Do you think you can get hold of a key?"

"I'll have to wait and see. I need to know where they caught him, and if they have any idea what he was doing at the spaceport. That's what I don't understand, Denise, how the hell did they catch him? We know their security, there was nothing left to chance when we planned this out."

"Another Dudley Tivon," she said. "A random event. Someone caught him red-handed."

"Then why wasn't there any kind of alert? If anyone does anything against Z-B's interests they send up a barrage of red rockets. This time, without Prime intercepting their communications I would never even know they'd taken anyone prisoner."

"So what do you think?"

"The way it was done, the fact he never managed to load a warning into the datapool, I'd say they were waiting for him."

"They can't have been, Ray! That would mean they know about us."

"Yeah. Not a nice thought, is it?'

"I don't believe it. There has to be another explanation. There has to."

"I don't want to believe it, either. But we can't afford to ignore it, not now."

"Ray, we have to get a key for one of the Xianti flights. Without that, we've failed."

"Not yet we haven't, not by a long way."

"If you can't get him out..."

"I know. He'll never let them discover what he's become, nor what he was doing. At least we have that option."

"Do you want me to come to Durrell?"

"No. If I can salvage this I need you to be ready where you are. I'm going to have to consider my next move very carefully. I think we underestimated Z-B from the start. If that's the case we may even have to abandon the mission altogether."

"No!"

"Face it, Denise. We're not looking good right now. In any case, Z-B will be back in another decade or so. We can try again then."

"All right."

"It's not over yet. I'll keep monitoring the situation here and review my options. I'm trying to establish a link to the spaceport. We should know within twenty-four hours."

Denise managed a sad little smile. "That's when we were supposed to be on our way."

"Yeah. I'll call you as soon as I have anything new."

After that, Denise didn't go to the school. She left a message for Mrs. Potchansky, claiming a stomach bug, then told the house's Prime-augmented AS to filter calls. She knew she wouldn't be able to face the dear old woman, not even over a visual link.

It was the first time the rented bungalow had felt truly empty without Ray and Josep. Her head slowly filled with strange notions as she wandered along the hall. That she should go back to Arnoon Province where she'd be safe. Or fly to Durrell anyway, and rescue Josep. That this whole mission had been a mistake.

None of these thoughts are relevant, she told herself crossly. That didn't stop them from breeding.

Denise looked at the door to Josep's room, not quite sure why she was standing outside it. He hadn't gone in for much in the way of personal decoration—a desk, a couple of dark green leather chairs, which she thought were pretty awful. The bed was a double. Naturally. He'd hung a big sheet screen over half of the opposite wall, so he could lounge around on the mattress and watch the shows. In its inactive mode the screen showed a picture of Mount Kenzi taken on a cloudless, sunny day, rugged snowcap shining bold against the pale turquoise sky. She turned the handle and went in. When he'd taken off for Durrell he'd left the room in a shambles—the quilt crumpled up at the bottom of the bed, sheet rucked; several pairs of swimming trunks were shoved under the bed. T-shirts that he'd worn when teaching his tourists were thrown into a heap on one of the chairs, still smelling of seawater. Towels had been dropped on the floor. A set of his gills were slung over the back of the desk chair.

Despite everything else Denise had to do over the weeks following the invasion, she'd tidied up both the boys' rooms. Clothes and towels were gradually put into the washing cabinet. The mess sorted out. She'd even found two pairs of panties and a bra under Josep's bed—they had also been washed. The quilt had been folded neatly on the foot of the bed. Their little domestic robot had vacuumed the carpet, dusted round and polished the broad window that looked out over the back garden.

Even spruced up like this, the room belonged to Josep. There were tears in her eyes, which she wiped away savagely with her knuckles. She sat down on the edge of the bed, a hand stroking the mattress. When she closed her eyes it was easy to see him. Memories of him as a stupid little boy up at Arnoon. Growing taller and more serious as the years wound on. Emerging from the d-writing, mature and confident, his dedication to the mission easily as strong as hers. Then down here in Memu Bay. Devilish and happy, growing into a decent, attractive young man. All those fabulous girls he'd brought back to the bungalow, ending up here on this bed.

She'd never slept with him or Ray. Instead they'd shared what amounted to a brother-sister relationship, caring and respectful, with plenty of teasing thrown in, housemate pranks.

Was I being stupid? Should I have just leaped at him? Stolen the precious time we had? Or were we both scared of how deep and serious it would become if we started?

Irrelevant now. Just an exercise in what if, and painful self-recrimination as the prospect of total failure dawned. She hated herself for thinking such things. But the memories wouldn't let her stop.

The message package from the underground cell arrived late in the morning. Prime programs installed in various data-pool nodes ensured it stayed below the horizon of Z-B's monitors. Not even dataflow logs recorded its routing.

Denise was curled up on Josep's bed when the bungalow's AS accepted the message and delivered it direct to her d-written neuron cells. The pillow was damp around her cheek. She'd been crying.

Misery became plain annoyance as she reviewed the message. It was from a cell group in Harkness, one of the smaller suburbs almost on the edge of Memu Bay's moat of terrestrial vegetation. They'd barely been active since the occupation. Scrawling a few slogans on walls. Storing equipment and crude weapons for the more active units in Memu Bay itself. But Harkness was stretched along the eastbound wing of the Great Loop Highway—a very strategic location given their mission. The main purpose in recruiting the cell was so that they could keep the road under observation. And they'd just fulfilled their principal function.

The package was a report that two Z-B jeeps had passed through town, heading down the Great Loop Highway out toward the hinterlands.

Denise felt a flash of resentful anger that the imbeciles in the cell had screwed up and bothered her. Especially right now. Another emotion surge she could do without.

There were no jeeps. The Prime she'd inserted into Z-B's headquarters network reviewed their deployment schedules. And something like a convoy of Skins on their way out to the hinterlands would have been tagged as immediate priority. She would have known within seconds of Ebrey Zhang's office posting the duty.

The Prime operating within the bungalow automatically correlated the new information. There was a patrol scheduled to travel round the hinterlands today.

Reflex muscle action made Denise sit up fast She queried the patrol assignment.

Prime confirmed it.

She loaded another query, asking why Prime hadn't warned her about the assignment.

For software as powerful as Prime, the answer was a long time coming. Several milliseconds. Her Prime hadn't been aware of the patrol before because the assignment hadn't come through Zhang's office. Something else had inserted it into the schedule, and done so in a way that shielded it from registering on any monitor routine. The Prime was sending out thousands of subtle trawlers through the surrounding architecture, trying to locate the origin. One of the probes encountered another Prime lurking inside Z-B's AS.

Within the electronic universe the two quasi-sentient software systems regarded each other passively. Attempts at infiltration and subversion were impossible. They were equals.

"Another Prime?" Denise squawked in shock.

It simply could not be.

Yet there it was.

She withdrew her own Prime.

There had been no alert issued in the Z-B network; nobody knew she'd been sniffing around. The other Prime hadn't informed them. She tried to think the situation through logically. There was only one place a Prime came from, and that was Arnoon. Somebody else from back home must be in Memu Bay. Somebody with a mission contrary to hers. Which again wasn't possible. No Prime would act against the dragon; it had written Prime specifically for them.

None of this made any sense. Then she finally paid attention to the platoon that had been assigned the patrol: 435NK9. Lawrence Newton!

"He can't know," she whispered. But he was heading down the Great Loop Highway on a patrol that Z-B had never authorized, and didn't know about.

Denise closed her eyes and considered her options. There weren't many. She had to know how a Prime was helping Newton. That was paramount: it might even reveal how Josep had been captured. The answer had to be in Arnoon. And Newton himself could not be allowed to reach the province.

Denise ran to her own room and began to change clothes. Jeans, a T-shirt, leather jacket, a small bag with the two weapons she kept in the bungalow. As she was putting them on she issued commands to various cells, requiring them to take direct action against the patrol. Her Prime also scoured the local traffic regulation AS to find a suitable vehicle for her. It gave her a list of possibilities, and she selected the one she wanted. A flurry of emergency route commands were shot into the vehicle's AS.

She pulled some heavy boots on and hurried out Lee Brack had been surprised when his bike AS suddenly flashed up emergency symbols on his optronic membranes and the bike immediately turned off down a side road. He always hated engaging the AS anyway. This bike was meant to be ridden properly, by humans, not goddamn software. The big green-and-gold Scarret had a three-core converter cell for power, with superconductor cabling and multi-ring direct axle motors with inbuilt turning angle compensators. Top speed of 250 kilometers per hour on a decent stretch of road. His wives referred to it as his midlife crisis machine. And here it was being remote-controlled into some damned housing estate. The alignment power coupling turned the front wheel again, taking him in to the curb as he slowed. Parking legs slid out.

Lee Brack took his helmet off and stared around in confusion. "What bloody emergency?" He was in the middle of Stereotype Street suburbia. On the other side of the road an old couple were walking their chocolate Labrador. In front of him an attractive girl was out jogging. Actually she was sprinting damn fast. She came to a halt beside the Scarret "Thanks," she said.

"For wh—"

Her hands grabbed the front of his one-piece bikesuit. Lee Brack was lifted off the Scarret's saddle as if he were made from lightweight foam rather than his actual weight of ninety-five kilos. He chased a short arc through the air to land badly on his left arm, with the shoulder taking most of the weight. Something amid his bones and tendons made a nasty crunch. Only then did he manage to yell.

The girl snatched up his helmet and straddled the Scarret. Lee's cry of pain turned to outrage as the dashboard display lit up. What about his fucking security codes? "You bitch!"

Denise's Prime simply erased the Scarret's AS and installed itself in the neurotronic pearls that governed the bike's systems. With her d-written neural structure integrating her directly into the software, it was as if she'd become part of the bike. Power burned into the axle motors, and she turned the handlebars in smooth unison with the alignment power coupling. The U-turn was sharp enough to scrape a parking leg on the tarmac. Sparks fantailed before it finished retracting. Denise accelerated hard, losing Lee Brack's barrage of obscenities within seconds.

The jeeps were approaching the edge of Memu Bay's original gamma soak. Strands of darker, bluish vegetation were mingling with the terrestrial grass on either side of the Great Loop Highway. Up ahead the jungle of native vegetation was steaming gently after the early morning rains. In the passenger seat of the first jeep, Lawrence had a good view of the wide strip of tarmac cutting straight across the land until it disappeared into the trees.

Finally they were leaving the villages behind. They were dotted every few kilometers along the highway, clusters of small buildings that lined the road, almost identical each time—a couple of general stores, always a bar, and some kind of low-tech industry. Truck garages were fairly common, with rows of corroding hulks parked out on the grass. Road maintenance robot stations, also with broken-down chassis strewn around. A semiautomated steel mill churning out I-beams. A reclamation furnace with tall twin stacks blowing out thick, greasy smoke into the clear air, a huge stinking pile of rubbish sprawled over the land behind. The houses that accompanied them were a lot cruder than the fine whitewashed apartment blocks in Memu Bay. These were little more than one-story shacks with walls of cinder block and a roof of composite sheeting and solar collectors. Adults sat outside, watching the road and its traffic. Kids ran about on the dirt paths, chasing after one another, playing soccer.

"None of this was here last time," Lawrence said as they drove through a little conglomeration calling itself Enstone. A big sign was stuck up on the side of the highway, advertising the boatyard that had spread over a couple of acres beyond the row of houses.

"We're twenty klicks from the sea," Lewis protested.

"Cheaper to build out here," Amersy said. "This is Memu Bay's secondary economy. It always starts to grow up around prosperous settlements that have been established for a while. The bigger the population the bigger the percentage of semiskilled and transient workers."

"You mean poor people," Dennis said.

"I certainly do."

The traffic on this stretch of the Great Loop Highway was also a lot heavier than Lawrence remembered from last time. Most of it was trucks or vans that were dropping in and out of the little factories and businesses, shuffling supplies and material between them. At this rate, he thought, it wouldn't be long before the villages merged into a single urban strip.

They were passing through the last highway village when Lawrence's Prime notified him that another Prime had queried the patrol assignment. Another Prime? he asked it. There was no margin of error.

It must be KillBoy, he thought. It was the only explanation. In fact it made perfect sense. He'd always known the resistance people had sophisticated subversion software available. Strange irony, though, that it should be Prime; in twenty years this was the only copy he'd ever encountered.

"I want sensors switched to search pattern A-five," Lawrence told everyone. "Have your AS review the input for localized data traffic and electronic activity. Someone's just taken an interest in us. There may be a few hostiles around here."

"How the hell do you know that?" Amersy asked.

"I have some smart software that can spot illegal askpings. And someone queried our patrol. Someone outside Z-B."

"Christ, Sarge," Karl said. "They should make you general."

"That's some software," Amersy said dryly.

"Yeah. Come on, people, look lively." He checked his telemetry grid to make sure they were activating their sensors. When everyone had upgraded he turned around and checked on Hal, who was riding in the back of the jeep. The kid was leaning on the door so he could look out across the countryside. Wind was thrashing his short hair about. He had a permanent lopsided grin as he watched the scenery flash past. Edmond was sitting beside him, feet resting on a box full of the medical supplies that Hal's modules used.

"Everything okay?" Lawrence asked.

Edmond waved casually. "Under control, Sarge."

They crossed the border between terrestrial and Thallspring vegetation. The only other vehicle left on the Great Loop Highway was a tractor unit pulling a flatbed trailer that was trundling in from the hinterlands. When they passed it, Lawrence saw the trailer was loaded with trimmed tree trunks. He wondered how legal that was. There were several plants in town that synthesized wood.

"Let's go," he said to Dennis, who was driving the lead jeep. "I want to reach Arnoon by nightfall."

Dennis lowered his foot down on the accelerator, and the jeep began to pick up speed.

Since the call came in, Newby had been operating on a permanent adrenaline high, and it felt glorious. This kind of action was what he'd envisaged when he joined the cell. But ever since the invaders landed, all he'd been asked was to keep some bulky sealed boxes in the back of his father's shop, hidden underneath the crates of empty bottles that were waiting to be collected. He did get a thrill from the strangers who would come in and give him the password, either collecting or delivering boxes. It made him feel part of something important. At twenty-three years of age, it was the first sense of belonging he'd ever known.

Now finally the cell had been put on active status, with a critical duty. He joined his fellow cell members Carole and Russell around the back of his father's store and climbed into the battered old pickup. Any thoughts of a quiet getaway were ruined by the gut-rattler roar of the truck's ancient combustion engine as it fired up. He winced and grated through the gears, racing away as his father came running out.

The instructions received and decrypted by his bracelet pearl were simple and accurate. He stopped to pick up another cell: three people he'd never seen before. Two pudgy pasty-skinned men in their late twenties that he suspected were brothers. The third man was slim and dignified, at least sixty years old, wearing pressed jeans and a denim shirt with a lace tie; his Stetson was also clean and expensive. He looked like money to Newby. But they all had the right password, and each of them carried two intriguingly heavy cases. They squashed into the back of the pickup, and all six of them headed east along the Great Loop Highway toward the Mitchell foothills, with Newby pushing the old engine hard.

They chose the ambush site deep in the jungle, where the road had already begun its climb up to the plateau. It was an area of exceptionally lush vegetation, with creepers and vines that grew at near-visible rates. The battle between the undergrowth and the highway maintenance robots was as fierce as ever. Constant pruning by energy blades meant that the wall of foliage on either side of the road was now almost solid. Overhead, where the robotic implements couldn't reach, the branches had knitted together over the tarmac wound, creating a somber arboreal tunnel. Ragged strings of creeper hung down from the apex, acting as conduits for the rain-soaked canopy above. They dripped sour water across the Great Loop Highway like botanical stalactites.

Newby had to use the pickup's headlights, it was so dismal under the trees. When they finally spotted a gap in the thick tangle of undergrowth along the side of the road, he turned off and slowly maneuvered the pickup through the trees until it was a hundred meters away from the tarmac and completely invisible. Aramande and Rufus, the brothers, immediately set about fixing explosive charges to trees beside the road. They handled the little charges efficiently. During the journey they'd explained that they took part in occasional unlicensed logging operations in the jungle, where a lot of trees needed to be felled quickly. Nolan, the old man, had opened up the remaining four cases. They contained the kind of weapons Newby always dreamed about using against the invaders. Nolan assembled a chunky gun with quick professional motions. He called it a thunderbolt. The short barrel was eight centimeters in diameter, with a loading mechanism that looked as if it had been put together out of components from a hardware store; there was no electronic augmentation. It fired rounds as big as a fist. Nolan slapped in a bulky magazine and handed it to a delighted Newby.

"You get this because these rounds are energized explosive," Nolan said. "In other words, it doesn't matter if you're not very accurate. Which I don't believe you are. We think a direct hit from one of these will kill a Skin suit. A close hit will almost certainly damage one. So when we stop the jeeps and I give you the okay, you fire this magazine at them as fast as you can. The idea is to destroy the jeeps and kick the shit out of the Skins. Then you put in the second magazine and aim for individuals." He handed another thunderbolt to Carole. "The five of you will be shooting these at them simultaneously, and you'll have the jungle to provide cover. In those circumstances, it will be difficult for them to shoot back, but not impossible. Their sensors are good and they're backed up by an AS. They will be able to spot you. Understand? That's why you must keep the barrage going."

"What are you going to be doing?" Carole asked.

Nolan opened the last case. There was a rifle inside that had a barrel nearly a meter and a half long. Even to Newby's untutored eye it looked deadly.

The old man took it out and patted it fondly. "I'll be going for the precision strike."

Newby found himself a tree with a decent solid trunk over two meters wide. It was twenty meters from the Great Loop Highway. If he crouched down between two big buttress roots he had a clear view of the crumpled ribbon of tarmac. A pair of interface glasses kept him in touch with the others. Nolan had brought them as well as the guns. They were all linked with fiberoptic cable, which he'd unspooled across the jungle floor.

"This way we can communicate without transmitting," he'd explained. "It'll help keep our exposure to a minimum."

So now Newby waited with his legs folded uncomfortably and the dreadful humidity soaking his shirt and giving him a serious itch all over. Tixmites had found him, and were eagerly exploring this new supply of nourishment. He was swatting the tiny insects every few seconds as they gave his skin another painful bite. Now that he had time to look around properly, he could see their glistening nest mounds swaddling the tree trunks all around him.

His earlier excitement had faded. Nerves were chewing at his confidence. Shrill birdcalls made him twitch. He wanted this to be over. Twinges of cramp began to shoot down his calf muscle.

"I hear something," Russell's voice whispered in his ear.

"What?" came a chorus of whispers from the others.

"Could be them."

"Very well," Nolan said. "Now remember. Stay calm. This will be short, noisy and brutish. Do not lose track of our objective among all that. We have to support each other. That's the only way this will work."

"I won't let you down. Not me." Newby was slightly abashed to realize he'd spoken it out loud.

"I know you won't, son," Nolan said gently.

"It's them," Aramande hissed. "I see them."

"Very well. Rufus, don't leave it too late."

"Hey, man, I know what I'm doing."

Newby shifted around slightly, lifting the thunderbolt up ready. He looked along the fat barrel toward the road. Sure enough, a jeep was approaching. Headlights glared amid the gloom and shadows. There was another one just behind it He could see the Skins sitting inside. The first jeep was almost level with him when Rufus blew the tree. It was a simple enough trap. One tree down in front, blocking the road, forcing the jeeps to stop. Then a second would be blown behind them, preventing any retreat. They'd be in a killing zone, with the thunderbolts ripping them to shreds.

The brothers really did know what they were doing. The charge in the trunk blew out a huge section of wood at the base, shaped just so. There wasn't much of a flash, or noise. The tree crashed down, tearing through the hundreds of vines that knitted it to the rest of the jungle. It landed almost at right angles across the tarmac, thirty meters ahead of the first jeep.

Newby jumped to his feet, bringing the thunderbolt to bear, finger squeezing the trigger. But the first jeep wasn't even slowing. He thought he saw a couple of bright-orange flashes somewhere among the seated Skins. Two explosions detonated in the middle of the fallen tree. They were terrifyingly powerful, pulverizing a vast section of the trunk. A shrapnel cloud of deadly dagger-sized splinters erupted out of the twin fireballs, shredding the surrounding vegetation. The two surviving sections of the tree on either side of the explosion were shunted apart violently, leaving the road clear.

"Shoot!" someone yelled in Newby's ear.

He was in the act of flinching as several dozen of the fatal wood splinters scythed through the air around him, but managed to pull the thunderbolt's trigger anyway. The recoil nearly wrenched his arm off. God alone knew where the shot was aimed. He recovered and tried to take aim on the first jeep as it sped past. Explosions burst through the forest on the other side of the road. One went off on his side, about thirty meters away. The blastwave was muted by the trees, but still managed to punch him into the trunk that he was using as cover. His interface glasses were flung off. He yelled wordlessly at the pain, unable to hear himself. His ears stung, but the world had fallen completely silent.

More explosions were pounding the jungle, bright orange-and-violet light strobing weirdly. There seemed to be two different kinds, one a lot fiercer.

With his knees barely supporting him, he managed to roll his body around against the trunk until he was facing the road. A jeep was driving past. He brought the thunderbolt up again, surprised by the runnels of blood he was seeing on his hands and sleeves. The weapon wobbled as he lined it up on the speeding jeep. He pulled the trigger. An emerald laser fan swept across him. All he could see was a dazzling green haze. Then something exploded in midair halfway between him and the jeep. He was flung backward as a dreadful torrent of heat scorched into him. He could feel the skin on his cheeks and forehead shriveling. His hair smoldered as he crashed down into the sharp, prickly undergrowth.

Newby laughed, or cried. He wasn't sure which. But his lungs were juddering as his throat convulsed. His whole body was numb as shock blanked out the pain. He could see very little, just simple silhouettes. He blinked a few times as he scrabbled around feebly in the mud and broken branches. It took effort to lever himself up onto his knees. The laserblast had left huge gray mists floating across his vision. He whimpered as the numbness quickly gave way to a terrible cold gnawing deep into his flesh. Then he was shaking uncontrollably. The jeeps had gone. Several fires were burning amid the shattered trees. Smoke braids coiled around the trunks as they drifted up toward the canopy.

A dark mote streaked past his head from the direction of the road, so fast he thought it was some phantom, part of the damage the laser had wreaked on his eyes. But there was a tiny rigid contrail in the air, marking its passage.

Newby turned to see where it had gone. The contrail was curving at incredible speed, weaving fluidly around the intervening trees as it chased through 180 degrees. His brain sent a flood of nerve impulses out to his lungs and vocal cords, preparing them for a scream. They weren't fast enough.

Lawrence didn't allow them to stop until the jeeps had climbed up onto the plateau itself, and they were free of the jungle. During the last section of the climb the Great Loop Highway had gradually eroded to little more than a path through the trees. The tarmac had crumbled away from a combination of heat, water and roots. This far from Memu Bay, the budget for highway maintenance robots no longer allowed for resurfacing. The best they could do was keep the original route clear. Vehicles that traveled out here had the kind of gearing and suspension to cope with a mud track.

The jeeps had certainly managed. They'd come through the attempted ambush with several dents from chunks of flying wood, and the paintwork was scarred and scorched. But the engines and wheels were intact.

Dennis braked to a sharp halt as soon as Lawrence told him he could, tires kicking up a cloud of sandy dust.

Lawrence turned around. The sniper's bullet had caught Edmond at the base of his neck, slicing clean through the Skin carapace. There was nothing the Skin's medical program could do for him. The bullet had spun inside him, hacking through muscle, blood vessels, nerves and even shattering two of his cervical vertebrae before punching out through the back of his shoulder. There was just too much damage.

Hal's arms were flung around his friend, as they had been for the last hour. Even with half of his facial muscles impaired, his anguished expression was terrible to see.

"Dead," Hal wailed. He sucked down some air and blew it out. "Dead. Dead." Another labored inhalation. "Sarge. He. Is. Dead."

"I know, Hal. I'm sorry."

Blood had foamed out through the hole in the Skin's carapace. It'd soaked into the front of Hal's white shirt, where it was clotting into a thick paste.

Amersy, Lewis, Karl and Odel walked over from their jeep.

"Shit," Lewis muttered on the general communication link. "Now what?"

"I didn't know this was going to happen," Odel said.

"Yes, you fucking did," Karl snapped. "The sarge warned us. And we saw those bastards lurking in the woods."

"He's dead!" Odel snapped.

"So are they." Karl's voice had a satisfied edge. "Smart missiles. You know they make sense."

"Dear heaven, this shouldn't have happened." Odel turned away from the jeep, standing with his hands on his hips.

"We have to bury him," Lawrence said.

"Sarge?" Dennis asked.

"Bury him. As far as Bryant and Zhang are concerned, he's another Jones. We can't take him back with us. We can't tell them what happened."

Hal was still embracing his friend. Dennis had to prize his arms away using a hefty fraction of his Skin's strength. Hal's cries were wretched as they carried Edmond away from the jeep. His hands flailed helplessly against the seat and door, rocking the whole vehicle.

By unspoken consent they walked several hundred meters away from the track. Amersy and Odel began to scrape at the sandy soil, digging quickly. They laid the body, still in its Skin, in the bottom of the grave and filled it in.

"Anybody got any words?" Lawrence asked.

"Good-bye, mate," Karl said. "I haven't finished with KillBoy's friends yet. I'll score up a few more for you before this is over. Promise."

Amersy sighed. "Those of us who knew you thank you for the time you shared with us. You lived a good life, and that will not be forgotten. We wish you bon voyage on your last journey. May God embrace your soul."

"Amen," Dennis mumbled.

"Amen," Lawrence repeated.

"So now what?" Lewis asked as they walked back to the jeeps.

"We should be able to reach Arnoon in another five hours," Lawrence said.

"You mean keep going?" Odel asked.

"I will," Lawrence said.

"But he's dead, Sergeant. They know we're here."

"Not anymore they don't," Karl said. "They're dead too. We've earned that money, man. It belongs to us."

"If you want to go back, you can," Lawrence said. "Nobody's going to stop you, or hold it against you. I said right from the start, this is your own choice. It was Edmond's, too."

"God damn that KillBoy," Odel said. "I hope he burns in hell."

"Okay, let's get started," Lawrence said. "Dennis, I want you to look after Hal. Get him cleaned up; I think we brought some fresh shirts for him. I'll drive. Odel, you're with us; I want you integrated with the smart missile rack."

"You think they'll try again?" Lewis asked.

"Only if they're really stupid," Amersy told him.

* * *

Denise managed to keep the Scarret's speed at around the 140-kph mark as she powered through the highway villages. Her body weight swayed fluidly from side to side in perfect concert with the alignment power coupling, slicing the bike round the lumbering trucks and decrepit old vans. The combination of the Scarret's laser radar, Prime and d-written neurons proved a formidable guidance mechanism, allowing her to push the bike right out to its limit. Ramshackle buildings flashed past, reduced to a peripheral slipstream of drab colors. Her attention was focused only on the road ahead, the obstacles that snapped up. Bicycles were a pain. People were dangerous, especially the kids, who ran out into the tarmac. She lost count of how many times she hurtled past one with only a few centimeters' separation distance, leaving the child screaming in terror.

The traffic began to thin out as she closed on the border. As the gaps between vehicles stretched, she increased the power flow to the axle motors. Hunched down behind the sculpted ellipsoid of the windshield she could feel the wind blast past on either side. Tarmac was a slick blur below the fat, soft tires. Once again, human emotion had engaged. The aggressive thrill of speed pursued over the edge of safety. A predator's satisfaction at closing on its prey. And coiled deeper in the psyche, the painful hunger for a revenge that was pure vengeance.

She thundered out of a low valley to see the countryside open up ahead. The Mitchell range slid up across the horizon, standing aloof above the jungle. One by one she named each of the peaks spiking up into the pale turquoise sky. It had been months since she'd seen them, the companions of her youth. The sight of them invoked a subtle reassurance. Despite the circumstances, she was coming home. The loneliness would soon be over.

Inevitably, once the Scarret entered the jungle, she had to slow again. The tarmac was cracked, pulped gray fruit was splattered across it, water pooled in the potholes and steamed off the flatter sections. Even this bike, with all its active stabilization and compensators, had to be careful over such a treacherous surface.

Her private wish was that she'd catch up with the jeeps before the ambush, maybe even charging past to help Newby, Nolan and the other cell members. Not anymore.

When the Great Loop Highway finally narrowed enough so that the trees merged above and cut off the sunlight, she switched the headlight on. It was a strange, spooky section of road. Rather than illuminate, all the blue-white beam seemed to do was deepen the twilight murk around her. The undergrowth that fenced the tarmac was peppered with mold and slime; the leaves, deprived of light, had grown long and distorted, bleached of their healthy color. Tixmites were the only form of life here, flourishing on the decay carpet that was the jungle's floor.

The bike hummed down the center of the disintegrating highway, its superb engineering still giving her a smooth ride over the erratic surface. She switched off the laser radar in case the Skins detected it. Every enhanced sense she possessed was straining to detect them.

In the end, it wasn't difficult. Gases from the explosives lingered a long time in the still, thick air that smothered the road. Denise smelled them a minute before she reached the ambush site. She came around a slight curve and saw thick columns of sunlight pouring down through the canopy where several trees were missing. Parking legs slid out of the Scar-ret and she got off. Explosions had torn huge rents through the jungle. Shattered stumps were still smoldering. There was a shallow crater in the road itself, with the ruins of a huge tree on either side. It didn't take much to work out what had happened. The fallen tree to stop the jeeps, putting them in the killing zone. Except the Skins had blasted it aside with their own weaponry.

She knew from her Prime's snooping through Z-B's AS that the platoons had brought heavy-caliber weapons to Thallspring. But it was the first time they'd ever used them. Newton must have withdrawn them from storage without anybody knowing—just as she had with the land mines.

The notion was extremely worrying. Unless it was some huge coincidence, it must be Newton who had the rogue Prime. Which meant that he must know of the dragon. How? Had somebody told him? The same person who had also given him a Prime?

And now he was taking his platoon up to the plateau on a freelance mission. There could really only be one reason.

Denise scouted around the immediate vicinity of the ambush, trying to find out what had happened to the cell members. She had a vague hope that they might be able to help fill in some details. Then she saw a toppled tree that was splashed in scarlet fluid. Tixmites were swarming over it. They were also falling off as fast as they arrived; hundreds were lying underneath, dead. She walked closer to investigate. Her foot slipped on a lump of something with the consistency of tough jelly. She looked down and winced.

The cell members wouldn't be able to tell her anything after all.

She hurried back to the bike. Her ring pearl used the domestic relay satellite to place a call to Arnoon. The call routing was guarded by Prime and heavily encrypted. Even so, there was a tiny risk of interception, but she had to take it "Denise!" Jacintha exclaimed. "Why the encryption? Have you heard something about Josep? We're all so worried."

"We've got a bigger problem than that, I'm afraid."

The Great Loop Highway was now just a rather feeble joke. The transponder posts were missing. The maintenance robots hadn't cleared the vegetation for years. The highway was nothing more than two uneven tire ruts in the ground, gouged out by the few trucks and pickups that still drove across the plateau. And they weren't even following the original path anymore. As puddles and holes grew bigger, the drivers had swerved around to avoid them. These curves would create new holes, and the next swerve would be wider.

Lawrence was constantly turning the wheel to follow the meandering track as it snaked around unseen obstacles. There were no puddles today; it hadn't rained on this part of the plateau for some time. His jeep was throwing up a smog of powdery dust as it bounced along the ruts. The stuff got everywhere. Hal had to wear one of the paper masks from the medical kit. Skin gills had to flush the gritty particles out of their filter membranes.

Lawrence was constantly referring to his inertial guidance display to confirm they were still heading roughly in the right direction. There was no other way of knowing. The map file of the plateau was the same as they'd had last time, without a single update. It still showed the Great Loop Highway running straight and true between the hinterland settlements.

When they approached Rhapsody Province he even thought the map was glitching. There was no sign of the bauxite-mining operation. It took him a while to realize that the conical hillocks ahead of them were actually the old slag heaps, a little bit taller now and covered in baby crown reeds and stringy weeds. The vegetation had a distinct lemon tinge, as if the plants were jaundiced.

"I wonder if they've shut the mine down altogether," he said.

"Can't see much happening here," Dennis said. "Maybe they've moved on."

"At least that explains why the road's in such a crappy state these days."

They drove on past the base of the first few slag piles, then turned in among them. Somewhere up ahead was Dixon. Lawrence didn't really want to go there, but that was where the road led. For all their ruggedness, the jeeps wouldn't be able to cross the raw terrain of the plateau.

"Somebody behind us, Sarge," Lewis announced. "Moving fast."

Lawrence expanded Lewis's telemetry grid and called up his visual sensor. Sure enough, a small plume of dust was racing across the plateau. It was too far away for the sensors to gain a clear picture of what it was. But it was certainly traveling a lot faster than the jeeps had managed along the same stretch of road.

"Keep tracking them," Lawrence said. "No active sensors. But I want to know when you can make them out properly."

"No problem, Sarge."

Dixon was still there. Most of it. The first thing Lawrence saw was that all but one of the huge maintenance sheds were gone. Its doors were open, showing a single excavator processor standing inside. Concrete oblongs marked where the other sheds had stood, gradually succumbing to the slow incursion of windswept soil. One of them was now a parking lot for a couple of articulated trucks. A further two were covered with small piles of aluminum ingots; there weren't enough to fill even one of the trucks.

The houses remained, though the majority had sheets of bleached plywood fixed over their windows. The grainy dust lay thick on every ridge. Lawrence noticed that all the air-conditioning cabinets had been removed, leaving empty metal brackets on the walls.

He looked over to the hexagonal building outside town that housed the fusion plant. The web of red power cables that used to radiate away from it had been taken down; now there was just a solitary line of pylons carrying a lone cable across the countryside. When he switched to infrared, the walls and roof glowed a light coral pink in comparison to the dull vermilion of the surrounding land.

"They have power," he said.

"Anybody home?" Dennis asked. He was too edgy to make it entirely jovial.

"There has to be somebody," Odel said. "They're still working here. The lights in the shed are on."

"They must have seen us coming," Karl said. "They'll be hiding out there somewhere."

"How did they know it was us?" Amersy said. "We didn't announce we were visiting."

Lawrence's jeep had reached the first houses. He nudged it forward along the main street, sensors sweeping for any sign of movement. "I don't care where they are as long as they're not in our way. Keep going."

"Sergeant!" Odel called. "Airborne. Incoming."

Odel's telemetry grid expanded across Lawrence's vision. Tracking data scrolled down. Three kilometers west, five hundred meters' altitude, holding level at four hundred kilometers per hour. One meter long. No known match found in the armory file.

"What the fuck is that?" he murmured. His own AS had acquired it: there was hardly any infrared signature, and no electromagnetic emission at all.

"It's a goddamn recon drone," Lewis said. "They're hunting us."

Who? Lawrence wondered. Somehow it didn't seem like the kind of thing that KillBoy would use. It must be Arnoon Province. They had the money and the technology to guard their territory. Despite the alarm at such a thing being deployed against them, he felt happy. I was right about them.

"More like a smart cruise," Dennis was saying.

"Amersy, double time," Lawrence said. "Let's get out of here. Odel, use a smart, shoot it down."

"Yes, sir!"

Lawrence accelerated: the main street was the best piece of road since before the ambush; the jeep made a hundred kilometers an hour along it without any trouble. He saw Amersy keeping up with him. A single pulse of bright-orange flame squirted out from the smart missile rack Odel was carrying. His sensors tracked the little missile as it flashed into the sky, arcing around to line up on the unidentified drone or whatever the hell it was.

He pushed the jeep harder, racing across the central square. His display grid flashed a huge silent warning. His Skin was being struck by an incredibly powerful em pulse. Even though all its electronics were ultrahardened, the brutal power of the energy wave had already overloaded several neurotronic pearls. Noncritical internal functions began to close down.

The jeep died on him. Every electrical system simply stopped working simultaneously. The dashboard display didn't even flicker before it blanked out. They were almost across the square, with the main street just to the right. He turned the wheel, but it was sluggish without the power steering. His foot kicked down on the brake. Tires skidded on the loose sandy soil.

Their right fender clipped the building on the corner of the main street. The hood smashed through the wall, shattering composite paneling into a shoal of fluttering fragments. Then the right front wheel struck one of the concrete foundation piers. Lawrence was slammed into the steering wheel, which broke instantly. His beleaguered Skin AS didn't harden the carapace fast enough. The steering wheel's blunt column stabbed straight through his Skin, puncturing his flesh just below the rib cage on his left side.

Odel was catapulted out of his seat and straight through the windshield. He plowed into the hulk of the building, his inertia breaking several more panel sections. Hal's safety straps held on to him as he was flung forward, then reeled him back into the seat. He flopped there limply, his eyelids flickering. Dots of blood began to stain his fresh shirt, seeping out from around the medical modules. Dennis was slung out sideways, his Skin locked solid as he whirled across the road.

Amersy saw what was happening to the jeep in front and yanked the steering wheel around hard. The brake seemed to have virtually no effect on their speed. He saw the other jeep crash into the building, its rear end lifting from the ground as it struck the pier. His steering wheel was already in full lock; he couldn't twist it any farther. They missed the other jeep by less than half a meter. By then they were almost at right angles to the street. Amersy tried to reverse the lock. He could feel the tires skidding. They hit something big in the middle of the road. Momentum rolled the jeep. There was a single bar to protect the occupants. It almost worked. From Amersy's point of view the horizon tilted fast, turning the ground into the sky. It descended onto his helmet. His Skin carapace hardened just in time to protect him from the lethal blow. Then the world rotated again. And again.

Lewis tumbled out of the rolling jeep when it was on its second spin. His Skin had turned rigid, holding him in a spread-eagle pose as he slithered across the dirt road to crash into a building's foundation pier. Despite the Skin's protection the impact stunned him. The Skin released him from its grip, and he collapsed back onto the ground. When he lifted his head he saw the jeep had finally halted, its wheels in the air. The roll-guard bar had buckled, trapping Amersy and Karl underneath. He clambered to his feet and staggered over.

Amersy's upper torso was protruding from the wrecked jeep. He was trying to crawl out, but the chassis had his legs pinned. Lewis gripped the side of the jeep, braced himself and lifted. The jeep creaked as it rose half a meter. Amersy wriggled free.

"Thanks," Amersy said.

"What the hell hit us?"

"I think it was some kind of e-bomb. It blew every circuit in the jeep. Even my Skin's electronics suffered."

"Shit. Where the hell did KillBoy get an e-bomb from?"

"God knows." Amersy looked back at the first jeep. "Sarge?"

"I'm here."

"You need help?"

"Don't think so. How are your guys?"

Amersy saw blood spreading out from underneath the back of the jeep. "Jesus! Karl? Karl, can you hear me?" He checked Karl's telemetry grid, which was almost blank. The Skin suit still had some functions, and there was a heartbeat. But that was about all he could tell.

Both of them dropped to their knees and peered into the gap. Karl's Skin had been split open by ragged twists of metal that had peeled back from the bodywork. Several of them were still impaling him.

Amersy used his speaker. "Hang on, Karl, we'll have you out of there right away."

"We'll have to turn it right over," Lewis said.

"Shouldn't be a problem." They took hold of the jeep. "Ready?" Amersy said. "Okay, lift." The jeep began to emit labored metallic screeches as they slowly tipped it up. One of Lewis's hands slipped, and the vehicle sagged back a few centimeters.

"Hell," Lewis grunted as he found another hold. "The tank's split, this thing is dripping in hihydrogen."

"Great."

They had almost got it on its side when Amersy's sensors detected the little projectile. An intense blue-white spark hit the jeep. The hihydrogen ignited immediately, enveloping the entire vehicle. Amersy and Lewis let go, sending it crashing back down.

"Down!" Amersy ordered. He was already flinging himself flat.

The fuel tank exploded.

Lawrence was unconscious for an unknown time. When the pain pulled him back he guessed it couldn't have been long. Dust was still swirling round the wreck. Amersy called him, and he said he was okay, though he was lying. The end of the steering column was still jutting into his side. The Skin's medical program was scrolling up information: the damaged tissue, chipped pelvic girdle, the suppressants it was pumping into his blood. He placed both hands flat on the dashboard and pushed. His body moved back, sliding off the steering column.

Even with the drugs, Lawrence wailed at the pain as it withdrew. Then his Skin muscles were realigning themselves, sealing up the wound. The suit's internal layer discharged antiseptic, anesthetic and clotting agents into the tear. The whole area turned blissfully cold.

He turned around to see what had happened to Hal. "Oh, sweet Fate." The kid was sitting against his safety straps, head hung forward. All of his medical modules had been burned out by the e-bomb. Lawrence's Skin AS couldn't get a response from any of them. Small patches of blood were staining the kid's shirt where the jolt of their impact had dislodged modules.

"Sergeant?" Odel limped out of the house. There was something wrong with the shape of one leg. "Are you okay?"

"Sure." He levered himself out of the driver's seat. "You?"

"Not a problem."

"Good, let's get Hal out."

"Where's Dennis?"

Lawrence looked around. There was a Skin suit lying in the middle of the street, badly mangled. The second jeep must have hit it full on. "Shit!" Dennis's telemetry grid was flatlined.

Don't grieve for the newly dead—they never thank you. Secure the platoon. Lawrence could hear Ntoko growling it out.

He released Hal's safety straps and lifted the kid out of the rear seat. "Bring the medical kit," he told Odel.

An explosion rocked the street. Lawrence saw a fireball burst out of the second jeep as the wreckage levitated off the ground.

"Amersy, get to cover. We've been ambushed. Seek and destroy."

"Roger that."

The two Skins lying flat on the ground beside the blazing jeep scrambled to their feet and sprinted for the nearby houses.

Lawrence wrapped one arm around Hal, lifting him gingerly, then reached down into the passenger seat for the smart missile rack. He stepped into the house through the demolished wall.

The room inside was empty. He kicked the door open and went through into a dark hallway. There were six identical doors and a stairway. He hurried down to the far end and kicked the last door open. It was another empty room. Tiny cracks of light leaked around the boarded-up window. He eased Hal down in a comer.

Odel put the medical kit down and snapped the top open. "Have we got anything that'll help?"

"I don't know." Lawrence picked out a diagnostic probe and switched it on. He was relieved when the small display pane lit up. The em pulse hadn't damaged electronics that were off at the time of the attack. Data began to flow into his AS.

There was the sound of a carbine firing in the distance. "Odel, go help them."

"You bet."

"Hey, be careful out there. These bastards look like they know what they're doing."

"So do I."

Amersy ran along an alleyway leading off the main street. There wasn't a lot of cover. The prefab houses were spaced a regulation twenty meters apart. The grid of streets almost allowed him to see from one side of town to the other. It also gave the ambushers the same field of vision. And he didn't know where they were.

Lewis had ducked away at the second house, heading off down a side street. Amersy raced on for a little while, then took a turning. He called up the Dixon map file, inertial guidance plotting his position. The Skin AS gave him a rough estimate of where the little projectile had come from. His link with Lewis gave him the other man's location, plotting that on the map as well.

"Lewis, we need to pincer them. You getting this tactical data?"

"It's online, Corp."

"Keep going straight on for a hundred and twenty meters. I'll be three streets to your left. They should be between us."

"Roger."

Lewis jogged along the route Amersy's AS had provided. His carbine slid out of its arm recess. When he got to the intersection he stopped and peered around the corner. There was a flash of motion two houses down. His AS replayed the image. It was a woman in her mid-twenties, dressed in jeans and a yellow T-shirt. She was carrying some kind of pearl-white cylinder in her left hand. The AS couldn't match it to any weapon in its catalogue file.

He switched carbine rounds to depleted-uranium and fired straight through the wall. The composite paneling in front of him disintegrated as the high-penetration rounds went straight through. Nothing in the houses was solid enough to stop one. His Skin AS gave him a spread pattern that had a high strike probability. He stopped firing and started to run to the corner where the woman had disappeared.

"Got a hostile, Corp. In pursuit."

"Roger that. Did you get them?"

Lewis reached the end of the street and jumped. It was a trajectory no hostile would be expecting. He flew past the end house, a meter and a half in the air. Carbine pointing down the street, sensors sweeping. There were puncture holes in the houses left by the depleted-uranium rounds, three foundation piers had shattered, but no body. His feet hit the ground and he was still running. He dashed behind a house and crouched beside a foundation pier.

"Shit, I missed, Corp."

"Okay. Let's close in, they're here somewhere."

Lewis got to his feet and turned down the street toward the corporal. He'd gone maybe ten paces when his neat display grid dissolved into a jazz of indigo lightning bolts. "What the hell...? Jesus, not now." His Skin's neurotronic pearls must have taken a bigger hit from the em pulse than he'd thought. He waited for the e-alpha fortress to reboot the crashed software. Instead the indigo swarm evaporated, leaving him without any data at all. "Son of a bitch."

He'd almost come to a halt when the woman stepped out from behind a house twenty meters ahead. She just stood there, watching him.

Lewis snarled, bringing the carbine up. Even without targeting graphics he could hit a pebble at this distance. The carbine didn't fire. He squeezed his trigger finger twice, three times, an impulse that was linked directly to the weapon. Nothing.

He started to run toward her. If she was counting on him not using brute force against a woman, she was about to find out the hard way just how big a mistake she'd made.

All of a sudden his legs weren't making any progress. It was as if he were wading through thigh-high mud. In dismay he realized his Skin muscles had stopped supporting him. His ordinary leg muscles were having to move the entire Skin suit.

"Corp!" he yelled, hoping his speaker was still functioning. "Corp, the fucking Skin's crashed. Corp!"

It became impossible to move. The Skin muscles had solidified, entombing him. He toppled over. For whatever reason, his visual sensors remained online. The side of his vision field showed him the woman walking toward him at a leisurely pace. She stopped beside him, the toes of her worn sneakers almost touching his shoulder.

Lewis was having to suck every scrap of air down into his lungs. The fail-safes! What had happened to the fail-safes? He wanted to shout up at the woman to help him, to open the Skin suit. But there was no air.

The woman leaned over slightly, as if she were studying him. Then she held a hand out above his helmet, fingers spread wide. She slowly closed the hand, fingers curling in to make a fist.

Lewis felt the Skin muscles flex. For an instant he believed the e-alpha was finally rebooting the entire suit. Then the Skin muscles began their contraction. He found enough air to scream as his ribs cracked. The last thing he saw was the hand above him squeezing tight.

Lawrence's AS had come up with very little to help Hal. What the kid needed was a whole new set of medical modules. Some of the ones he was using were so specialist that Lawrence wasn't even sure Memu Bay had replacements. All they had in the kit was field-aid systems and capsules of the drugs that the organ support modules used.

The diagnostic was showing abnormal blood chemistry. Lawrence's AS produced a list of drugs to combat the condition. But he didn't know if that blood chemistry was wrong given Hal's state. In the end he settled for injecting small doses.

Hal groaned, his head moving slowly from side to side.

Lewis dropped out of Lawrence's telemetry grid. "Amersy, what the hell's happening out there?"

"He's gone. I don't know what..."

Amersy's voice faded. His telemetry grid was breaking up. Then a warning Lawrence had never seen before flashed up. It took him a moment to recognize the symbols. His Prime was expanding into the Skin's neurotronic pearls, replacing the standard AS program.

"Amersy, Odel, listen to me. Your Skins are being infiltrated with a very powerful subversive software. Close down and reboot. Do not use the communications links again. They've been compromised. Repeat, don't use the communications links."

Odel's telemetry vanished.

"Oh, sweet Fate." He requested a status summary from Prime and read the indigo data as it scrolled. Prime had immediately blocked the attempt to infiltrate his own Skin. The ambushers had tried to use their own Prime to subvert his AS. In which case, he decided, the ambushers had to be from Arnoon Province. They must have bought their Prime when they were on Earth—not that it mattered now.

He could hear a carbine firing again. If they could intercept the Skin communications link, they'd have his position down to a millimeter. He snatched up the smart missile rack and plugged its data cable into a port on his Skin. Prime entered the missiles.

Lawrence stood up. Prime was displaying maps with tactical scenario overlays. Just as he turned to leave, Hal groaned again. Lawrence gritted his teeth.

Amersy did exactly as Lawrence ordered, shutting down his entire Skin immediately. For a wretched moment he was locked solid in airless dark. He hated how vulnerable he must be, a big figure standing motionless in the middle of the open street. Then the AS began its reboot. Sensors came back online.

This whole mission was going too wrong, too quickly. Whatever the Arnoon ambushers had, it was an easy match for Skin. Amersy knew Lawrence had seriously underestimated them. The remains of the platoon were never going to reach their pot of gold now; all those lazy dreams of coming down from the plateau with enough money to buy out were dead. Survival was all that mattered.

As soon as he got limb movement back he ran at the nearest house, shattering the door as he went straight through. When he was inside he ordered the Skin to open. He started instructing the AS as he wriggled out.

Denise was doing nearly a hundred kph when she charged past Dixon's outlying buildings.

"Amersy's stopped transmitting," Jacintha said. "Gangel, see if he's still active."

"I've got Odel's last position," Denise said. "I'll take him."

"Be careful," Jacintha said. "We know the Prime hadn't infiltrated his Skin. Damn, Newton's good."

"Don't we know it."

"Eren, help Denise out, please."

"I'm thirty seconds away," Eren assured them.

Denise slowed the Scarret and skirted the main square. Odel could be down any one of half a dozen side streets. Fortunately, a Skin was easy enough for her to spot: its heat signature left a trail in the sandy soil that was as strong as a neon sign. She sensed Eren walking down a street parallel to hers. Seventy meters ahead, hot footprints glowed on the ground. They led into one of the houses. Its front door swung loosely on its hinges.

"Got him," Denise said. She slowed the bike to walking pace and closed on the house.

Carbine fire echoed over the deserted town.

"Amersy is still with us," Jacintha said dryly. "Those were depleted-uranium rounds. Careful, everyone."

Denise halted ten meters from the house. Eren appeared from an intersection opposite. He gave her a small wave.

"Cover the other side," she told him. "A Skin can walk through these walls like they're paper."

"Right." Eren jogged away to the back of the house.

Denise took the electron cluster pistol from her bag. The little unit melded snugly into her palm, giving her an aim alignment that was pure instinct.

More carbine fire sounded as Jacintha and Gangel started a running firefight five streets away. Ragged holes were punched clean through a house twenty meters behind Denise. Jacintha and Gangel shot back with e-c barbs. Sheets of flame roared into the sky as composite walls ignited.

"Ready," Eren said.

Denise swung a leg over the bike and stood facing the front door as it swung about in the slight gusts. This is wrong, she thought, it's too easy. Odel is a properly trained soldier. He won't allow himself to be cornered like this. She looked up at the house's roof.

The solar collector panels were hot from the sun. Infrared was useless. Then she saw scuff marks in the patina of ocher dust.

Denise spun around, her e-c pistol coming up. She was firing as she turned. Tiny sparks of light spurted out of the nozzle, twinkling as they shot away into the sky. Then one of them struck the Skin lying prone on the roof. It punched the bulky suit a couple of meters across the smooth solar collectors, ripping off a segment of the carapace. Two more e-c pulses hit, tearing the Skin apart.

Eren came round the side of the building. "Denise? What happened?"

"He jumped to another house. It was an ambush."

"Hell. Well done."

Carbine fire sounded again. Depleted-uranium rounds tore into the house, shredding huge sections of the paneling. A foundation pier burst apart in a wicked shrapnel cloud of concrete chips. Denise and Eren hit the ground together.

"Crap, I hate those carbines," Eren shouted as he lifted his head.

Denise risked looking back to where Amersy had fired from. "They never used depleted-uranium down in Memu Bay."

Eren grunted. "I wonder why."

Another house ignited from a deluge of e-c barbs. Carbine fire crackled again; buildings shivered and rocked as the rounds chopped through.

"Gangel, he's on your left," Jacintha cried. "Denise, we could use some help."

"On our way."

Eren gave her a reluctant grimace and started running. Denise paced him as they closed on her sister's position.

"He's under a house," Gangel said. "Damn, moving again."

A stream of e-c barbs poured out of an intersection ahead of Denise. She flinched. Carbine fire answered. Denise hit the ground again. Twenty meters away, a solar collector roof ruptured; black, glittering fragments rained down on the street.

"What was he shooting at?" Jacintha asked.

"Who cares?" Gangel said. "He can't have much ammunition left, not at this rate."

More depleted-uranium hammered through five houses. The last one sagged and slowly collapsed inward as its piers disintegrated. Denise had been ready to run forward again. Instead she buried her head in the ground.

"Shit!" Jacintha exclaimed. "He's got us pinned down."

"This is seriously crap tactics," Eren said in alarm. "If Newton comes up behind us, we're dead."

"They can't communicate," Denise told him. She wished she had more confidence. The platoon had worked together for years, decades even. And they were trained soldiers. If anybody could manage without a direct link, it would be Newton and Amersy.

The carbine fired. Her link with the Scarret went dead. "Shit!" She was aware of Jacintha hurrying forward again. Gangel started sprinting from the opposite direction. They were pouring e-c barbs into the house where Amersy was hidden. Denise began to race forward, holding her e-c pistol ahead, sending out a constant barrage of barbs. The house was an inferno, huge, violent flames roaring almost horizontally out of the shattered windows. Its solar collector roof was twisting and flexing as the heat lashed at it. Then flames were stabbing victoriously through the gullies as it juddered and began to sink down.

Another burst of carbine fire came from inside. Even as she flinched down yet again, Denise marveled at how the corporal could keep so cool in this situation. Skin suits might be heat resistant, but to stand at the heart of an inferno surrounded by enemies and still maintain a devastating fire pattern was enviable.

One of the walls collapsed amid a huge fireball. A Skin tumbled through the gap. It was hit by e-c barbs from three directions, bursting apart.

Denise squinted against the glare and fierce heat. There was something badly wrong about the way the Skin had ruptured. Jacintha must have thought the same. She was approaching the remnants, cautious yet urgent, covering it with her pistol.

The solar collector roof finally fell to the floor, throwing out a cascade of sparks. Jacintha raised one hand to ward them off. She bent over the tattered Skin. "Shit!" She was looking around wildly.

"What?" Denise asked. She was closing in, along with Gangel and Eren.

"It's empty. The bastard wasn't in it!"

Denise was suddenly swinging round, her heart thudding in fright as she attempted to cover half the town with her pistol.

Amersy crouched behind a foundation pier, watching intently as the young woman and her companion started running toward the firefight. His Skin AS was firing the carbine in random bursts, maintaining a suppressing-fire pattern. The two ambushers flung themselves flat. He grinned as he scuttled over to the shiny Scarret. Damn dumb amateurs, weren't even checking their asses. He used a power blade to slice through the dashboard, then waited until another carbine burst sounded before jabbing the tip straight into the electronics. He cut through the neurotronic pearls and fiberoptics that were connected to the compensators and brakes. Without AS management (or whatever program was loaded in) the bike would be sluggish. But he could accelerate, brake and steer manually. It was enough to get him back to Memu Bay. That would have to do.

He slung a leg over the saddle and twisted the throttle.

Five houses were on fire around the empty Skin suit, their composite panels hissing and melting as flames licked around them, exposing the steel skeleton. Thick black smoke billowed high into the plateau's calm air.

Still watching the empty streets, Denise went over and hugged her big sister. "I missed you," she whispered.

"We're together now. Everything will be all right"

"I hope so. We're making a complete mess of this."

"He's naked and alone, he won't get far."

"On my bike, he'll get clean away." She couldn't believe she'd been so stupid.

"It doesn't make any difference. He's not a part of Z-B anymore. They won't be sending in the cavalry. Not on this one."

"Okay. That just leaves us with Newton to deal with."

"And the other one."

Denise gave her a surprised look. "What other one?"

"There were four of them in the lead jeep. One of them was in normal clothes."

"Did you see who it was? There's nobody in the platoon left."

"I don't know."

"It could be our traitor."

Jacintha stroked Denise's cheek. "I don't think there is one."

"There has to be! Newton has Prime."

"Our dragon isn't unique," Jacintha chided gently.

"But..."

"Come on, we need to finish this."

The four of them split into pairs to approach the crashed jeep, closing on it from opposite sides.

"Newton was in there when he detected our Prime infiltration," Gangel said. "And that diagnostic probe is still transmitting. Whoever the fourth man is, he's in a bad way."

"Do you think Newton is still in there?" Jacintha asked.

She and Denise were crouched at the corner of the next house along the main street. When Denise inched around the foundation pier she could see the battered rear end of the jeep sticking out of the house. Nothing moved. Heat traces around the jeep were confused and fading. "I doubt it But he can't have got far."

"Okay. Eren, any heat traces on your side?"

"Nothing."

"Stand by. We're going in."

"I'm going in," Denise said. "You cover me."

She scurried along the front of the house, keeping flat against the wall. Her breathing had quickened, the rasping loud in her ears. Heat was flooding out of the jeep, its axle motors gleaming crimson, power cells casting a vermilion glow underneath the chassis. The smashed-up wall was crisscrossed with hot ruby lines where the material had bent and cracked. Denise eased herself through the gap at the side of the jeep, her pistol sweeping across the room. There were thermal tracks all over the floor, leading to the door. Jacintha climbed up behind her and nodded.

Denise flipped around the open door, into the hallway. It was empty. The door at the far end was open a couple of centimeters. She didn't even need infrared. The dust showed two sets of Skin bootprints going straight to it. Only one came out.

Her bracelet pearl pinpointed the diagnostic card broadcasting from inside. The fourth man was definitely in there. Beads of perspiration were building up on her face. It was no good creeping along the hall: the Skin carbines could shoot through walls as if they were fog. She sucked down a breath and sprinted down the hall, bursting through the door. Shock froze her.

Jacintha followed her sister into the end room and nearly knocked into her. Denise was standing rigid in the middle of the room, pistol pointing at the figure slumped in the corner.

"You're dead," Denise croaked. She was aiming at Hal Grabowski's head. The same Hal Grabowski who had faced a firing squad and died. Now here he was again, all by himself in an abandoned house in Dixon. Her pistol arm shivered slightly.

"Who the hell's that?" Jacintha asked.

"Hal Grabowski."

"You mean the Hal Grabowski that you set up in Memu Bay? The one Z-B executed?"

"Yes," Denise snapped. She straightened her arm, ready to shoot. She couldn't do it, not an unconscious man. Then she noticed the writing on the wall beside him.

HELP HIM I WILL KNOW

The diagnostic probe was resting against Hal's abdomen, still transmitting. Denise looked from that to the big medical kit box.

Gangel and Eren slipped into the room.

"Where's Newton?" Eren asked. "And... hey, isn't that Grabowski?"

Denise flashed him an exasperated glance and finally lowered her pistol. Gangel went over to the window. The frame was open. When he pushed at the plywood sheet nailed up outside, it swung out. "Looks like Newton left."

"So what about him?" Eren asked, pointing at Grabowski.

"He's Newton's problem," Denise said.

An explosion went off somewhere in the town.

Gangel was squinting through the gap at the side of the plywood. "That was a smart missile. He just took out the general store building. What the hell did he do that for?"

Denise looked at Hal again. She understood the message now. "He's not asking."

"What?" Jacintha asked.

"Newton wouldn't abandon an injured comrade. He's not asking us pretty please to help Grabowski. He's telling us."

There was a huge explosion outside. The house on the other side of the main street blew apart, fragments of composite panels and solar collectors whirling through the air to rain down over a wide area. Dust and smoke surged up out of the crater, spreading out in a miniature mushroom cloud.

The blast shook the room. Denise ducked in reflex. The glass in the window frame cracked, and the plywood sheet whirled away, allowing sunlight to blaze in. She saw the diagnostic probe had fallen off Grabowski and scrambled over the floor to grab it. She slapped it down on Grabowski's stomach; the display pane began to register his vital signs again. "All right! We'll do it."

Jacintha stared at her. "Do what?"

"Newton's out there with a rack of smart missiles—which he's probably loaded with Prime. He'll keep firing them over Dixon until he runs out. If we go outside, the seeker head will spot us and... that's it. Even we can't deflect one of them. The only place we're safe, the only coordinate he'll never target, is here with Grabowski. And if we don't keep Grabowski alive, guess which house the next missile will take out."

"Sneaky bastard," Gangel said with bemused admiration.

"You said it," Denise grunted.

They all winced as another missile detonated. The flash was close to the maintenance shed. Smoke began to rise over the rooftops.

"He's not kidding, is he?" Jacintha said. She knelt beside Grabowski and lifted his shirt up. "We'd better get to work." She took a dragon-extruded analyzer unit out of her pocket, placing it over one of Hal's defunct medical organ modules. The little plastic rectangle softened and began to mold itself round the module.

"What range have those missiles got?" Eren asked.

"Three kilometers," Denise told him.

"That's not too far. We know he was injured. We can catch him."

"We won't know what direction he took. All he has to do is leave the rack two kilometers away and program it to keep launching at regular intervals. He could be ten or more kilometers away before this barrage stops."

"Shit!" Eren glared at Grabowski. "Once those missiles run out, so does your luck."

"Does it?" Denise gave Eren a quizzical look. "After we spend a couple of hours caring for him, you're just going to kill him, are you?"

Eren banged a fist into the door frame. "No. Guess not."

"We should call the village," Gangel said. "They can send a team out here. With enough support we can tackle Newton."

"No," Denise said. "That's too much exposure. Besides, I know which road Newton's on."

Lawrence was on the edge of town when he saw the bike charge along the Great Loop Highway, about five hundred meters away. Helmet sensors zoomed in. It was being ridden by a naked man whose skin was smeared in pale blue gel.

The bike stopped and the man looked at him. It was Amersy. He raised his fist and punched the air twice.

Lawrence laughed as he gave an answering punch. His rack fired another smart missile back into the town.

Amersy paused a moment, then turned the throttle, accelerating fast along the road.

Lawrence left the rack fifteen hundred meters outside Dixon. He was in the middle of the slag heaps, so he could push it down into the black grainy soil easily enough. Once he satisfied himself it was secure, he departed at a steady jog. The smart missiles would fire at random intervals. Each was targeted on a different house, with the seeker head programmed to watch for human bodies moving along the streets. If it located one, it would divert from the primary target and go after the body.

With the rack's data cable disconnected, he had only one telemetry grid left now: Hal's diagnostic readout. Judging by the way his vital signs had stabilized over the last ten minutes the Arnoon people had worked out their side of the deal. His only worry now was whether they'd keep treating the kid after the missiles ran out.

Sorry, Hal, but what else could I do?

Trying to carry Hal out of the ambush was impossible. They wouldn't have gotten ten meters before those strange weapons cut them down. He'd been puzzled by the little dazzling bullets of light that the ambushers were firing. Once again there was no match in his armaments catalogue file. And not just the model, either, the nature of them was a mystery, too. His one clue was the intense magnetic signature that his sensors had recorded as he'd slipped away. He hadn't stopped to try to get a second reading.

Lawrence increased his pace. There were enough missiles left to last seventy minutes, although that did leave some long gaps between a few launches. But it should allow him to put about twenty kilometers between himself and Dixon if he stuck to a reasonably straight line.

He called up the plateau map file as he ran. After Dixon, the Great Loop Highway carried on in a wide curve through the Mitchell peaks, passing through Arnoon Province almost at its apex. He began to plot out a direct course to the crater lake. There was one river cutting across his path, which he'd be able to cross easily enough in Skin. The only real problem was that taking this route put Mount Kenzi directly in the way. He expanded the foothills to try to find a passage around the side.

The slag heaps soon gave way to the plateau's wilderness of crown reeds and the occasional giant tree. He had to slow slightly to go around the crown reeds. Each mature clump varied from two to three meters high. The fat, succulent leaves with their serrated razor edges weren't able to cut his Skin, but he certainly couldn't push through them. The ground underfoot was a thin, brown soil threaded with a low scrub plant that had slim woody stems and tiny saffron flowers.

At twenty minutes he lost the signal from Hal's diagnostic. The little probe was never intended for long-range broadcasts. The last reading showed the kid was recovering well. Lawrence didn't know what the ambushers were doing, but they were making a lot better use of the aid kit than he had.

As he drew away from the slag heaps of Rhapsody Province the land began to grow more uneven. The slopes he crossed were long and gentle, each one a little higher than the last. His inertial guidance told him he was steadily gaining altitude. Crown reeds gradually shrank away to be replaced by small wiry bushes, their bark a dull russet color. Boulders lurked among them, half-buried lumps of hard, dusky rock.

After an hour he had to slow again. The wound left by the steering column had begun to ache despite the local anesthetics. It was similar to having a stitch, but just above his hip. The Prime reported he was bleeding. Clotting agents weren't able to cope with the constant stresses of running. When he looked down he could see blood dribbling out of the puncture hole in the carapace. He told the Prime to readjust the Skin muscles to reseal the wound. More clotting agents were discharged.

He gave it a minute for everything to take effect, then started off again. Mount Kenzi didn't seem any closer, just bigger. A raft of fat clouds obscured its pinnacle. Wind was bringing them in from the east. The sun was already lost behind them, shading the plateau in a dreary penumbra light.

Thin trailers of fog began to slide past him. The brittle bushes were glistening with moisture, even though it wasn't raining. Ahead of him the ground curved up until it met the clouds. Cataracts of mist flowed out of it, sluicing down along the narrow, stony gorges that wove chaotically across the land. He jogged on as the ridges steepened and the scraps of destitute vegetation became less populous. The external temperature was dropping considerably as the mist thickened. Lawrence was hot inside his Skin; he could feel himself sweating. He was taking constant sips on his water nipple; the inside of his mouth was parched.

The mist closed around him, reducing visibility to less than twenty meters. He kept going for another hour, then sat down on a frosted boulder. A chest pouch opened up and he took out one of the three spare bloodpaks he was carrying. Its nozzle clicked into the Skin's umbilical socket, and the internal reserve bladders sucked the fluid in.

Blood was oozing out of the wound again. His leg was slick with runnels of the sticky liquid. The Skin sealed itself once again and dosed him with antiseptic and clotting agent. His display showed him that the suit muscles around the puncture were starting to degrade. They were losing as much blood as the wound.

As he rested, his own muscles began a mild ache. He'd been on the go for four hours now. His side around the wound was numb, with the surrounding flesh tingling slightly from the drugs. He was sure he could feel blood trickling down the inside of his leg, which might be a problem later on. There was no way of draining it out short of removing the whole Skin. Without a medical kit to treat the wound immediately, he wasn't about to do that.

When he stood up, a rush of dizziness almost made his legs buckle. He swayed about for a moment until the Skin muscles tightened and held him upright. His head slowly cleared and he took a big suck on his water.

He started off walking, then slowly broke into a trot. In his mind he could hear his left leg squelching inside the Skin every time his foot hit the ground. The light was beginning to fade, hastened by the cloying mist. This region of the plateau was almost barren. It comprised long stretches of sloping land that ended in ridges that were almost as steep as cliffs. Every time, he would have to scramble and claw his way up through the boulders and scree falls. Stubby toe claws extended from the Skin to give him extra grip over the slippery dripping rock.

Night had fallen half an hour before he reached the ridge that would take him up onto the saddle plain. Mount Kenzi was on his left, with Mount Henkin to the right. He stopped at the base of the rock barrier and took out the second bloodpak. His Skin guzzled it down greedily. While he was waiting, the last fringes of the mist retreated down the slope. There were no stars visible. The sky above was cloaked in dark cloud, its turbulent underbelly swelling and surging as it was provoked by conflicting air currents surging off the mountains. But there was enough light for him to see the ridge. He'd negotiated the last one with laser radar as his only way of seeing what lay ahead. Here, there were broad stripes of white rock zigzagging down through the ridge, almost like a giant's steps. He studied them, trying to concentrate on finding an easy route up.

Indigo icons slipped over his vision. Medical symbology cautioned him on the state of the wound. He responded by ordering another infusion of drugs. The cold numbness was spreading up his ribs. Occasionally he would shiver, which the Skin would automatically mimic.

This time he clambered to his feet with slow, deliberate movements. Even so, when he was upright it felt as though his body were made from jelly, held in shape only by the hard mold of Skin around him. It was a stupid sensation, so he ordered a stimulant infusion. His mind cleared swiftly, and he looked hard at the ridge, finding himself a way up.

When he got to the top he could see the saddle plain stretching away in front of him. The heavy cloud formed an unbroken ceiling five hundred meters up. On either side, the two mountains were massive, curving walls of naked rock, riddled with slender crevices and deep folds. It was an enclosed universe that gave him no choices. According to his map file, it was ten kilometers to the far side. He started walking.

The saddle was classed as alpine desert. Lawrence thought it looked more like the surface of Mars. The exposed soil was a somber rust-red, strewn with small, flinty stones. There were no animals or insects living up here. Even the small crustaceous plants that peeked out from the stones looked desiccated. His Skin reported that the pressure was down to a third sea level. The gills were having to work hard to pull enough oxygen out of the freezing air.

He'd got a kilometer past the ridge when it began snowing. It wasn't big, soft flakes drifting out of the sky; these were small, hard pellets of ice that the wind drove straight at him. He could see them bouncing off the Skin carapace. Visibility was down to seven meters. Laser radar was useless. He didn't even bother with infrared or low-light. All he had was inertial guidance. It was enough for him.

Until the snowstorm engulfed him, all that had mattered was to keep going, to remain focused on the destination. Anything less would be betraying the platoon—which he could never do. Now, Lawrence began to contemplate what he was going to do when he actually reached the crater lake. He'd got a full magazine for the carbine. But against that the villagers had guns that fired weird stars, e-bombs, Prime and biotechnology from Santa Chico. He needed medicine and treatment for himself, and blood for his Skin. Then all he had to do was find out what the source of their wealth was and extort some of it out of them. Oh, and transport, too.

Blind, alone, cocooned by a faltering Skin against an environment that would kill him in minutes, Lawrence Newton started laughing. All this—insane desperation—so that he could buy himself back into Amethi. The home he'd run away from so he could explore the universe. It was hard to remember now, but in those days Lawrence Newton had thought the stars were full of excitement and wonder. What was it he'd told Roselyn that first day they'd met?

Nowhere you live can be exotic. That's only ever somewhere else.

Now he knew: it was always somewhere else. If he'd been given the chance, that young Lawrence Newton would have kept on flying and never come back.

Did I really hate myself that much back then?

He smiled happily as his thoughts of Roselyn brought her image to the front of his mind, the one icon that never deserted him. His hand patted the base of his throat, feeling the small lump of the pendant pressing against his skin.

It would be nice to see her one last time.

The clouds swept clear when he was still a couple of kilometers from the end of the saddle plain, taking the snow with them. Stars gleamed brightly in the thin, clear air. Two centimeters of ice pellets lay across the ground. His Skin crunched them down as he trudged onward.

He had to use the last bloodpak before he finished traversing the saddle plain. The Skin had used up a lot of energy keeping him warm in the snow. When he sucked at the water nipple, the tank was empty. His tongue was dry inside his hot mouth. Pain was a constant in his side now, a fierce pulse at the center of a permanently cold hip. The anesthetic made no difference. He wasn't even sure the clotting agent was having any effect. The Skin leg was coated in blood. Its muscles couldn't keep the carapace puncture hole fully sealed anymore.

And still, he had no choice.

The ground began to dip away, and Lawrence could look down across the forested vales of Arnoon Province. It was quiet and beautiful in the starlight, just as he remembered it.

This side of Mount Kenzi was a scree slope that swept down steeply for over two kilometers. Lawrence began his descent. The small stones slid and skittered beneath his feet, clattering away out of sight. As he became used to the subsidence he used it to slide his way down, taking long hops, deliberately landing hard on his heels so the scree would give way underneath him. Time after time he lost his balance or hit a big rock and fell, skidding and sliding down the slope at the head of a miniature avalanche. Without Skin he would have been cut to shreds on the sharp little stones. But the carapace maintained its integrity easily: this kind of treatment was well inside its tolerance limits.

The scree gave way to tough grass. He started to walk down to the treeline several hundred meters below. His left leg was stiff, even with Skin muscles moving it. Several scree stones were stuck in the open puncture. He stopped to pick them out, then continued. Their absence didn't make any difference to the limp. The display revealed that an alarming amount of Skin muscle in his left leg had degraded to a nonviable level. When he checked, blood was still leaking down the leg. It must be coming from the wound inside. There was no clotting agent left.

He stopped when he reached the trees and bent over, trying to throw up. Nothing came, apart from a vile acidic juice that burned his already arid throat. His gills adjusted their filter parameters, feeding him a higher oxygen level. It made breathing a little easier.

The trees thickened quickly once he was inside the forest. But their trunks were never so close as to form a barrier. Undergrowth was a shaggy fern that his Skin legs pushed through with hardly any extra effort. The visibility was as bad here as in the snowstorm. He had to rely on inertial guidance again, following the indigo trail across the slope, always heading down.

Warmth slowly drained out of him, seeping away through the puncture hole in the Skin. His fingers were icy, his feet blocks of ice. Nothing he could do would stop the shivering. The display wanted him to replenish the Skin's blood bladders. He sneered at it and told the Prime to clear the icons away. More medical warnings appeared, indicating the strain he was putting on his own organs now that his body was having to reoxygenate the blood.

The trees came to an end. Lawrence moved forward with small, laborious steps. He was hunched up in an effort to ease the pain throbbing along his ribs. One hand was clamped over the puncture hole in the carapace.

He arrived at the top of the curving cliff. A hundred and twenty meters below, the black waters of the crater lake rippled gently. Low-light sensors turned the gloomy night vista to a glowing blue-and-gray image. He saw the central island. The little stone temple was still sitting at the center.

"Meditation my ass," Lawrence grunted at it, and jumped.

The carapace hardened protectively long before he hit the water. It was a jolt that sent an excruciating pain flaming out from his wounded hip. He screamed inside the helmet. For a moment he though he was about to throw up again. All he was really worried about was the depth of water at the foot of the cliff. Whatever it was, his feet never touched the bottom of the lake.

Low-light sensors showed him faint gray bubbles swarming around him as he slowly floated to the surface. Then he was bobbing about, trying to see where the island was. Once he found it, he brought his legs up so he was floating on his back. His feet kicked slowly, aided by the occasional flap of his arms. He instructed the Prime to make the Skin muscles follow the motions he wanted. His own limbs weren't responding very well. The result wasn't a particularly fast stroke, but he made steady progress.

He was about seventy meters from the island when something brushed against him. The carapace tactile sensors stroked his skin in mimicry of the contact. Lawrence flinched and held still, waiting for it to happen again. When nothing happened, he began kicking again, perhaps a little more urgently now. The fish-creature prodded his left leg. Lawrence shoved at it with his hand. A narrow, pointed head broke surface for a moment, then dived with a small splash.

Something touched him on the other leg. Two of them! He concentrated on kicking, keeping his feet below the surface for maximum effect. One of the fish-creatures slithered over his chest. It was similar to an eel, but pale green, over a meter long, with three ridges running the length of its body. They were vibrating softly.

"Shit!" Lawrence punched at it in panic. But it was too fast.

Pointed jaws with needle teeth worried their way into the puncture hole like a hammer drill. Lawrence chopped at the thing with the edge of his hand. Two more were nuzzling the puncture. He twisted over and started swimming side-stroke, keeping the puncture out of the water. One of the creatures tangled itself round his legs. The puncture was forced below water. Teeth began to bite into the exposed Skin muscle.

The carbine slid out of its recess. Lawrence angled it away from his leg and fired. Bullets chewed the water around the creatures. There was an eruption of spray, and they were gone.

Lawrence started swimming hard, shouting to counter the pain coursing through his body at each hurried motion. Ripples wriggled across the water, arrowing toward him. Several of the creatures were suddenly writhing all over him. Lawrence thrashed about, going under for a moment. Their jaws were tearing at the Skin muscle in the puncture, severing chunks of it. He used the carbine underwater, hearing a dull roar as it fired.

When his head came up, he could see the island thirty meters away. A biohazard alert flashed in the middle of his display. Some kind of toxin was seeping into the Skin's circulatory network. Prime determined the infection point as the muscle cords around the puncture.

They're poisoning me!

Just then one of the fish-creatures began to coil and convulse a few meters away, flinging spray in all directions. Two more started similar berserk motions.

Lawrence kept swimming. Prime closed the valves connecting his major blood vessels with the Skin. Another creature jabbed its head into the puncture. He shot at it.

Dozens of the creatures were racing through the water around him. They slid over and around the Skin. Lawrence's foot touched a solid surface. He struggled for balance and waded out of the water. The creatures were charging around his legs, butting against the carapace. Prime was flashing up information on the toxin. It was spreading through the Skin's leg muscles. Secondary blood vessel valves were being closed, in an attempt to isolate it.

When his feet were finally out of the water, Lawrence managed two steps on the grass, and fell over. His legs wouldn't move, the weight of the inert Skin was too much.

Lawrence surveyed the status display. The toxin had contaminated over a third of the Skin's muscles. There was no blood reaching the rest. With a sob he gave the Prime his last order. The Skin split open smoothly along its chest seal. Lawrence whimpered as he pulled the helmet back off his head. Cool night air licked against his body. He pushed and wriggled, emerging slowly and painfully from the dead Skin like some glistening blue chrysalis. For a while it was all he could do to lie panting on the grass. Then his left hand felt its way along his side and probed at the wound. He grimaced, and slowly sat up.

The clotting agent had left a thin layer of white foam inside the wound, which was cracked and flaking. Blood was dribbling out, running down the slippery layer of dermalez gel. He pressed his hand against it, hoping the pressure would hold the bleeding until he could find something to use as a dressing.

Lawrence got to his feet and looked around. He could just make out the temple. Each step was forced, and he cried out more than once as he made his way over to the stone structure. When he got there, a section of the tiered seating had sunk away to reveal a staircase leading down. A weak light was shining at the bottom.

"I knew it," he mumbled.

He had to lean his shoulder on the wall for support as he stumbled down the stairs. Dermalez gel smeared an uneven trail along the stone as he went. Blood dripped continually through his fingers, splattering on the steps.

There was a small, empty room at the bottom, directly under the middle of the temple. A single metal door faced the stairs. It slid open as Lawrence hobbled toward it, revealing an elevator. He eased himself inside and found a control panel with just two buttons. The door slid shut when he jabbed the lower one.

There was a quiet whine as the elevator descended. The door opened to show a large hemispherical chamber with wall segments of dark copper-colored composite. Lawrence staggered out, not caring that he'd be seen. He just had to know what he'd been chasing. That was all. Nothing else mattered anymore.

In the middle of the chamber was a broad pedestal of milky glass, almost like an altar. A long ash-gray rock was resting on top, its surface pitted and blackened. The central section was draped in a gold mesh. The end pointing at the elevator had been cut and polished; clumps of small aquamarine crystal were sticking out of it, glowing lambently.

Lawrence squinted at the scene, not understanding any of it Two young women were standing in front of the pedestal. The older one gave him a sad smile, and said: "Welcome to the temple of the fallen dragon, Lawrence. Remember me?"

Lawrence grinned at her, and lost consciousness.