THE CENTAURI DEVICE

'Good.' She dropped the hairbrush. 'I'll take you to him now.' Got up, smoothed her dress over her stomach, stood too close to him, smiled right at him. He was touched. But,

'No. Here. Tonight. Fetch him here at eight. I've got things to do.'

She frowned. 'You wouldn't be working for General Gaw yourself, Captain?'

'You're a bit behind the times, aren't you?' Deep down, something was warning him that losers should never, never make decisions. He ignored it, and it sniggered horribly at him. 'Just on my terms this time, that's all.' It was blatant hubris. At the door he asked, 'Don't you ever get tired of being used?' Thinking of poor old-animal Nodes, who also hadn't known what 'it' was — or wanted to.

She stared out into the rain after him, tapping her fingers against one of the Opener broadsheets ('Some Words of Plain Good Sense in a Time of Trouble'). After he'd vanished down the dreary street, she went out in another direction.

'I want a gun,' said Truck when he got in.

'Christ' Tiny had heard about the incident at the Boogie Shuffle, 'Truck, how can you shoot a bloke just because he chucked you out of a bar?'

He put his underpants on, hopping about on one foot; he was entertaining. The lady in the bed, her voice muffled by the blanket, said, 'Get that creep out of here. He gives me the willies.' She raised herself on one elbow, glaring at Truck. 'Tiny, how can he live with his breakfast like that? How can you live with him? You're an artist.' She shuddered.

Pointedly, Tiny showed Truck the door. 'Fix might have left something on the ship,' he suggested. He winked and jerked his thumb back over his shoulder. 'Eh?'

Fix hadn't. But in a locker on the bridge, Truck found a set of steel knuckles he'd bought long ago on Morpheus and never used. He put them on and went prancing around on his toes, feinting dangerously at the display panels. He got a couple of hours sleep in his old bunk then, when it was dark, stuck the steel knuckles in his right boot (under his foot where they'd be safe from a cursory search, if uncomfortable), and left for the edge of Egerton's Port. He had howling colic from Angina Seng's Avernus pasty.

Half past seven saw him shivering in a pool of shadow twenty yards from Angina's door.

The compass wind was blowing inside and out, wiping the eyes with rain, buffeting the losers on the port streets (down galleries of one repeated image — a hand to the shaking wall, head down, retching dejectedly from the very brain out), and plastering Truck's cloak to him like wet cement He wasn't sure why he was there: to hold, perhaps, for just this once, a small power over those who have the steerage way to set a course despite the wind; to get a look at Angina Seng's new sponsor before whoever it was got a look at him.

Given this, anyone can predict a disaster.

Twenty minutes later, the enigmatic Angina appeared head down into the weather from the direction of Junk City and let herself in, looking round circumspectly while she fumbled with her key. Off in the prehistoric darkness, Truck sniggered to himself. She was bundled up against rain or recognition, but unable to disguise the earthly slouch of the born port lady. Lights came on. Both of them settled down to wait. She had a mysterious trick of turning up at the window moving from right to left then, a minute later, reappearing from the same direction, as if some personal topology applied to the room. Fifteen of these manifestations took place while Truck shivered and squirmed the sole of his right foot and tried to ignore his griping stomach.

The figure that finally shuffled up to Angina's door might just as well have been Herma

One of the UASR death-commandos who had been following him since he left Ella Speed rapped him quickly in the biceps to immobilize his arms while the other lugged out a Chambers gun the size of a mortuary and poked it at his groin in awful warning. 'You put your hands on your head pretty fucking sharpish,' they advised him. Their lean pockmarked faces were wreathed with smiles as they searched him, and then stood back to let him reflect on his obvious future if he insisted on playing by the rules of wi

'Got any good postcards, boys?' he insinuated nastily, because he felt the fool he was. The hashishin exchanged an unpleasant glance, clearly reinterpreting their orders, and advanced on him.

'We thought you'd never come in, Captain,' said someone from behind him, just in time. 'You didn't have to skulk about there in the rain, old chap — didn't Miss Seng make that clear to you? You must be frozen stiff.'

Gadaffi ben Barka: second Colonel or executive of the People's Army of Morocco — originally a chip off the old UNFP — and thus the nearest thing to General Gaw's opposite number in the UASR(N). He was tall and slimly built, with a back like a board and a neatly clipped mustache. He tapped Truck's hands with the tip of his little swagger cane. 'You could put them down now, I think.'

He affected the precise, slightly decayed English of original Arab stock unused to handling it since the cultural revolution of 2184 with its concomitant stress on the speaking of only Arab languages among the bureaucrats of the i

'You seem to have got caught up in my security operation. Sorry about that.' Quite the part, walking with his hands clasped behind his back, he knew exactly what had happened. 'But if you'd just come through the front entrance' — ushering Truck through that same door — 'as we expected, you'd have been quite safe. No harm done. These mix-ups happen.'

Angina Seng ignored him and stared out of the window. He hoped it was because she felt guilty. He limped ostentatiously past her and sat down on the bed. In fact, his foot did hurt like hell, and his queasy gut was generating long gray waves of nausea to break cold and sweaty over his bald scalp. He looked accusingly at the fridge. His cloak fell open. 'You've bloody poisoned me,' he told Angina's shoulders. She shrugged.

Like the commander of some desert terrain poring over his maps, ben Barka sat behind the camp table, scraping idly at its curious reliefs of dried cosmetic; pla

The hashishin, meanwhile, had disposed themselves by the door, where they seemed to fall into a state of feral languor, giving Truck insolent grins and winks, picking their noses with fanatical concentration. Ben Barka brought his last dawn sortie to its desperate conclusion under the cold desert rimwall and said, 'I see you've been on Stomach lately, Captain. Intellectually, I can hardly credit you as an Opener — it's an unsatisfying notion. Still, faith is a peculiar thing: in the past, we Arabs have had creed enough for a Galaxy, and energy too; but, until now, no — '