LIGHT

'This is useless,' she complained.

'It seems that way,' the mathematics said equably. 'But if we go to a regime that corrects for the dynaflow shift, and set N quite high, what we get is this… '

There was a sudden jump. Randomness resolved to order. The signal simplified itself and split in two, with the fainter component- coloured deep violet-blinking rapidly in and out of view.

'What am I looking at?' demanded Seria Mau.

'Two vessels,' the mathematics told her. 'The steady trace is a K-ship. Phase-locked to its mathematics is some kind of Nastic heavy asset: maybe a cruiser. One clear benefit is that no one can interpret their signature, but that's a sideshow. The real issue is this: they're using the K-ship as a navigational tool. I've never seen that done before. Whoever wrote the code is almost as good as me.'

Seria Mau stared at the display.

'What are they doing?' she whispered.

'Oh, they're following us,' the mathematics said.

TWELVE

The Warren

Tig Vesicle, stu

'The warren!'

Plunging downhill into the maze of light and dark, they were soon nowhere again, wandering aimlessly round corners into the sudden teeth of the wind until they found themselves back on Yulgrave-the black, echoing, completely deserted perspective of which stretched away between warehouses and goods yards, apparently forever. There, they were witness to an event so strange that Chianese put it out of his mind until much later. Too much later, as it turned out. At the time all he thought was:

This isn't happening.

Then he thought, it's happening but I'm still in the tank.

'Am I still in the tank?' he said out loud.

No reply. He thought: maybe I'm someone else.

Snow was still coming down, but warm air from Clinker Bay, tainted with the smell of the inshore rigs and cracking plants, had dissolved it to sleet, falling through the mercury vapour lamps like sheaves of sparks from some invisible anvil. Walking through the sparks towards them came a small, plump, oriental-looking woman in a gold leaf cheongsam slit to the thigh. Her gait had the quick irritability lent by high heels in bad weather. One minute, Chianese was sure, she wasn't there: the next she was. He blinked. He rubbed his hand over his face. Flashbacks, hallucinations, all the bad dreams of a twink.

'Do you see her too?' he asked Vesicle.

'I don't know,' said Vesicle listlessly.

Ed Chianese looked down at the woman, and she looked up at him. There was something so wrong with her face. From one angle it looked beautiful in that oval, high-cheekboned oriental way. Then she turned it, or Ed altered his angle on her, and it seemed to blur and shift into a yellow and wrinkled old age. It was the same face. There was no doubt about that. But it was always moving, always blurred. Sometimes it was old and young at once. The effect was extreme.

'How are you doing that?' Ed whispered.

Without taking his eyes off her he extended a hand towards Tig Vesicle. 'Give me the gun,' he said.

'Why?' Vesicle said. 'It's mine.'

Ed said carefully: 'Give me the gun.'

The woman got out a little gold case, which she opened, and took from it an oval cigarette.

'Do you have light?' she said. 'Ed Chianese?'

She stared up at him, her face blurring and shifting, blurring and shifting. A sudden flurry of sleet went round them both, hot orange sparks off the anvil of circumstance. Ed took the Hi-Lite Autoloader out of Tig Vesicle's hands and fired it point-blank.

'Right between the eyes,' he would say later. 'I shot her point-blank, right between the eyes.'

Nothing happened for a moment. She continued to stand there, looking up at him. Then she seemed to disassemble herself into a stream of tiny, energetic golden motes, which poured away from the point of impact to join the sparks of the rain. First her head dissolved, then her body. She burned away quite slowly, like a firework consuming itself to make light. There was no sound at all.

Then Ed heard her voice, an echoing whisper.

'Ed,' she said. 'Ed Chianese.'

The street was empty again. Ed looked down at the gun in his hand, and up from the gun at Tig Vesicle, who was staring into the sky, his face tilted so that rain fell into his open mouth.

'Jesus Christ,' Ed said.

He put the gun away and they both began to run. After a minute or two, Ed stopped and leaned against a wall. 'I'm not up to this,' he said. 'Are you?' He wiped his mouth. 'I hate the fucking dry heaves.' He looked dizzily up at the stars. They were like sparks, too, rushing and pinwheeling across the sky to coalesce, just above the warehouse roofs, into the roseate blur of the Tract. This reminded Ed of something he had been meaning to ask. 'Hey,' he said. 'What planet am I on?'

Vesicle stared at him.

'Come on,' Ed said. 'Be fair. Anyone can have a problem with that.'

New Venusport, Earth's original outpost in the halo:

The military cities sprawled across the southern hemisphere. They were less cities than EMC compounds, run as free-trade zones, pulling in migrant labour from across the halo the way a black hole rips gas out of an accretion disc. They drew the defeated races. They drew the enfeebled and stupid. They drew the New Men, like moths to a flame. You went to New Venusport because you had nowhere else to go.

South hemisphere New Venusport was essentially a maintenance operation. K-ships filled its skies, or shot vertically into orbit at Mach 50. Night and day they crouched in the service bays with arc-light slicking down their dark grey flanks. They were restless. They flickered in and out of visibility as their navigation systems trawled through ten spatial dimensions. They never disco

'Hey, this thing could peel a planet!'

In the cities, air and food were foul, and you had no idea what came down in the rain. The New Men, packed into their warrens, preyed upon by the usual portfolio of gangsters, high-profile political zealots and EMC police, went off to work in the grey dawn, coughing and shivering and bemused, awkwardly hunching their shoulders. But it wasn't all bad. New corporate workplace safety guidelines, self-imposed and self-policed, had brought the life expectancy of a male worker up a couple of points, to twenty-four years. Anyone could tell you that was an advance.

Meanwhile, scattered across the northern hemisphere, the corporate enclaves constructed themselves as Old Earth.

They favoured little towns-with little market squares-called Saulsignon or Brandett Hersham; little clean railway trains ru