Machine Vendetta

Book 3: The Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies

by Alastair Reynolds

Genres: Hard Science Fiction; Space Exploration

Synopsis

From the king of modern space opera comes a new adventure in the Prefect Dreyfus series—Machine Vendetta is a thrilling tale of deadly conspiracies and old enemies that refuse to die.

Panoply is a small, efficient police force, dedicated to maintaining the rule of democracy among the ten thousand disparate city-states orbiting the planet Yellowstone.

Ingvar Tench was one of Panoply's most experienced operatives. So why did she walk alone and unarmed into a habitat with a vicious grudge against her organization?

As his colleagues pick up the pieces following her death, Prefect Tom Dreyfus must face his conscience. Four years ago, when an investigation linked to one of his most dangerous adversaries got a little too personal, Dreyfus arranged for Tench to continue the inquiry by proxy. In using her, did Dreyfus also put her in the line of fire? And what does Tench's attack tell him about an enemy he had hoped was dormant?

The Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies
Aurora Rising
Elysium Fire 
Machine Vendetta 

Release date: January 16, 2024

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 432

Sample

Something terrible had happened in Mercy Sphere.

Thalia Ng was the first on-scene. She touched a hand to her throat, stifling nausea. With her other hand she slipped on a pair of goggles, feeding her observations back to the Supreme Prefect.

“I’m inside, ma’am,” she said. “You should have a clear view of the scene.”

“Pan around for me,” the voice in her ear instructed.“Slower. Slower still. Why isn’t it in focus?”

“It is, ma’am.” Thalia coughed. “There’s a lot of smoke in the air. The circulators are struggling to clear it.”

“Do you need a breather?”

“No, ma’am. It’s pretty bad, but if these people are managing without breathers, I think I can as well.”

Mendicants—the order who operated Mercy Sphere—were busy fixing damage, clearing bodies and tending to the few souls who had survived the conflagration. Humans and hyperpigs alike made up their number, dressed in green and white clerical outfits.

As Thalia tracked around, her goggles placed reference tags on the fallen and sick.

“It’s vile, ma’am. That someone should do this deliberately . . .” She trailed off, the horror too unwieldy to be carved into words.

“Detachment, Ng,” Jane Aumonier said. “Record and assist where you can. Medical and forensic squads are inbound.”

Thalia coughed again. Some part of that smoke haze came from the burned fabric of Mercy Sphere, but the rest was a sooty suspension of barbecued flesh. The flavour of it was new and ancient at the same time, as if her brain had always been primed to recognise it.

“Ma’am,” she said, swallowing hard.

“Why haven’t they sent a hyperpig?”

The question came not from Jane Aumonier, but from the Mendicant who had arrived alongside Thalia. A middle-aged human woman with ash-smeared skin and eyes slitted and inflamed by the smoke.

Her goggles brought up her name from Panoply’s register of citizens.

“I was the nearest when the alarm came in, Sister Drusilla. It could have been any one of us, a human or hyperpig prefect. We make no distinction.”

“Words for my benefit, or is your superior listening in? Let me address Jane Aumonier personally.” Staring directly at Thalia, Sister Drusilla pushed steel into her voice. “This attack against us was a foregone event. We’ve been warning of such a thing for six months, begging for greater protection. Why did you not listen?”

“Tell her that we did listen, but that our resources are not infinite,” Aumonier interjected.

“There are just a thousand of us,” Thalia offered. “That’s a thousand of us to cover every possible threat in the Glitter Band, anything that can’t be managed by the constables. With the best will in the world, we can’t be everywhere at once. And since the Cranach crisis blew up . . .” She winced at her own ill-judged choice of words. “We’re tallying multiple threats and multiple possible targets, and with each escalation the problem gets worse.”

Sister Drusilla surveyed the carnage surrounding them: the burned, twisted, charred and smoking bodies, the melted architecture, the damage caused by secondary fires and explosions as the chain of destruction played out.

She touched a hand to the snowflake stitched across her chest.

“So, your policy is to stand back and observe . . . until such threats are acted on?”

“I wish I could offer more, Sister.”

“That’s the best you have, a wish?”

“Do not apologise for a system forced on us by the democratic will of the citizenry,” Aumonier interjected.

Thalia salted some authority into her reply. “Be grateful that we’re here at all, Sister. My colleagues will shortly be arriving in force. Rest assured our investigation will be extremely thorough. I must ask: did you have much warning before the capsule docked?”

“What difference does it make, now that the harm’s done?”

“With respect, Sister, that’s for me to decide. Was there anything unusual?”

A sigh. “We had a few minutes’ warning—the usual pattern. When escapees flee to us, they rarely have time to put elaborate plans in place. Of course, our suspicions have been heightened with the threats made against us—that’s why we’ve been pleading for more protection—but everything about this capsule seemed genuine.” Despair broke through her mask. “If there’s something we missed, something we should have seen . . .”

“There won’t have been,” Thalia said firmly. “The ones who did this to you would have made sure of that.”

“How long will it take you to identify them?”

“We’re already working on that problem. We think they used a non­velope to conceal the capsule’s movements until it was very close to you.”

“I have no idea what that is.”

“A sort of invisibility screen, made from a quickmatter shell. It’s contraband technology, but easily within the grasp of hundreds of families and concerns in the Glitter Band.”

“But you will find them.”

Thalia groped for an answer that was neither a lie nor promised too much. “This attack was part of a pattern of escalating grudges, drawing in many actors. We’ll seek to identify all culpable elements. Our greatest concern, though, is to stop the violence on all fronts.”

“You’ve dodged my question.”

“We will bring our resources to bear,” Thalia affirmed. “And none of us will rest until you have an answer.”

“Well handled, Ng,” came the voice in her ear.

Thalia unholstered her whiphound, displaying it to Sister Drusilla. “I’m going to send this device off to gather evidential traces. You needn’t be alarmed by it.”

Sister Drusilla scoffed. “I’ve just seen my best friends burn alive, Prefect Ng. They’re in my nostrils. Do you imagine much is capable of alarming me now?”

Thalia didn’t answer. She flicked out the whiphound’s traction filament and sent it scurrying away, a busy blur of flickering silver.

Jane Aumonier floated weightless, taking in the audiovisual stream from Thalia Ng.

The large, spherical room in which she hovered had a single continuous inner surface, wrapping it from pole to pole. A mosaic of feeds quilted the surface: images and status summaries of the ten thousand orbital habitats under her responsibility. She even allowed room for the dozen or so that had seceded during the breakaway crisis. Panoply had no formal jurisdiction over those wayward states, but she still considered them her children.

Behind the quilt, algorithms churned ceaselessly. They evaluated metrics from each feed and assigned an attentional weighting to each habitat. As events played out, certain feeds swelled and magnified, while others shrank into the background, diminishing to tiny chips of colour. If a development demanded that a feed be brought to her immediate notice, then the entire quilt would move, creating a dizzy sense of the entire universe spinning around the floating woman at its focus.

That was exactly what had happened with Mercy Sphere.

The structure was an outstation of Hospice Idlewild, operated by the same order of Ice Mendicants. It was a beacon of kindness, a shrine to a way of living in which hyperpigs and baseline humans were considered equals, and given every opportunity to coexist, thrive and prosper. Tolerance, openness and forgiveness were the norms. It was a model of a better Glitter Band, one Aumonier hoped to live long enough to see.

Naturally, it had become a target.

Six months earlier, one of their own—a hyperpig prefect named Mizler Cranach—had launched a murderous and unprovoked suicide attack on a habitat. As the spill-out from the incident intensified, Aumonier had naturally moved to upgrade her surveillance on potential targets like Mercy Sphere. The problem was that there were just too many plausible candidates for any one of them to merit special attention. Too many candidates, too few prefects, even fewer ships to move them around in.

Hindsight was a wonderful thing.

“Completing sweep of segment one, ma’am,” came Ng on her earpiece. “The worst of the fatalities were here, but segment two also took a lot of damage. There are reports of fatalities right through to segment three. I’m moving through now.”

“Thank you, Ng. You won’t be on your own in there much longer. Heavy Technical and Medical squads should be clamps-on inside . . .” Aumonier stopped. “I’ll call you back, Ng.”

“Ma’am?”

“A situation, Ng. Continue as you were.”

Between one second and the next, an entirely different feed had swelled up to dominate the room.

It was impossible. The algorithms had made one of their rare glitches… surely?

Because what could possibly overshadow the events at Mercy Sphere, not even an hour into the atrocity?

Something had, though.

“Stadler-Kremeniev,” Aumonier said, reading aloud as the feed helpfully annotated itself. “I know you,” she mouthed, some faint connection pricking her memory. “Now what is it . . .”

But she did not need to speculate. Next to a real-time image of the grey, wheel-shaped habitat, the annotation was already answering her next question.

A prefect—Ingvar Tench—was on her way to Stadler-Kremeniev.

And Jane Aumonier’s blood ran cold.

She tapped her earpiece.

“Aumonier to Ingvar Tench. Respond immediately, please.”

Silence.

“Ingvar. Answer me. If you can’t answer me, change course.”

She eyed the status summary, willing some alteration.

Nothing changed.

“Dock Attendant.”

A thin male voice answered her immediately. “Thyssen, ma’am. How may I help you?”

“Very quickly, I hope. Ingvar Tench appears to be on her way to a watchlisted habitat, Stadler-Kremeniev. Were you on duty when she signed out?”

“Yes, ma’am, eight hours ago. I was keeping an eye on the schedules, making sure we had a docking slot available for her.”

“Did she go out alone?”

“Yes. Tench was her usual talkative self. And she didn’t make any mention of visiting anyone or anything on a watchlist.”

“Thyssen, I need you to take control of Tench’s vehicle. Do it immediately. Get that ship steered onto any heading except Stadler-Kremeniev.”

“One moment, ma’am.”

She heard Thyssen delegating to subordinates in the docking bay. Voices batted back and forth. They were normal at first, but after a few exchanges she detected a gradually rising concern.

Something wasn’t right.

“Thyssen?” she pressed.

“We can’t stop that cutter,” he said. “She’s going to dock.”

Dreyfus was knee-deep in a mob of angry babies.

Technically they were not babies at all, but rather adult-age humans who had undergone forced developmental regression to an infant body-template, surrendering most of their higher mental faculties along the way. They lived in a world of basic needs and responses: hunger, joy, rage, with just a thin smear of language and comprehension on top, just enough to satisfy the basic requirements of democratic participation, and to earn reciprocal status as full and valued citizens of the Glitter Band, with all the rights that came with that association.

Dreyfus knew all that. As far as he was concerned, though, and especially now that he was in the thick of them, they were still angry babies.

He had planned a straightforward in-and-out, no complications. The thoroughfares of the Grevenboich Spindle had been almost empty when he came through on his way to the polling core. He had gone about his business without molestation. The checks had come back clear, and he had begun the journey back to the docking hub.

Which is when it had all gone wrong.

Without warning, thousands of infant-sized citizens had spilled into the civic core of the habitat. At first, Dreyfus had assumed that he was the object of their concern. But as more and more of them arrived—coming in on moving walkways, escalators and miniature public transit systems —he realised that their interest in him was transitory, a mere detail to be absorbed on the way to something else.

Each toddling, infant-sized citizen carried a toy of some sort, either clutched possessively or itself clinging onto its charge with soft furry limbs and tails. The toys murmured to their human companions, worry forming in the exaggerated wideness of their eyes and the quivering curves of their mouths. Dreyfus had his whiphound sniff the local cybernetic environment, detecting many epsilon-grade artificial intelligences. He felt their synthetic anxiety crackling in the air, boiling off them like a faint electrical haze. They craved some reassurance that their human keepers were incapable of offering.

Or unwilling.

The babies pressed in, squeezing in from all directions. It had been getting harder and harder to walk, and now it was a struggle not to trample tiny toes or trip himself up. Dreyfus was not a tall man, but compared to the babies his heavy-set frame might as well have been that of an ogre.

He stopped, cupped a hand to his mouth and exclaimed over the rising rage of the crowd:

“Citizens!”

No reaction, so he sucked in all the breath he could muster and bellowed:

“CITIZENS!”

His voice turned hoarse. The best he could manage after that was a broken declamation.

“Allow me through. You are under Panoply observance and I—” He had to stop to catch his wind. “I will not be obstructed in the execution of my duty!”

“Too big, too clumsy!” yelled one of the citizens. “And you smell wrong!”

Dreyfus felt his hand drifting in the direction of the whiphound. He hoped that the gesture would be seen and understood by the bawling mob.

His bracelet chimed, loudly enough to snag his attention. He touched a hand to his throat microphone.

He wheezed out: “Dreyfus.”

“Are you all right, Tom?”

He cleared his throat.

“I’m fine, just caught in the midst of two thousand bad-tempered toddlers.”

“Toddlers?” asked Jane Aumonier.

“Big-headed, thick-necked, belligerent toddlers.”

“You must be at the Grevenboich Spindle. The Obligate Infantile State?”

“One and the same.”

Down the length of the thoroughfare—behind him, thankfully—the babies and a number of animatronic robot helpers, essentially larger, adult-sized toy animals, were wheeling a movable stage into position. It supported a squat, boiler-like machine with a hopper near the top.

“Is there a difficulty?”

“Nothing that a whiphound won’t solve.”

“Good. I’d like you to get out of there as quickly as you can. We have a developing situation.”

Babies fussed around the machine with the hopper, using ladders to climb up its sides. The hopper was already jammed with a squirming, pleading mass of sentient furry toys. Babies leaned in over the top, using rams to press down on its thrashing, desperate contents.

“What is it?”

“Ingvar Tench is about to get hurt. She’s taken it upon herself to make a solo visit to a watchlisted habitat. Stadler-Kremeniev.”

A baby pulled a lever on the flank of the machine, making it throb and grind. The hopper was discharging into its guts, a flurry of colourful body parts beginning to spew out from a spout.

“Remind her it’s out of bounds.”

“Tench isn’t answering, and Thyssen can’t override her ship. It looks bad.”

“Has she arrived?”

“According to our tracking she’s close to docking. She’ll likely be inside within ten minutes, unless someone stops her.”

The hopper was emptying, the first batch of toys were nearly destroyed, but now the mob was moving into its second phase. By a formalised, ritualistic process Dreyfus could not quite follow, babies within the crowd were being singled out and having their toys ripped from them, then passed hand-over-head to the shredding machine.

“I’ll get there as quickly as I can. Is anyone else closer?”

“No. Our positioning puts you twenty minutes away, with an expedited crossing.”

Dreyfus nodded, bleakly resigned to the worst. He unholstered his whiphound, holding up the truncheon-like handle with its filament still spooled in. The babies pressed around him like a living, squirming sea.

“I’ll call when I’m near Stadler-K.”

Ingvar Tench sighed, closed her compad and slipped it into the stowage pouch next to her seat. She had been engaged in research on the way over, trying to find a glimmer of interest—the tiniest hint of a challenge—in the latest addition to her task list.

“Confirming acceptance of updated schedule,” she reported for the second time. “Am on normal finals for docking. Will advise of any anomalies once I’ve completed core inspection.”

The habitat was lined up ahead, its rotation neutralised now that the cutter had accepted the local approach-and-docking handshakes, allowing it to be reeled in like a fly on a tongue.

Tench thought this visit was a first time for her. Not that the view through the window told her much: grey, wheel-shaped habitats were hardly a rarity in the Glitter Band. This was a small one, but there would still be hundreds just like it, scattered through different orbits, some closer to Yellowstone, others further out. Some rich, some poor, some home to relatively normal communities, others functioning as theatres of the absurd or grotesque. The habitat’s name, Transtromer, rang no bells whatsoever. At some point it must have crossed her attention—lost in a rapidly scrolling list, perhaps—but she was confident that it had never done anything, or had anything done to it, to cause it to rise to any higher prominence.

Given that it was a routine inspection, it was a little odd to have had it added to her task schedule at such short notice, when she was already meant to be on her way back to Panoply. Tench was troubled by this for only about as long as it took to flick a loose hair out of her eyes. There was a good reason for it, no doubt. Perhaps it was as simple as saving time and fuel, given that she was already in the right sector when the reassignment came in.

She docked at the wheel’s hub, noticing—with no more than mild puzzlement—that there were no other ships latched on. Curious, because the briefing indicated Transtromer had decent ties to the rest of the Glitter Band, with the expectation of trade, inter-habitat travel and even some low-level tourism. Perhaps she had just arrived at a quiet hour.

Tench unbuckled into the near-weightlessness of the docking hub. She looked around the stowage racks at the limited assortment of equipment carried by the cutter. Breathers, tactical armour, hardsuit vacuum gear, emergency medical supplies, evidential preservation packages. Nothing that was likely to be the least use to her in a routine call.

Tench pushed through the yielding membrane of the m-lock, finding herself in a cold, damp space that in no way fitted her expectations for the habitat.

Oddly, no one was there to meet her.

“Hello?” she called, feeling faintly ridiculous and wondering if there had been some simple mix-up—the welcoming delegation on the wrong side of the hub or similar. Her schedule had been amended at short notice, it was true, but the citizens of Transtromer had still had fair warning that a prefect was about to dock. Time to scrabble together at least a few civic functionaries to meet her at the hub, help her to the core and offer a few crumbs of hospitality.

“All right,” she said to herself. “So, they’re too busy to send anyone, or they’re still on their way, or somehow the message didn’t get through.”

It was a tissue-thin rationalisation, but it served her needs for the moment.

Tench moved through the hub in long, arcing drifts. Less accustomed to weightlessness than her longer-serving colleagues, she was nonetheless getting better at it all the time.

The hub, she quickly established, was deserted. Not only was hers the only ship docked, but the place had a neglected, decaying feel about it, as if it was only very rarely used.

Clearly no reception party was imminent.

Tench scouted around for a means of getting to the rim, where her briefing told her the polling core was kept. Two connecting spokes thrust out from the hub in opposite directions. The first was just an empty tube stretching away with a set of parallel rails diminishing into the distance. In the absence of handholds, Tench knew better than to just drift into it. She would not have needed to go far before the spoke’s inner wall kissed against her and centripetal force took hold. If that happened, she would be on an unchecked one-way slide all the way to the bottom. Bones broken at the very least.

She went to the other spoke and had better luck: there was a simple but functional vehicle fixed onto a similar set of rails to the ones she had just seen. Tench climbed into the open cockpit of the beetle-shaped body, secured herself to one of two spartan bucket seats and pressed the sole control, a bulky start button. With a buzz, the vehicle lumbered into unhurried motion.

Tench was increasingly aware that things were not quite right with this assignment. Panoply briefings could be slightly out of date, especially in the cases of the more insular habitats, but a prefect would normally have made a routine visit within the last couple of years. Unless Transtromer had gone to seed very quickly, it was hard to see how reality and the briefing could be so divergent.

Presumably, she told herself, it would all make sense when she got to the hub.

Thalia had completed her inspection of the third segment of Mercy Sphere, recording fatalities, injuries and structural damage. Beyond the third segment, the harm done to the station was relatively minor. She had no doubt that it could be repaired speedily, especially as there had been no loss of pressure integrity in any part of the facility. The psychological toll would be much harder to heal.

A picture of the atrocity was coming into focus. When the Mendicants had opened the capsule, they had found the four hyperpigs onboard alive but unresponsive. They had barely begun disconnecting the pigs from the capsule’s life-support systems when the implanted bombs had been triggered. They had been incendiary devices, designed to cause death, mutilation and terror, rather than the total destruction of the station. Anyone with the wherewithal to arrange for the pigs, the transit capsule and the nonvelope device could easily have planted more potent weapons. That they had not done so demonstrated a repulsive, reptilian restraint.

“Ng to Panoply,” she said, aware that she no longer had a direct line to Jane Aumonier. “I’ve reached the limit of my usefulness here, without additional support. I was promised Heavy Technical and Medical squads were on their way. That was ten minutes ago. Where are they?”

“This is Clearmountain,” came the reply. Gaston Clearmountain, Senior Prefect and one of the highest-ranking operatives beneath Aumonier herself. “The support you have requested will arrive in good time, Ng. But we are now facing a two-pronged situation. Enforcement, technical and medical resources are also required elsewhere. Our assets have been re-tasked accordingly.”

Thalia spluttered: “What’s more important than getting prefects into the immediate scene of a terrorist incident?”

Clearmountain’s answer was disarmingly unruffled. “You worked closely with Ingvar Tench, didn’t you.”

“Ingvar? What the hell has Ingvar got to do with this?”

“Tench has chosen to walk into a watchlisted habitat, without additional equipment or backup.”

Fingernails glissaded her spine.

“Which habitat?”

“Stadler-Kremeniev.”

The fingers squeezed, wringing marrow out of her.

“Oh, no. Oh, hell, no.”

“You mentored Tench after her transfer from internal work to field duty. Is there anything that might shed light on her actions?”

“No, sir.” Thalia had to compose herself. “That was nearly four years ago, sir. I shadowed her for six months, until it was clear she didn’t need any more guidance. It was a routine transition, and she already had years of competent service behind her, as you well know from your time with her in the tactical room. She already had a seat at the big table; all she needed was some reorientation into the practicalities of field service.”

“Then you had no misgivings?”

Thalia felt the faint, prickling onset of something. Still surrounded by the workers and injured in the third segment, she dropped her voice to a hush. “Sir, with respect, I was only required to submit observations on a colleague who was already my effective superior. I didn’t make the final decision on Ingvar Tench’s future.” She clawed her hand, nails biting into flesh. “What’s happening now?”

“We won’t know until Dreyfus is there. He’s on his way to the scene, trying to catch Tench before she gets into serious trouble.”

Now Thalia was pincered between two anxieties. Concern for the woman she had mentored, and also for the man who had mentored her.

“I should be with him, sir. If those reinforcements can be sped up—”

“You sit tight in Mercy Sphere, Ng. I just wanted your viewpoint on Tench.”

“I’ve got nothing, sir. She was as good as any of us, and the least likely to do something reckless or suicidal.”

“Be that as it may, much the same was said about Mizler Cranach. Others might say that there’s a conclusion to be drawn.”

Thalia bit back any answer that might land her in trouble further down the line. If Ingvar Tench had indeed gone rogue, then Thalia could be hung out to dry for signing her off as fit to serve as a lone field operative. The last thing she needed was to make things worse for herself by getting brusque with Clearmountain.

What was the bastard trying to suggest, anyway? That Tom Dreyfus’s mentees were having a bad run of luck with the candidates they had themselves mentored?

Clearmountain closed the call. Ng stared around, eyes still watering from the chemical haze of scorched materials and burned bodies.

Dreyfus jerked forward in his restraints as the cutter slowed down, eighteen minutes after his departure from Grevenboich.

The Stadler-K wheel loomed ahead, face-on and rotating steadily. A chime from his console indicated the habitat’s automated systems negotiating with his avionics.

“Jane.”

“Listening, Tom.”

“I have approach handshakes from Stadler-K. Nothing out of the ordinary. Have we heard from Ingvar?”

“Nothing, and Thyssen still can’t override control of her ship. Do you have eyes on it?”

Dreyfus magnified the view with a pinch of his fingers, zooming in on the hub at the middle of the wheel. A cluster of docking positions lay close to the rotational axis, with just the one vehicle throwing an angular shadow off to one side. He watched the shadow’s projection alter with the angle of the wheel.

“I see her cutter. She’s already docked. Lights are out, so she’s likely already inside.”

A soft nasal sigh: disappointment, but not surprise. “Proceed, if you’re satisfied with the risks.”

“Proceeding.”

Dreyfus allowed the cutter to accept docking guidance.

Besides the navigation system, the only signal emerging from Stadler-K was the standard housekeeping pulse of abstraction, the universal information protocol which permeated the entire Glitter Band. The threadbare pulse indicated the lowest possible level of engagement short of an enforced lockdown. Still, there was enough information in that flow to indicate that the citizens still had theoretical access to the democratic process, even if that right was going almost entirely unexercised.

That was not a Panoply problem. The point of prefects was not to force citizens to exercise their rights, but to ensure that nobody was denied them.

Dreyfus unbuckled and prepared his equipment. He patted the whiphound at his side and removed another from stowage. Thus armed, he surveyed the options for defence. Full, hard-shell vacuum gear would defend him against a variety of anti-personnel weapons, but it would be intimidating and cumbersome. Light tactical armour was his best option. He buckled the quickmatter tabard and spinal shield over his uniform, grunting as he strained the fastenings together. He waggled his neck, freeing a roll of flesh pinched under the rim of the spinal shield.

“Too big, too clumsy,” he murmured to himself.

The cutter clamped on. Capture latches secured, and suddenly all was still and silent. He moved to the nose-facing m-lock, gathering reserves of focus and preparedness. He had the ship conjure up an apple, took a bite from it, contemplated whether it might be his last, and tossed the mostly intact fruit back into the recycler.

“Jane?”

“Yes, Tom.”

“I’m about to go inside. Besides my usual good humour, I’m carrying tactical armour and dual whiphounds.”

“Take two minutes to go back and put on hard-shell gear, please. I’d like you back in as few pieces as possible.”

“I think it might help if my face is easily read. Everyone looks shifty through a visor, and if we end up negotiating . . .”

“And if we’re past the point of negotiation?”

Dreyfus smiled grimly. He had no answer but to sign off and continue through the m-lock, into Stadler-Kremeniev.

Tench got out into something close to standard gravity.

It had taken about four minutes to descend the spoke, the open-bodied car juddering to an unceremonious halt. She straightened her uniform, patted the whiphound against her thigh and moved to an upright slit of narrow light, where two sliding doors had not quite met in the middle.

The doors did not open as she approached. S