journeys for anyone other than key government officials. Smaller settlements — weather stations and the few remaining archaeological digs — could be reached by airship or all-terrain crawler, but not usually in less than weeks of travel time. Now a red light was winking up in the northeastern corner of the map, hundreds of kilometres away from anywhere most people had heard of. A field agent was calling in. Operatives were identified by their code numbers, winking next to the spot of light that denoted their position. Operative Four. The Inquisitor felt the short dark hairs on the back of her neck prickle. It had been a long, long time since she had heard from Operative Four. She tapped a query into the desk, hunting and pecking for the stiff black keys. She asked the desk to verify that Operative Four was currently reachable. The desk’s readout confirmed that the red light had only come on in the last two hours. The operative was still on the air, awaiting the Inquisitor’s response. The Inquisitor picked up the telephone handset from her desk, squeezing its sluglike black bulk against the side of her head. ‘Communications,’ she said. ‘Comms.’ ‘Put me through to Field Operative Four. Repeat, Field Operative Four. Audio only. Protocol three.’ ‘Hold the line, please. Establishing. Connected.’ ‘Go secure.’ She heard the pitch of the line modulate slightly as the comms officer dropped out of the loop. She listened, hearing nothing but hiss. ‘Four… ?’ she breathed. There was an agonising delay before the reply came back. ‘Speaking.’ The voice was faint, skirling in and out of static. ‘It’s been a long time, Four.’ ‘I know.’ It was a woman’s voice, one the Inquisitor knew very well. ‘How are you keeping, Inquisitor Vuilleumier?’ ‘Work has its ups and downs.’ ‘I know the feeling. We need to meet, urgently and in person. Does your Office still have its little privileges?’ ‘Within limits.’ ‘Then I suggest you abuse them to the fullest extent. You know my current location. There is a small settlement seventy-five klicks to the southwest of me by the name of Solnhofen. I can be there within one day, at the following…’ and then she gave the Inquisitor the details of a hostelry that she had already located. The Inquisitor did her usual mental arithmetic. Via slev and road it would take in the region of two to three days to reach Solnhofen. Slev and airship would be quicker but more conspicuous: Solnhofen was not on any of the normal dirigible routes. An aircraft would be faster, of course, easily capable of reaching the meeting point within a day and a half, even if she had to take the long way around to avoid weather fronts. Normally, given an urgent request from a field agent, she would not have hesitated to fly. But this was Operative Four. She could not afford to draw undue attention to the meeting. But, she reflected, not flying would do precisely that. It was not easy. ‘Is it really so urgent?’ the Inquisitor asked, knowing what the answer would be. ‘Of course.’ The woman made an odd henlike clucking sound. ‘I wouldn’t have called otherwise, would I?’ ‘And it concerns her… the Triumvir?’ Perhaps she imagined it, but she thought she could hear a smile in the field agent’s reply. ‘Who else?’ CHAPTER 5 The comet had no name. It might once have been classified and catalogued, but not in living memory, and certainly no information relating to it was to be found in any public database. No transponder had ever been anchored to its surface; no Skyjacks had ever grappled themselves in and extracted a core sample. To all intents and purposes it was completely unremarkable, simply one member of a much larger swarm of cold drifters. There were billions of them, each following a slow and stately orbit around Epsilon Eridani. For the most part they had been undisturbed since the system’s formation. Very occasionally, a resonant perturbation of the system’s larger worlds might unshackle a few members of the swarm and send them falling in on sun-grazing orbits, but for the vast majority of comets the future would consist only of more orbits around Eridani, until the sun itself swelled up. Until then they would remain dormant, insufferably cold and still.
The comet was large, as swarm members went, but not unusually so: there were at least a million that were larger. From edge to edge it was a twenty-kilometre frozen mudball of nearly black ice; a lightly compacted meringue of methane, carbon monoxide, nitrogen and oxygen, laced with silicates, sooty hydrocarbons and a few glistening veins of purple or emerald organic macro-molecules. They had crystallised into beautiful refractive crystal seams several billion years earlier, when the galaxy was a younger and quieter place. Mostly, though, it was pitifully dark. Epsilon Eridani was merely a hard glint of light at this distance, thirteen light-hours away. It looked scarcely less remote than the brighter stars.
But humans had come, once. They had arrived in a squadron of dark spacecraft, their holds bursting with transforming machines. They had covered the comet in a caul of transparent plastic, enveloping it like a froth of digestive spit. The plastic had given the comet structural rigidity it would otherwise have lacked, but from a distance it was all but undetectable. The backscatter from radar or spectroscopic scans was only slightly compromised, and remained well within the anticipated error of Demarchist measurements. With the comet held stiff by its plastic shell, the humans had set about sapping its spin. Ion rockets, emplaced cunningly across its face, slowly bled it of angular momentum. Only when there was a small residual spin, enough to ward off suspicion, were the ion rockets quietened and the installations removed from the surface. But by then the humans had already been busy inside. They had cored out the comet, tamping eighty per cent of its interior volume into a thin, hard shell that was used to line the outer shell. The resultant chamber was fifteen kilometres wide and perfectly spherical. Concealed shafts permitted entry into the chamber from outside space, wide enough to accept a moderately large spacecraft provided the ship moved nimbly. Berthing and repair yards festered across the inner surface of the chamber like the dense grid of a cityscape, interrupted here and there by the cryo-arithmetic engines, squat black domes which studded the grid like volcanic cinder plugs. The huge engines were quantum refrigerators, sucking heat out of the local universe by computational cooling. Clavain had made the entrance transition enough times not to be alarmed by the sudden whiplash course adjustments necessary to avoid collisions with the comet’s rotating husk. At least, that was what he told himself. But the truth was he never drew breath until he was safely inside or out. It was too much like diving through the narrowing gap in a lowering portcullis. And with a ship as
