that unusual a name on Resurgam.’ The driver coughed. ‘Solnhofen,’ he said dubiously, as if it was a place he had barely heard of. ‘Yes, Solnhofen. It’s a small settlement up that road. In fact it’s the first one you’re going to hit if you head in that direction for more than about five minutes. Who knows, you may even have passed through it once or twice.’ ‘Solnhofen’s a bit off my route, love.’ ‘Is it? That’s funny. I was under the impression that the route, as you put it, pretty much consisted of a straight line right through Solnhofen. Difficult to imagine how anything could be “off” it, unless we’ve abandoned the idea of being on a road at all.’ She fished out some money and was about to lay it on the food-strewn table when she thought better of it. Instead she just waved it in front of the drivers, the notes crisp in her leather-gloved hand. ‘Here’s the deal: half of this now to any driver who can promise me a trip to Solnhofen; a quarter more if we leave within the next thirty minutes; the remainder if we arrive in Solnhofen before sun-up.’ ‘I could take you,’ one the drivers said. ‘But it’s difficult at this time of year. I think I’d…’ ‘The offer’s non-negotiable.’ She had made a decision not to try to ingratiate herself with them. She had known before she took a step into the roadhouse that none of them would like her. They could smell government a mile off and none of them, financial incentives aside, really wanted to share a cabin with her all the way to Solnhofen. Frankly, she could not blame them for that. Government officials of any stripe made the average person’s skin crawl. If she had not been the Inquisitor she would have been terrified of herself. The money worked wonders, however, and within twenty minutes she was sitting in the elevated cab of a cargo hauler, watching the lights of Audubon fall back into the dusk. The rig was only carrying one container, and the combination of light lading and the cushioning effect of the house-sized road wheels leant the motion a soporific yawing. The cabin was well heated and silent, and the driver preferred to play music rather than engage her in pointless conversation. For the first few minutes she had watched as he drove, observing the way the rig needed only occasional human intervention to stay locked on the road. Doubtless it could have managed with none at all, were it not for local union laws. Very rarely another rig or string of rigs whipped past in the night, but for the most part the journey felt like a trek into endless uninhabited darkness. On her lap was the newspaper containing the story about Thorn, and she read the article several times as she grew more fatigued, her eyes stumbling over the same leaden paragraphs. The article portrayed Thorn’s movement as a gang of violent terrorists obsessed with bringing down the government for no other reason than to plunge the colony into anarchy. It made only passing mention of the fact that Thorn’s avowed aim was to find a way to evacuate Resurgam, using the Triumvir’s ship. But the Inquisitor had read enough of Thorn’s statements to know his position on the matter. Ever since the days of Sylveste, successive governments had downplayed any suggestions that the colony might be unsafe, liable to suffer the same extinction event that had wiped out the Amarantin nearly a million years earlier. Over time, and especially in the dark, desperate years that had followed the collapse of the Girardieau regime, the idea of the colony being destroyed in some sudden cataclysmic episode had been quietly erased from public debate. Even mentioning the Amarantin, let alone what had happened to them, was the sort of thing that got one branded a troublemaker. Yet Thorn was right. The threat might not be imminent, but it had certainly not gone away. It was true that he struck against government targets, but usually the strikes were surgical and considered, with the minimum of civilian casualties. Sometimes they were intended to publicise his movement, but more often than not their function was the theft of government property or funds. Bringing the administration down was a necessary part of Thorn’s plan, but not the primary goal. Thorn believed that the Triumvir’s ship was still in the system; he also believed that the government knew where it was and how to reach it. His movement claimed that the government had two functioning shuttles with the capability to make repeated flights between Resurgam and Nostalgia for Infinity . Thorn’s plan, therefore, was simple enough. He would first locate the shuttles, something he claimed he was close to doing. Then he would bring down the government, or at least enough of it to enable the shuttles to be seized. Then it would be up to the people to make their way to the agreed exodus point, where the shuttles would make round trips between surface and orbit. The last part would presumably involve the complete overthrow of the existing regime, but Thorn repeatedly stated that he wished his goal to be achieved as bloodlessly as possible. Very little of that desire came through in the government-sanctioned article. Thorn’s goal was glossed over, the idea of a threat to Resurgam made to seem faintly ludicrous. Thorn was portrayed as deranged and egotistical, while the numbers of civilian deaths associated with his activities were greatly exaggerated. The Inquisitor studied the portrait. She had never met Thorn, though she knew a great deal about him. The picture bore only a very vague likeness to the real man, but Internal Threats had accepted its plausibility all the same. She was pleased with that. ‘I wouldn’t waste your time with that rubbish,’ the driver said, when she had just nodded off properly. The sod’s dead.‘ She blinked awake. ‘What?’ ‘Thorn.’ He poked a thick finger into the paper spread across her lap. ‘The one in the picture.’ She wondered if the driver had deliberately kept silent until she was asleep, whether this was a little game he played with his passengers to amuse himself through the journey. ‘I don’t know that Thorn’s dead,’ she answered. ‘I mean, I haven’t read anything in the papers or heard anything on the news that says so…’ ‘The government shot him. He didn’t call himself Thorn for nothing, you know.’ ‘How could they have shot him if they don’t even know where he is?’ ‘They do, though. That’s the point. They just don’t want us to know that he’s dead yet.’ “They”?‘ The government, love. Keep up.‘ He was toying with her, she suspected. He might have guessed that she was from the government, but he might also have guessed that she had no time to report minor instances of wayward thought. ‘So if they’ve shot him,’ she said, ‘why don’t they announce the fact? Thousands of people think Thorn’s going to lead them into the Promised Land.’ ‘Yes, but the only thing worse than a martyr is a dead martyr. There’d be a lot more trouble if word got around that he was really dead.’ She shrugged and folded the paper. ‘Well, I’m not really sure that he ever existed. Maybe it suited the government to create a fictitious hope figure, just so that they could clamp down on the population even more effectively. You don’t really believe all the stories, do you?’ ‘About him finding a way to lead us off Resurgam? No. Nice if it happened, I suppose. Get rid of all the whiners, for a start.’ ‘Is that really your attitude? That the only people who want to leave Resurgam are whiners?’ ‘Sorry, love. I can tell which side of the fence you’d come down on. But some of us actually like it on this planet. No offence.’
