mathematical exercise in optimal packing. Clavain was webbed into the pilot’s position, with tactile controls and visual read-outs within easy reach. The ship could be flown without blinking an eyelid, but it was also designed to withstand the kind of cybernetic assault that might impair routine neural commands. Clavain flew it via tactile control in any case, though he had barely moved a finger in hours. Tactical summaries jostled his visual field, competing for attention, but there had been no hint of enemy activity within six light-hours.Immediately to his rear, with their knees parallel to his shoulders, lay Remon-toire and Skade. They were slotted into human-shaped spaces between the inner surfaces of weapons pods or fuel blisters and, like Clavain, they wore lightweight spacesuits. The black armoured surfaces of the suits reduced them to abstract extensions of the corvette’s interior. There was barely room for the suits, but there was even less room to put them on.Skade?note 140I think it’s safe to tell me where we’re headed now, isn’t it?Qust follow the flight plan and we’ll arrive there in good time. The Master of Works will be expecting us.]Master of Works? Anyone I’ve met ? He caught the sly curve of Skade’s smile, reflected in the corvette’s window.note 141He didn’t need to be told that wherever they were going was still in the same part of the cometary halo that contained the Mother Nest. There was nothing out here but vacuum and comets, and even the comets were scarce. The Conjoiners had turned some comets into decoys to lure in the enemy, and had placed sensors, booby-traps and jamming systems on others, but he was not aware of any such activities taking place so close to home.He tapped into systemwide newsfeeds as they flew. Only the most partisan enemy agencies pretended that there was any chance of a Demarchist victory now. Most of them were talking openly of defeat, though it was always worded in more ambiguous terms: cessation of hostilities; concession to some enemy demands; reopening of negotiations with the Conjoiners … the litany went on and on, but it was not difficult to read between the lines.Attacks against Conjoiner assets had grown less and less frequent, with a commensurately dwindling success rate. Now the enemy was concentrating on protecting its own bases and strongholds, and even there they were failing. Most of the bases needed to be resupplied with provisions and armaments from the main production centres, which meant convoys of robot craft strung out on long, lonely trajectories across the system. The Conjoiners picked them off with ease; it was not even worth capturing their cargoes. The Demarchists had launched crash programmes to recover some of the expertise in nano-fabrication they had enjoyed before the Melding Plague, but the rumours coming out of their war labs hinted at grisly failures; of whole research teams turned into grey slurry by runaway replicators. It was like the twenty- first century all over again.And the more desperate they got, the worse the failures became.Conjoiner occupation forces had successfully seized a number of outlying settlements and quickly established puppet regimes, enabling day-to-day life to continue much as it had before. They had not so far embarked on mass neural conversion programmes, but their critics said it would only be a matter of time before the populaces were subjugated by Conjoiner implants, enslaved into their crushingly uniform hive mind. Resistance groups had made several damaging strikes against Conjoiner power in those puppet states, with loose alliances of Skyjacks, pigs, banshees and other systemwide ne’er-do-wells banding together against the new authority. All they were doing, Clavain thought, was hastening the likelihood that some form of neural conscription would have to take place, if only for the public good.But so far Yellowstone and its immediate environs — the Rust Belt, the high-orbit habitats and carousels and the starship parking swarms — had not been contested. The Ferrisville Convention, though it had its own problems, was still maintaining a facade of control. It had long suited both sides to have a neutral zone, a place where spies could exchange information and where covert agents from both sides could mingle with third parties and sweet-talk possible collaborators, sympathisers or defectors. Some said that even this was only a temporary state of affairs; that the Conjoiners would not stop at occupying most of the system; they had held Yellowstone for a few short decades and would not throw away a chance to claim her for good. Their earlier occupation had been a pragmatic intervention at the invitation of the Demarchisfs, but the second would be an exercise in totalitarian control like nothing history had seen for centuries.So it was said. But what if even that was a hopelessly optimistic forecast?Skade had told him that the signals from the lost weapons had been detected more than thirty years earlier. The memories he had been given and the data he now had access to confirmed her story. But there was no explanation for why the recovery of the weapons had suddenly become a matter of vital urgency to the Mother Nest. Skade had said that the war had made it difficult to stage an attempt any sooner than now, but that was surely only part of the truth. There had to be something else: a crisis, or the threat of a crisis, which made the recovery of the weapons vastly more important than it had been before. Something had scared the Inner Sanctum.Clavain wondered if Skade — and by implication the Inner Sanctum — knew something about the wolves that he had yet to be told. Since Galiana’s return, the wolves had been classified as a disturbing but distant threat, something to worry about only when humankind began to push deeper into interstellar space. But what if some new intelligence had been received? What if the wolves were closer?He wanted to dismiss the idea, but found himself unable to do so. For the remainder of the trip his thoughts circled like vultures, examining the idea from every angle, mentally stripping it to the bone. It was only when Skade again pushed her thoughts into his head that he forced himself to bury his internal enquiries beneath conscious thought.note 142Of course. I hope you were discreet about whatever you were doing out here. If you’d drawn the enemy’s attention you could have compromised everything.note 143That’s not the point. There weren’t supposed to be any operations within ten light-hours of—note 144 She leaned forwards from the tight confines of her seat, the restraint webbing taut against the black curves of her spacesuit. note 145Don’t underestimate the Demarchists.note 146Does it have to be recovery? Or would you settle for destruction ? Clavain watched her reaction carefully. Even after his admittance to the Closed Council Skade’s mind was closed to him.note 147You told me that your main objective