Mellanie waited in the middle of the pen, still in her nurse’s uniform, arms folded huffily across her chest, an incensed expression welded into place.
Paula told the police to open the gate. Mellanie remained resolutely in place.
“I thought we could talk on the way back,” Paula said. Somehow she didn’t have any scruples about setting the girl up. Mellanie, she guessed, had involved herself in a great deal of illicit activity to get into the Saffron Clinic.
“Do you know how long I’ve been waiting here?”
“To the second, actually. Why?”
Mellanie glared at her.
“If you prefer, you can stay here,” Hoshe said generously. “The police will process you in due course. They are quite busy after tonight.”
Mellanie let out a dangerous growl. “I can’t access the unisphere.”
“We have blocker systems active down here,” Hoshe said. “They’re quite effective, aren’t they?”
Mellanie switched her stare to Paula. “Where?”
“Where what?” Paula asked.
“You said we’d talk on the way back. Back where?”
“Earth. We have tickets for the next express. First class.”
“Fine. Whatever.” Mellanie stomped out through the open gate. “Where’s the car?”
Hoshe gestured politely to the ramp. “Outside.”
Mellanie flounced in disgust at their incompetence. She headed for the ramp with long impatient strides. Paula and Hoshe exchanged a bemused glance behind her back, and set off after her. Hoshe’s four black cases trundled along behind him.
The ramp came out directly on the street beyond the Greenford Tower’s plaza. Mellanie paused in confusion at the scene outside. Paula and Hoshe stood on either side of her. The remaining reporters flocked toward the nearest section of the barricades, and started shouting questions.
Paula’s virtual vision showed her several heavily encrypted messages arriving in Mellanie’s address port as they emerged from the blocking field. The girl sent two.
Tridelta police still had Allwyn Street sealed off for six blocks around the skyscraper. All the ambulances had departed, leaving the fire department crews and bots to clear up the aftermath of the explosion. The eight cars closest to Renne’s taxi were burnt-out wrecks, shunted across the road to smash into the buildings; a further twenty vehicles were buckled and broken. A big crane was lifting them onto waiting trailers. Civic cleaning bots were washing the blood off the pavement. There had been a lot of people in the open-air bars nearby. GPbots were moving along the facades, sweeping up the piles of broken glass.
“Oh, God,” Mellanie mumbled. She stared at the devastation, then twisted around to look back at the Greenford Tower.
“I told you it was an unsafe environment,” Paula said.
A big police van pulled up beside them. The door slid open, and they climbed in. The cases rolled into the luggage compartment.
“I remember Randtown,” Mellanie said in a quiet voice as the van drove off. “I hoped I’d forgotten, but that just made it all come back. It was awful.”
Paula decided the girl was genuinely upset. “Death on this scale is never easy.”
Hoshe was looking out of the window, his face expressionless.
“Did your people get hurt?” Mellanie asked.
“Some of them, yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“They knew the risks, just like you did. They’ll all be re-lifed.”
“If there’s anything left to be re-lifed into.”
“We’ll make sure there is.”
***
The police van got them to the CST station in plenty of time before the express was due to depart. A cool breeze blew through the cavernous structure, coming straight off the Logrosan, which ran along the side of the smallest marshaling yard Paula had seen in the Commonwealth. Illuminatus didn’t export any bulk products, it only manufactured small high-technology items. The marshaling yard was set up primarily for receiving food imports; without any arable land on the planet, every meal had to be brought in on the goods trains. She wondered what would happen if the Primes struck here. Or worse, on Piura, the Big15 world to which it was connected. If Illuminatus was cut off from the Commonwealth, it would go bad very quickly for the population of the trapped city.
When she looked along the platform, the other waiting passengers scrupulously avoided eye contact. The station wasn’t exactly busy, but there were more people than usual for this time in the morning. Several families stood huddled together, complete with drowsy children. After the news of the starships, they’d obviously been thinking hard about the consequences of a Prime attack.
Mellanie rubbed at her arms; the cool air was raising goose bumps. “I feel stupid in this,” she muttered. Her nurse’s uniform had short sleeves.
“Here.” Hoshe took off his sweater and held it out to her.
She flashed him a grateful smile. “Thank you.” It was baggy on her, but she stopped shivering.
The express slid silently into the station along its maglev track. They boarded the first-class carriage, where they had a reserved compartment.
“Which Earth station are we going to?” Mellanie asked.
“London,” Hoshe said.
“I thought you were based in Paris.”
Paula gave her an enigmatic smile. “It depends.” She told her e-butler to open one of the pouches in her belt. A Bratation spindlefly dropped out and began to scuttle up the wall. Its gossamer thread extruded behind it as Paula walked along the carriage’s narrow corridor, maintaining the secure connection. The compartment contained thick leather couches on either side of a walnut-veneered table. Mellanie flopped down into one with a hefty sigh, curling her legs up and pulling the sweater down over her knees. She had her face up close to the window, like a child peering into a shop display. Paula and Hoshe sat opposite her. The black cases arranged themselves on either side of the door.
After a couple of minutes, the express eased out of the station and began to pick up speed as it headed for the gateway.
“What happened to the lawyers?” Mellanie asked.
“Bodyloss,” Paula told her. “Our medical forensic teams will try to recover their memorycells, but given the damage level it doesn’t look good.” She checked the image she was getting from the spindlefly, which showed her a black and white fish-eye-lens view of the corridor from the ceiling. Her skin tingled as they passed through the pressure curtain. A warm salmon-pink light shone in through the compartment’s window, and the express accelerated hard across Piura’s massive station yard.
“They were the one lead I had back to the Cox,” Mellanie said.
“Yes, me, too.”
Mellanie looked surprised. “You did believe me!”
“I do now. We uncovered a Starflyer agent in my old Paris office. He’d been manipulating information for quite some time. The Cox case was one of them.”
“Did you catch him?”
“No,” Paula said. It was a heavy admission, but she’d talked to Alic Hogan before the paramedics put him under. Treetops had been worse than the Greenford Tower.
“So we still don’t have any proof that the Starflyer exists,” Mellanie said.
“The case against it is building.” Paula’s virtual vision flashed a small square of text. The management routines in the carriage arrays were shutting down all their communications functions. The spindlefly showed her the door that led through to the next first-class carriage being opened. She exchanged a glance with Hoshe, who nodded subtly.
“But not conclusive,” Mellanie said sullenly. “That’s what you’re going to say.”
“No. And we’re running out of time.”
“How do you figure that?”
“The war is not going well for the Commonwealth. Our starships were defeated at Hell’s Gateway.” A girl was walking along the carriage’s corridor toward their compartment. Paula’s heart began to speed up. A tactical grid flipped up into her virtual vision; she prepped several icons for immediate activation.
“Yeah. I guess the rich will be taking off in their lifeboats pretty soon.”
“I expect they will. More importantly, according to the Guardians, the Starflyer will leave once it has arranged for our destruction. Unless we can move against it soon, it will have gone.”
“So just stop it going back to Far Away,” Mellanie said. “Put a guard on the Boongate gateway to Half Way.”
“I would have to convince my political allies such a move was justified.” Through the spindlefly’s artificial senses, Paula saw the girl standing outside their compartment.
Mellanie took a deep breath. “I know about some more Starflyer agents, if you’ll believe me this time.”
“You are very well informed.”
A focused disruptor field hit the compartment door, which instantly shattered. Mellanie screamed in shock, flinging herself down. Paula and Hoshe activated their force field skeletons. Isabella Halgarth stepped in through the dagger shards of the door frame. A force field sparkled around her.
“It’s her,” Mellanie yelled. “It’s Isabella! She’s one of them.”
Isabella raised her right arm. The flesh on her forearm flowed, parting in several places like lipless mouths.
Paula triggered the cage. Curving force field petals sprang out of the cases on each side of Isabella, closing around her and squeezing tight. She grimaced, as if mildly puzzled. Then she tried to move, squirming inside the constricting petals. Her movements were mechanical as each boosted muscle tried to push her body free. A series of apertures opened in her skin along both arms, allowing dark stubby muzzles to protrude. She started firing ion bolts and masers.
Streamers of energy lashed across the cage, grounding out in the floor of the compartment. Smoke began to leak upward. The shimmering petals slowly brightened to a threatening azure.
“Ready?” Paula shouted above the screech of the wild discharges. She held up a dump-web, and as Hoshe nodded she slapped it against Isabella’s back. The
