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  The AI had, superfluously, told him he was permitted to use maximum sanction. That had always been a favourite AI euphemism for murder. That permission had been implicit the moment she had drawn the weapon. Coldly, Cormac considered his options. The AI had already instructed him that the part he was playing here must be closed down immediately. Well, this effectively did just that. He could not see the rest of the cell welcoming him back after killing their leader’s sister.

  Angelina dead. Instructions?

  The delay was not so long this time. He reckoned the moon had moved above the horizon and he was now in line of direct contact.

 

  Runcible AI, why so fast?

 

  Cormac reached down and pulled the gun from Angelina’s knotted fingers. He weighed it in his hand and wondered who was supplying the Cheyne III Separatists with such items. Before this emergency recall it had been his intention to find out. No chance now. As he studied the weapon he felt a momentary flush of annoyance. He had blown it. The recall had come at an opportune moment. What the hell had he been thinking? He stared at the weapon introspectively and it took him a moment to register that all its displays had dropped to zero. It started to vibrate and emit a high-voltage whine. He shook his head. Bad enough that they were obtaining weapons with this destructive potential, but weapons that were keyed as well? From where he was kneeling, he tossed the proton gun out to sea. The whine it was emitting passed out of audio range, and it hit the water like a piece of hot iron. He watched its glow sink into the depths and disappear. Shortly after, there was a brief copper-green flash, and bubbles of steam foamed to the surface as the weapon dumped its load. Cormac watched as the bodies of whitebait floated to the surface.

 

  Cormac gazed beyond to where waves were breaking over a just-submerged reef, then he slowly stood. The breeze from the sea was cold and quickly penetrated his legs. Glancing down he saw that he had been kneeling in Angelina’s blood.

 

  Beyond the reef something large was cutting through the waves. A fluke the size of a man turned in the air, throwing up spray, and a wide black body submerged. Cormac gave a nod and looked down at the body of the woman he had made love to.

  Weapon was palm-keyed to Angelina. It self-destructed.

 

  All systems are functional.

 

  Cormac inspected himself. ‘I am unhurt,’ he said, out loud.

  * * *

  A sea breeze was carrying with it a burnt-wood smell. On the landward side of the sea wall the papyrus was all papery whispering and seed heads nodding knowingly. Here, blue herons hunted for whitebait and flounders in the straight channels between the rows of plants, and juvenile dark otters hunted the blue herons. Those otters that caught a heron only did so once; the adapted meat of this Earth-originated bird was poison to a native of Cheyne III. Cormac stared at a heron as it pulled from the grey water a flounder seemingly too large for it to swallow. With an instruction that was almost without language, he accessed wildlife information and statistics. In one corner of his visual cortex he fast-forwarded pictures of the changes terraforming had wrought here. He speed-read and downloaded a file on the introduction of the blue heron, while a commentary mumbled subliminally in the background.

  The heron, oblivious to this attention to it, flipped and turned its prey into position, and eventually gulped it down. The flounder struggled in its baggy neck as the bird moved on after other prey, dark shadows following close behind it. Cormac blinked and shook his head. He dispelled the mumbles and the access he couldn’t quite remember requesting. His arms were burning with the weight he carried. He looked down, then, after a further pause, he placed Angelina’s headless body in the passenger seat of his open-topped antigravity car. Then he turned round and went back for her head.

  I should feel something.

  What was there to feel? She had been a terrorist, and it was his duty to protect the citizens of the Polity from her like. To his knowledge she had been personally and directly responsible for three deaths. Indirectly, with her brother Arian, she had been involved with Separatist outrages that had left hundreds of Polity citizens dead or maimed. Cormac knew all about them; the statistics scrolled at the edge of his vision as he stopped by Angelina’s head, then stooped and picked it up by its long blonde hair.

  Angelina’s face was without expression, utterly relaxed in death. A shudder went through him. He felt something almost like a cringe of embarrassment. Holding her head like some grotesque handbag, he returned to the car. He opened the driver’s door and reached across to put the head in the body’s lap before he got in. Once he was in, he secured her belt before his own. He did not want her falling across the control console; she was making enough mess as it was. He had considered leaving her, but it would be better if she disappeared completely, and he knew how to achieve that; it had been one of the first things he had learnt from the Cheyne III Separatists. Cormac grimaced to himself, then pulled up on the joystick. The car rose ten metres and halted. He turned it out towards the sea and shoved the stick as far forward as it would go. This detour, to where the ocean-going dark otters swam, wouldn’t take long. It never did.

  Three minutes and he was out over water as black as oil. He looked for a sign, and soon saw a huge swirl 100 metres from him; it was an egg-carrier, and a big one. Once above it, he opened the passenger door, unclipped Angelina’s belt, and shoved her out. The carrier turned on her. A toothless mouth, as of a huge carp’s, opened and closed with a foaming splash, then the dark otter dived, its wide sleek back like a glimpse of the turning of some immense tyre.

  Cormac shook his head. Something was tense and clenched round his insides. He blinked as if in the expectation of tears. And then he surprised himself by feeling regret. He regretted that her sodium-salt-filled body might poison the dark otter. Grudgingly he acknowledged to himself that it was precisely this lack of involvement that had betrayed him. He closed the passenger door and frowned at the pool of blood on the seat. The rental company would not be happy, he thought, with a kind of tart indifference. He turned the AGC and headed at full speed for Gordonstone.

  * * *

  The system of papyrus fields, protective breakwaters, sluices and tidal channels occupied a band four kilometres wide and 140 kilometres long. Cormac glanced down as the AGC sped above a robot harvester. The machine had the appearance of a giant chrome scorpion devoid of tail and legs, and driven along by riverboat wheels. He watched it feeding papyrus into its grinding maw with its five-metre mandibles, and noted the cubic turds of compressed papyrus it left behind. He accessed and quickly learnt that the harvester was a Ferguson Multiprocessor F230 and was about twenty solstan years old. The ultra-fine fibres from the gene-spliced plant the machine harvested made a much sought-after kind of silk. It was Cheyne III’s only large export and source of foreign wealth. Of course, sources of wealth were the reason the Separatists had managed to recruit so well here.

  The seas of Cheyne III swarmed with dark otters. They were thriving despite centuries of human colonization of the land, as well as colonization of the sea by the adapted Earth lifeforms. Many colonists felt that they occupied space that could be utilized for highly commercial industrialized sea farming. It had been suggested that perhaps there could be a few less dark otters. A customized virus would do the trick. But the Polity had come down hard on that: it was against conservation strictures agreed to when Cheyne III had first been colonized. If any such virus was released, the entire population of Cheyne III would be subject to a fine which in turn would be used to fund a repopulation project. The Polity had samples of all known dark otter genes. This lack of understanding of the hardships faced by the citize
ns of Cheyne III had caused much resentment.

  Cormac looked beyond the papyrus fields to forested areas thinly scattered with villas and repromansions. It was the people who lived here who had been most resentful. They had stood to make an awful lot of money from the exploitation of the seas. The people of Gordonstone, which reared from the haze like a tiara of silver monoliths, had been resentful only when told, by those who lived in mansions and villas, what they were losing out on. The whole farrago offended Cormac deeply. He could not forgive avoidable ignorance.

  At city limits Cormac applied for computer guidance, received it, then punched in his destination on the control console. As soon as the city AI took over, he released the stick and leant back. The AGC climbed half a kilometre and accelerated past its manual governor. At this speed the city rapidly drew close, and he soon saw sprawling ground-level arcologies below the plascrete towers. These shining buildings cloaked the ground like the etchings of an integrated circuit. From this height only a green blur could be seen between the buildings, but Cormac knew that there lay endless beautiful gardens and parks, greenhouses and warm lakes, playing fields and orchards. The towers that punched up from this Eden at regular intervals rose for hundreds of storeys into the sky and contained apartments for those who preferred a less bucolic lifestyle. Every tower was an object of beauty, with its projecting balconies and conservatories and its distinctive AI-designed architecture. Strangely enough, by Earth standards, this city was not particularly well-to-do. Even so, its citizens enjoyed a lifestyle that in another age would have been viewed as nothing short of numinous.

  * * *

  Under city control the AGC decelerated as the Trust House Tower came in sight. Here was the kind of building common to Earth. It stood half a kilometre high and was in effect a self-contained city.

  The city AI put Cormac’s craft in a stacking pattern with all the others that were spiralling down to the fifty hectares of rooftop landing pads. It did not take long for the AI to bring him to the pad above one of the hotel complexes. The AGC was dropped neatly in a row of five similar vehicles enclosed by a privet box hedge. Cormac climbed out and sauntered easily to the nearby drop-shaft. Chipped amethyst crunched underfoot, and somewhere a thrush was singing its heart out.

  Cormac smiled at the first person he saw: a woman in a cat-suit and spring heels. He smiled because this should have been expected; it was a lovely day. People smile on lovely days. The woman studied him dubiously with slitted cat’s eyes. Must be back in, he thought irrelevantly, and considered, then rejected, accessing information on the latest fashions. It was only as he drew abreast of the woman that he noticed she was looking at the front of his shirt. He returned her gaze levelly, and once past her he glanced down.

  Idiot!

  The blood spattered there was not exactly a fashion accessory. He hurried to the cowled entrance of the drop-shaft, quickly hit his floor-level plate, and stepped out into open air. The irised antigravity field closed around him and controlled his descent. As floor after floor sped by him he removed his shirt and rolled it up. He had it tucked under his arm as he slowed to a halt at his own floor, and stepped out onto the sea-fibre carpeting. In moments he reached the door to his room and hit the palm-lock. It was with chagrin that he noted the bloody smear he left there as he entered. Before closing the door he wiped the smear away with his shirt.

  ‘Messages,’ he said, tossing his shirt on the floor and kicking off his shoes.

  ‘Arian Pelter commed you at 20:17, but left no message,’ the sexy voice of the Trust House AI told him. He grimaced to himself as he stripped off his trousers. It was now 20:35. Of course he did not need to see the clock to find this out. He always knew the time, to the second.

  ‘Did he leave any provisos with his message?’ Cormac asked.

  ‘Only that he be informed when you return,’ the AI replied.

  ‘Oh good,’ said Cormac.

  ‘There is a problem?’ the AI asked him.

  ‘None at all,’ said Cormac as he rolled up his discarded clothes and took them to the disposal chute in the kitchen area. He tossed the clothing in, cycled it, and quickly headed for his bathroom. The shower he turned on full and as hot as he could stand. He had the strongest soap on the list mixed into the water and the sonic cleaner going as well. It had always been his experience that blood was a complete bastard to remove.

  ‘Ian Cormac, please respond?’ the Trust House AI urged. Cormac supposed it must have been its second or third request for his attention. He shook soap from his ears and clicked the control of the shower to pure cold water. When he had taken as much of that as he could stand, he stepped from the stall and took up his towel. He did not have time to luxuriate in the warm air blast.

  ‘Yes, I’m here.’

  ‘John Stanton and Arian Pelter wish to see you. They are verified. Shall I allow them access?’

  ‘No. I do not wish to see them.’

  ‘Will there be any further message?’

  ‘No further message.’

  Cormac quickly pulled on Earth army trousers, desert boots, a hardwearing monofilament shirt and sleeveless utility jacket. This clothing was more to his liking than his dress of the last few months. He looked around and took in the comfortable form chairs and thick carpeting. That wonderful shower, a jacuzzi bath, and a bed that he had thought might be intent on eating him when he first lay on it. He suspected he would not be enjoying such comforts again for a little while. He considered the belongings he had installed here: the designer clothing dispenser, the brandy collection, the antique weapons. They were all cover; aimed to present him as a weapons merchant prepared to sell to terrorists. There was nothing much here he really wanted. From his grip he removed a small toylike gun, which he tucked into one pocket of his jacket, and a chip card, which he tucked into the other.

  ‘Ian Cormac, my apology for this interruption, but Mr. Pelter is most insistent. He informs me that he wishes to see you on a matter of great importance and urgency,’ said the House AI.

  ‘I bet he does,’ said Cormac. Of course Angelina’s brother wanted to have words with him. He had not expected him ever to return. ‘Tell me, where is he at the moment?’

  ‘He is at the inner-street level of this complex. Do you have any messages for him?’

  ‘Yes, tell him I’ll come down to him shortly.’

  ‘Message relayed,’ the AI replied, but by then Cormac was through the door.

  Cormac hit the pad for the floor immediately below the roofport and stepped into the drop-shaft. As he ascended he looked down. Pelter was supposedly twenty floors below him, but Cormac had never put much faith in what low-level AIs told him; they were too easily fooled. He stepped out into the penthouse area of the House. Here the apartments were spread out like bungalows, with glass-roofed gardens in between. He knew that the roofport was directly above him, and supposed that light was refracted in from the side of the building to the gardens. It produced an interesting effect, but not one he wanted to ponder for too long. He quickly headed to the nearest stairwell to the roof, pulled out his thin-gun, and ascended very quietly.

  John Stanton was a bruiser with a surprising intellect. He appeared a complete thug, with his boosted musculature, reinforced skeleton and red-fuzzed neckless dome of a head. However, apart from the man’s mercenary approach to life, Cormac liked him. He also found it easy to recognize him from behind, and John was unfortunate in choosing the top of that particular stairwell for cover.

  Cormac kept his gun zeroed on the red dome of Stanton’s head as he climbed the stairs with utter control, and in utter silence. Stanton did not react until Cormac was only a pace away from him. Then he turned, saw Cormac and, because he had no weapon immediately to hand, launched a heel-of-the-hand strike. Cormac pulled back, looped his own arms round Stanton’s arm, his gun hand above and his other arm below, twisted his body and scissored his arms. The bones of Stanton’s arm broke with a loud crack. He had no time to yell as, off-balance, he slammed headf
irst into the side of the stairwell. Stanton went down, tried to rise. Cormac smashed the heel of his left hand down and Stanton went down again and stayed down, his breathing laboured. Cormac stepped back and pointed his weapon at Stanton’s head. He thought about Angelina, then turned the gun aside. The Separatist movement could recruit the likes of Stanton whenever they wanted. He convinced himself he let the man live for purely logical reasons.

  From the vantage point of the stairwell there was no sign of any suspicious characters, though there were plenty of people wandering to and from the many AGCs ranged along the roof. Cormac turned back to Stanton and pulled open his coat. He raised an eyebrow at the nasty-looking pulse-gun concealed there. It was large for such a weapon, and had been moulded in the shape of a Luger. He took it out and removed its charge: double canister. This was the kind of weapon that fired pulses of ionized aluminium dust. Good for close work. He tossed both the charge and gun itself down the stairwell before searching the man again. The comunit he had expected to find was half the size of a chip card. It was also DNA locked. Cormac swore quietly and tossed it to one side, and then he looked back out towards the roofport. Still no sign of Pelter. Cormac moved out of cover and walked casually over to the nearest AGC.

  ‘That’s about as far as you go, Agent.’

  Cormac threw himself forward, firing off one shot towards the voice as he hit the ground. A double flash exploded amethyst chips just fractionally behind him. He came up in a crouch and fired at a ducking figure, then dived behind a Ford Macrojet. Another flash and the vehicle’s boot blew open. Cormac realized he’d backed himself into a corner, and immediately jumped onto the roof of the Ford, then over the adjacent hedge. More flashes—and the smell of burning wood.