'Ethics? He lied to us about our baby '

'We don't know '

' I know! I know! ' '

'What are you going to do?'

'I'm going to see if he's left his databook lying around.'

'You can't just '

She grasped him by the collar and glared hard into his frightened eyes. He fidgeted nervously in her grip, unable to meet her stare.

'I can do anything,' she told him. 'Anything at all to get to the truth about our baby. If you don't want to help, go back home and I'll see you there later.'

He took a deep breath, waved his arms in a gesture of compliance, and finally nodded slowly with a resigned and rather silly look on his face.

105.

'If anybody comes, just act like we're supposed to be here. If you persist in looking so neurotic you're going to draw attention to us.'

Josef s nodding intensified. Stuffing his hands into his pockets he strolled around a bit, obviously trying to pull himself together. Then he returned to her side and continued to dance from foot to foot in a state of agitation while she worked.

'Would you stop doing that?' she asked. 'We're comptechs. n.o.body's going to question us fixing a faulty door com.'

The door swept open and she awarded him a satisfied grin.

'You keep an eye out,' she hissed. 'If he comes back. . . do something.'

'Do what?'

'Oh, I don't know. Create a diversion.'

She left him gawking up and down the corridor and plunged inside the apartment to find it lit with dull pools of yellow illumination. As she made her way into the empty living area, she wondered for a moment if she was doing the right thing after all. Despite all the evidence she'd found about the medicare staff changes, she could be making a big mistake. Maybe there was some simple, honest explanation for it all, and for Pryce's distinct edginess when she contacted him today. Maybe, as Josef had pointed out, medicare was simply covering up a truth that was too unpalatable for them to be subjected to. Maybe she ought to leave the whole thing alone. If Joby really were dead, knowing the whole truth might only hurt them both even more.

Yet something was driving her on. Many fractured jigsaw pieces that added up to an as yet unrecognisable picture: the look on Pryce's face when she called him; the fact that Military One were not only still in charge of Medicare Central, but had suddenly intensified their grip today; and the dreams. The dreams of a child still alive.

A child still alive. . .

That was a possibility she couldn't shake out of her brain.

The living area was tidy but pretty much empty. It was the room of a man living alone, but a man who spent little time at home. Everything had its place, and Pryce was clearly a fastidiously tidy person. That meant that his databook should be in the study along with any other work backups he might store there. Looking at the scarcity of family pictures in the room, Veta felt that Pryce probably spent a good deal of his spare time in his study.

The layout of Pryce's apartment was similar to Veta's own, and she found the study where the nursery was situated in their apartment. The light was on and the room was bright. She felt a stab of panic when she thought suddenly that 106he might well be in there, perhaps working and deliberately ignoring the door.

She stopped in the hall and listened, but there was only silence.

As she pushed open the door, the panic returned when she saw him slumped over his desk with his back to her. For a second she was frozen with fear, but as the panic pa.s.sed she saw that he was preternaturally still. Not even the rhythm of breathing. There was no response at all to the sound of the door sc.r.a.ping the carpet. He didn't move a muscle.

Then she saw the blood on the desktop. The blood from his wrists that had puddled under him and dripped on to the carpet below his seat.

She continued to stand and stare, unable to propel herself into action for a moment that seemed like forever, before she stepped forward into the room and leaned over to see his face. It was Pryce. His eyes were open and staring, his face and lips blue. He was leaning on his arms as if resting, and the blood had soaked into his sleeves. There were claggy damp patches in his hair where it trailed into the pooled blood on his desktop. Veta could see an old-fashioned metal scalpel lying discarded by his side, and the comp light was on, although the unit had closed itself down.

She found a remote keypad on a shelf under the desk and used it to reactivate the machine. The hologram opened above the desk to reveal Pryce's usage record for this afternoon. The bottom lines of the history intersected Pryce's head, and Veta had to adjust the hologram to raise it higher into the air so she could read it. Scrolling through the log, she found his last action, and caught her breath when she realised what it was.

The last thing Pryce ever did was to take the call from her.

When Colonel Peron arrived for duty the handover crew reported that Dr Domecq had retired to rest in the hospitality suite. He'd spent the entire day on Pryce's computer, however, and she was intrigued to discover what he'd been looking at.

Pryce's office was empty when she arrived, despite the fact that he was supposed to be on duty from almost an hour ago. Activating his desktop, Peron located the machine's audit folder and opened it up. The hologram above the desk was instantly filled with lines of information, and Peron was immediately shocked at the sheer volume of data Domecq had reviewed. Surely it wasn't humanly possible for one person to read this amount of material in one day.

He'd spent the first couple of hours trawling through Pryce's prenatal records on the Manni baby. He'd looked at scans and genetic sweeps, bio-profiles and a whole lot of detailed stuff on the foetal development. After the first two 107 hours, it seemed he'd spent the next hour and a half constructing some virtual experiments on zygotic maturation. He'd tried bombarding the cells with all manner of radiation and other influences, including some attempted spatio-temporal contortions that the comps had rejected as unprogrammable. The results that those investigations alone had thrown up would take a whole team of medical professionals weeks to a.n.a.lyse fully. Domecq had spent less than twenty minutes looking through them.

He'd then reviewed the hormonal correlation already conducted by the medicare comps. He'd spent seventy minutes looking at embryonic evolution in general, but another forty minutes looking specifically at one particular day in the Manni baby's in-uterine life. He'd spent some time reviewing the same day in the development of all the other eleven babies, and Peron had to a.s.sume that he'd discovered something vital on that day.

However, that was where the audit trail ended and Peron was forced to follow a tenuous string of data that took her on a circuitous route to a dump file logged in the comp's bin-memory. The file was unnamed, simply represented as a featureless blue icon. The comp warned her that she needed a pa.s.sword to enter, and she regarded the icon furiously as she considered what might be in there.

Domecq had spent about three-quarters of the day investigating the creatures, but what had he done with the rest of his day? Thinking back to Pryce's ridiculous acceptance of the man's ident.i.ty Peron decided that she needed to get inside the dump file, and she instructed the comp to start work on cracking the pa.s.sword, giving the task Priority One clearance.

Instantly, the blue icon began to dissolve with a small sound effect like a sc.r.a.ping, wheezing noise. After a second or so of fading in and out of comp memory, it was gone without trace. Peron simply sat and stared in surprise at the hologram above Pryce's desk, before she slammed the desktop with her fist and put a call through to Military One.

The head and shoulders of a military receptionist materialised above the desk to replace the displayed contents of Pryce's comp bin. The young man snapped to attention when he realised who was calling.

'Colonel Peron. Can I help you, sir?'

'I understand Dr Domecq has retired to hospitality. Can you tell me where he is at the moment?'

The receptionist's eyes flicked right and a faint frown line appeared on his brow. She watched his shoulders move about as he fed the request into the sec comp. The frown line deepened and he met her eyes again with a hint of 108distress.

'I'm sorry, sir. We don't appear to have a trace on Dr Domecq at the moment.'

'Right,' Peron said, 'let me know the moment he turns up on the system.'

The receptionist was in the middle of responding when Peron cut the call to replace it with another to Gaskill Tyran. Tyran's head unfolded almost instantaneously in front of her.

'Colonel,' Tyran said. He was smiling, looking quite pleased with himself.

'Sir,' Peron said, 'we have a probable security breach.'

'I take it you're referring to the ubiquitous Dr Domecq?'

'He's been rooting around the comp system. Deliberately covered his tracks.

Seems to know what he's doing. Could have been anywhere.'

'Where is he now?'

'Unknown.'

The smile was deteriorating fast in Tyran's features. 'Can you find him?'

'I think I probably can,' Peron told him.

'I'd like you to bring him straight to me, please. I'd like to get his report on what exactly he's discovered today.'

'Yes, sir.'

'Thank you, Colonel,' Tyran said, cancelling the call from his end.

Bringing up the readings they'd taken from Domecq when he was first admitted to medicare, Peron put a com call direct to Captain Foley.

Foley's head snapped into the air beside Domecq's readout.

'Colonel?'

'Captain. Report to Medicare Central. My office. And bring a detector.'

'Yessir.'

The head snapped out of existence and Peron prepared Domecq's readings to be downloaded into Foley's device. As her fingers worked expertly among the controls, a smile wormed its way across her face.

'You might think you can run, Doctor, but you certainly can't hide. . . '

Bains returned to his apartment with little remaining trace of his earlier injuries except for a vague kind of rawness around the ribs and a grumbling suggestion of a headache. What he actually felt more than any physical discomfort was a sense of astonishment. Considering the knowledge he possessed, and, perhaps more to the point, his determination to expound that information at any cost, he simply couldn't understand why he was still alive to tell his tale.

The thought struck him that he shouldn't question providence. He should be grateful for his life and keep his head low. Perhaps WorldCorp was gambling 109 Bains would reciprocate and abandon his cause, accept Tyran's pay-off and disappear to another a.s.signment as far away as possible from Ceres Alpha. If that was the case, then WorldCorp wasn't as shrewd a judge of character as it should be.

When he let himself into his apartment, Bains was puzzled to see that the lights were on. He remembered turning them off when he'd left last night, and he was very much a man of habit when it came to conserving energy.

Hanging his jacket by the door, he stepped into the living area to find it littered with his folders, handwritten records and reams of printouts. They were all scattered across the floor in what at first appeared to be a mess, but which Bains realised very quickly was no such thing. There were heaps of diaries that he could see at a glance were stacked in date order, and the other doc.u.ments seemed to be fanned out in thematic sequence. A panoramic 2-D image of the main cave he'd discovered was arranged on his sofa, and other images were dotted around the room, most of them lying on the floor, but some stuck up on his walls.

As he gazed about in bewilderment, a.s.suming that WorldCorp was about to instigate a spring clean for him, he sensed motion at the back of the room and discovered the Doctor standing in the kitchen doorway. The man smiled warmly and swept across the room to greet him like an old friend, grasping Bains by the hand and shaking it enthusiastically.

'Professor Bains. So nice to see you again. How are you feeling?'

Bains stared at him, briefly lost for words. 'Fine, thanks. What are you doing here? How did you get in?'

'Please,' the Doctor said, all apology, 'forgive the intrusion. But you were still under anaesthetic and I really needed to make a start.'

Bains indicated the mess in the room. 'A start?'

The Doctor raised his hand to show Bains the small carved stone that Bains had thrown on to the desk in Tyran's office. Bains's hand shot to his pocket where he kept the stone at all times. The Doctor was grinning like a child.

'This is most fascinating, you know. The detail. The craftsmanship. How do you think they were able to work in such minute detail?'

Bains shook his head. The images on the stone were so tiny that you could only really appreciate them if you used a magnifying gla.s.s. But all the evidence he'd uncovered suggested a very rudimentary civilisation without technology to speak of.

'I think they didn't use their eyes,' the Doctor suggested, seemingly playing around with a theory. 'I think they may well have worked in a kind of trance 110state, producing these images through precise accident.'

'Precise accident?'

'But the thing that really fascinates me is the shape,' the Doctor said, moving swiftly on. 'What do you think of this shape?'

Bains shrugged as he watched the Doctor grasp the little finger of his right hand with the thumb, pressing the two outer digits into his palm. He placed the stone between the three remaining fingers and Bains could only shake his head.

The Doctor was grinning again, seemingly afflicted by a bout of effervescence.

'I think it's designed to be held comfortably by someone who happens to have three fingers, wouldn't you agree?'

'I thought it was decorative,' Bains said. 'Perhaps with some religious rele-vance.'

'Do you know what I think?'

Bains didn't.

'I think,' the Doctor said, 'that we need to have a good look at the site of your dig.'

Bains felt as if he'd been kicked in the teeth. He was still recovering from his last attempt, and he didn't particularly feel like trying again while his ego, if not exactly his body now, was still so freshly bruised.

'If you can get my archaeology permit renewed, I'd be very glad to show you.'

Shadow pa.s.sed through the Doctor's sunshine face. 'I had in mind a more. . .

informal visit.'

'Tried that,' said Bains, making his way towards the kitchen at the back of the room. 'Doesn't work.'

'Oh, but I'm something of an expert at clandestine operations,' the Doctor informed him. 'I can get us there and back tonight before they even realise we've gone.'

Bains left him standing there in the middle of the apartment and stepped through the kitchen to prepare himself a cup of tea. As he worked, he heard the Doctor enter behind him.

'I can understand your reluctance. . . ' the Doctor began.

Bains cut across him. 'I'm very grateful for what you did for me in Tyran's office,' he said, 'but I really don't think I can face any more confrontations like that before I've had a good night's rest. D'you mind if we talk about this in the morning?'

'I'm afraid I don't know how much time we have.'

Bains deposited two cups in the oven and programmed hot tea, determined that he wasn't going to be rushed into rash action he'd very quickly regret. He'd 111 get his own back on WorldCorp, all right, but there was a place and a time for direct action, and right here and now weren't either of them.

'I have no doubts now that my dig will be destroyed,' he confided. 'But I've collected a good deal of evidence already to make a case to Earth Central for a full investigation. I've decided that I can only work through formal channels.

WorldCorp are going to face the music, but it's going to have to be official.'

Removing the cups from the oven, he offered one to the Doctor. The Doctor gazed at the cup without taking it. After a moment's silence, Bains found the Doctor's eyes on his, and they were full of what he could only imagine to be disappointment.

'No, thank you,' he said. 'I'd better be on my way.'

As he turned to leave, Bains felt a pang of regret. 'On your way where?'