She glanced at the door, wondering how much time she had.

'Things are getting very edgy here now. They've been bad and getting worse for months '

'That's not my my fault. . . ' fault. . . '

'Can you imagine the amount of dollars and man-hours that go into a project like this? People put their lives and the lives of their children into terraforming. It's a multigenerational pursuit. When it goes wrong, people can get very trigger-happy. If they can't find a reason, they'll find a scapegoat.'

'I have no idea what you're talking about,' he said.

'What d'you know about pedology?'

'The study of feet?'

'Soils! The chemical properties are changing. We engineer the chemistry, reconst.i.tute the soil with our own seeds and microbiology. With the atmosphere 133 here it should have been a simple task. We should have been growing crops since months ago. But no. The rhizosphere seems to be constantly morphing at molecular level. We've been monitoring the changes with spectrometers, but the phylogenies of the micro-organisms are just mystifying. It's as if whatever we do to the soil, it automatically reverts back to its original state.'

'I love it when you talk dirty,' he grinned.

Jamming the keys into his hand, she pushed him off the bunk. She grasped a scalpel and knelt in the corner by the wall, cutting just enough canvas to let him through. Immediately, the wind tore in through the gap, causing a small sandstorm in the corner.

Fitz dropped to his knees beside her.

'Turn right and follow the perimeter of the base. You'll see the bug on the left parked just beyond the main door about two hundred metres along.'

He was about to squeeze through the gap when she grasped his shoulder.

'You'll need my pa.s.scode to get the bug started.'

'Pa.s.scode?'

'Goldfinch.'

'Goldfinch.'

After pushing him out through the gap, she was rising when he popped back through and grasped her arm, tugging her back to her knees. He watched her with a look of confusion.

'How do I get to the city?'

'You can't miss the tracks it's leaving,' she told him, swiftly becoming exasperated.

This looking stunned was becoming a habit. He did it again. 'The city's moving moving?'

'Of course it's moving. And so should you be if you want to live.' The realisations were obviously crowding his brain. She really ought to carry out some more ECG scans to check he was OK, but they didn't have time for that.

' Go on! Go on! ' she urged. ' she urged.

He vanished, only to reappear instantly, his absurd hair now piled around his head in an even more ridiculous heap. He reached in and grasped her arm, regarding her intensely. For a second she thought he was going to kiss her.

'Thank you,' he said.

And then he was gone.

She set to work pushing the bunk into the corner to cover the slit she'd cut.

Then she trundled the med unit to the top of the bunk and grasped the flare pistol. She was about to turn to sit on the bed and wait, when she felt the 134cold metal of another gun on the back of her neck. She dropped the pistol and raised her hands into clear view, turning to find Jorgan with his own flare gun aimed directly at her face.

'Where is he?' Jorgan demanded, eyes flashing around the room.

'Gone.'

'Gone where?'

'I don't know.'

The gun dropped and his fist replaced it, connecting with her jaw and sending her twisting back on to the bunk. She fell on the pistol and when he dragged her back up for another punch, she pushed it up under his chin and he froze.

'You're a stupid man, Ra.s.sel Jorgan,' she told him.

He lifted his hands into the air and she jerked the gun hard into his face.

'Get out.'

He turned to leave, but paused at the door, turning back with a sneer.

'He won't get far,' he snarled. She recognised bloodl.u.s.t in his eyes. A look she hadn't seen in years, but a look that she'd be able to identify for ever. Jorgan left with an angry smack of canvas.

Ayla dropped back on to the bunk and leaned there caressing her jaw. Jorgan was was a stupid man, she thought. But he was also effective and he got results. a stupid man, she thought. But he was also effective and he got results.

He wasn't the most subtle of souls she'd encountered on Ceres Alpha, but there were different people for different jobs and he was good at his. She knew she'd done what she could for their strange visitor, and she knew that Jorgan would kill him if he caught him. He was a man who took his work very seriously.

She'd noticed his flare pistol was loaded, for example, whereas hers had been empty from the start.

The storms were getting worse, she could swear. Even wrapped in storm gear, Peron felt the teeth of the winds trying to tear her apart. The readout in her goggles that should have been pointing her in the direction of the others was a useless mess of static and fuzz. There was a crackling in her ear where there should have been a clear signal.

'Where are you, Danes?' she spat into the mike.

The crackling intensified, and Danes's voice was barely audible, although he couldn't have been that far away.

'We're just beyond chopper pad twenty. There's a. . . '

Interference hissed through her, making her reach up spasmodically to tug the earpiece away from the side of her head.

'Didn't catch all that,' she yelled. 'I'll try to get closer.'

135.

The earpiece hissed nonstop as she made her way down the chopper bays and finally caught a glimpse of powerful lights sweeping through the almost impenetrable sandstorm. There was a small team of troops, she wasn't sure how many, even at these close quarters, but she could make out that one of them was holding a detector out in front of him. She made her way over and nudged him on the shoulder.

Private Danes peered through his goggles at her, and saluted when he recognised who she was. He hoisted the detector so she could see the readings.

'It's very garbled,' he said, and now she could hear his voice tolerably clearly on the system, although even right at his side there was still hiss and crackle.

'The whole d.a.m.n system's falling apart,' she commented, trying to see the detector screen through her goggles.

Another voice suddenly cracked across their coms, vying with renewed static activity on the line.

'Over here. I got her.'

'Where?' Peron snapped.

'I think I'm near pad twenty-two. There's a ventilator shaft. Get a reading on me.'

'If we could get a reading on you I wouldn't have asked where,' Peron told the voice.

'Hold on. . . Can you see that?'

Through the wall of seething sand, they could just make out an intermittently flashing searchlight.

'Got that,' said Danes. 'Keep signalling and we'll close in.'

Following the light, they made their way forward until they could see a black oblong shape looming out of the sand. It was the entrance to a ventilation maintenance block, and there was a man at the side of it swinging his light for them to track. Peron grasped the detector from him and squinted at the reading. Less than two metres in the direction of the block. She was inside.

'She shouldn't be armed,' Peron announced. 'But don't take any chances. OK.

I'm going in.'

Releasing her rifle from its locking harness at the back of her shoulder, she entered her code to open the door. The panel remained red and the door remained shut. Peron tried again, feeling the frustration curling awake inside her gut. Still the door remained locked.

Lifting the rifle, she blasted the mechanism and the door jerked ajar. She stepped aside and let the others move in to push their fingers into the gap.

Then she levelled her rifle at the opening fissure while the searchlights jiggled 136about in the wind. Finally she could see Kapoor on the other side of the door, her frightened features gazing back at the light. As the door was prised slowly open, Peron was astonished at what she found.

'You didn't see this,' she told the others on the com. 'Tonight this didn't happen. If I hear any word of this when we get back, you'll all be on report.'

Returning the rifle to its harness, Peron stepped inside. Kapoor was standing in the middle of the small room, no more than a shed that contained a handful of maintenance tools. And in her arms she was holding one of the creatures.

As Peron approached, Kapoor backed away across the tiny s.p.a.ce, clasping the creature to her chest and twisting in a futile attempt to stop Peron taking hold. Glancing back, Peron saw the troops behind her gathering in the doorway, bringing the lights into position so they could see what was going on. She watched one of them unclip his rifle with a single-handed manoeuvre to cover Kapoor.

When she turned back, Kapoor was cowering, grasping the creature tight enough to burst it. As she took the last couple of steps she realised Kapoor was speaking, her voice quiet and pleading, just audible above the sound of the wind.

'We don't belong,' she said. 'We don't belong.'

As Peron reached out to take the creature from her, it gazed at her out of pitch-black eyes.

And so did Kapoor.

Having spent the last twenty minutes pacing across the apartment feeling like a wild thing caged, Josef was on the verge of going after Veta. The only thing that stopped him was the fact that, as Veta had pointed out, the military were in control of medicare for a good reason, and it would look suspicious if another very anxious-looking comptech turned up looking for his wife, who just happened to be working on the most security-sensitive comp in the entire place.

Not the best way to run an undercover operation.

He'd spent the first half an hour online monitoring her progress as she gained access to Peron's system and started transferring a whole load of toplevel files into her databook. The whole procedure had gone smoothly, and Josef could only a.s.sume that Veta had had the considerable good fortune to be left alone to work.

But then, without warning, twenty minutes ago Veta's connection had been cut and Peron's machine had been hastily exited. Since then Josef had been walking on coals, his head full of images of Veta being caught, Veta being 137 brusquely chucked into a cell, Veta being menaced by thugs in black Military One uniforms.

He'd actually walked out of the door three times in the last ten minutes, setting off to see where the h.e.l.l she was. But each time he'd returned home to pace up and down a little bit more.

Switching on the comp, he surrept.i.tiously checked medicare for any unusual new activity. Any reports of Veta's discovery, any recordings of her mistreatment. Nothing. He entertained the idea of looking through Military One's system, but just couldn't bring himself to violate their security. The slightest mistake could bring them down on him in no time. And right now he was just too d.a.m.n nervous to be confident he could scrub every single trace.

He cancelled the comp and jumped up again, this time determined he was going to medicare. Grabbing his jacket, he swung open the door, and found Veta standing wide-eyed on the other side, obviously just inputting her code.

'Where the h.e.l.l have you been?' he asked, alarmed at how high and stringy his own voice sounded.

'You know where I've been,' she told him, forcing past him into the apartment.

He shut the door and hung his jacket back up, and by the time he came back into the room Veta had already opened the comp and was scanning the information on her databook. The hologram above the little desktop was a blur of scrolling lines.

'I was worried about you,' he said, plaintively.

'Well, don't. I'm more than capable of looking after myself.'

He plonked down beside her, watching her work, seeing for the first time in G.o.d-knows-how-long the Veta he'd married twelve years ago. The shadows were still there, and she looked like a woman who needed to take a well-deserved holiday, but there was also that spark back in her eye. That drive and genius that had captivated him.

'You didn't have any trouble, then?'

'Course not. I got a copy of the stuff she'd left online, but I suspect a good chunk of the more juicy stuff has been loaded on to her 'book. Hopefully she'll plug it in at some point, then I can go raid it.'

'While she's using it? Risky. . . '

She shot him a look that told him to shut up.

'Well. . . I mean. . . '

'Will you please stop fussing?' she asked without taking her eyes off the surging data. 'I know what I'm doing. Ah!'

138.'Ah, what?'

No answer. Her fingers skipped across the desk, and the lines of code in the hologram were abruptly replaced by an image. It was a sec recording of a young woman waking in medicare. She lifted herself warily and reached up to pull the skullcap ECG from her head. Her attention was caught by something nearby, and she gazed in surprise at the empty wall. Then, gradually, she smiled at the same vacant s.p.a.ce.

'What's she seen?' Josef wondered.

'That's obviously what Peron was asking when she was reviewing this 'gram.'

The scene cut, to be replaced by a foggy picture that showed the back of a man who was hunched in the dark. It was difficult to make out the detail, but he seemed to be manipulating something in his hands. Was it a small sphere?

Josef strained to see, but the image was infuriatingly dim and grainy.

Then he saw it. In the shadow. The small shape watching. The shape of a child. A smooth-skinned child with bulbous head and big black eyes. The whole world froze in that instant. Time stood perfectly still. The universe stopped.

It started again only when he heard Veta's voice, just a whisper in the immense and delicate silence.