'Yes?' she snapped, the irritation evident in her voice.

A hologram appeared in the air in front of her. The WorldCorp logo with its animated representation of birds flying off into an empty blue yonder and a sun beaming off to the right. The birds coiled in the air on their interminable journey, while the comp voice of Military One chipped out its syllables at her.

'We got company in direct path central.'

'Direct path central?' Foley repeated dubiously. 'Are you sure?'

'Life signs confirmed.'

'Nature?'

'Possibly human. Signals very weak and intermittent. This is code red. We're almost on top of them.'

Dropping her towel, Foley drove herself into her tunic and cancelled the shower program.

'Where the h.e.l.l did they come from?' she demanded as she swept through her apartment with the hologram close on her shoulder.

'Unknown.'

42.

Falling on to her bed, she slammed her feet into her combat boots. 'How the h.e.l.l did they get into central region without being detected earlier?'

'Unknown.'

Grasping her com unit and shouldering her way deftly into the harness, she headed for the door and slapped the exit pad with unnecessary ferocity that just made her feel a tad better.

'Where the h.e.l.l are Downs and Klute?' she demanded as she hurtled down the corridor to the elevator. The hologram, now routed through her com unit, continued to pursue her tenaciously.

'On their way to chopper pad four.'

As she soared upward in the liftpod, taking harness and systems through their standard checks, she continued to toss questions at the hologram.

'How could anybody get in so close without being detected?'

'The storms are severe tonight. Ma.s.sive interference. They were lucky we picked them up at all.'

'They won't feel particularly d.a.m.n-s.h.i.t lucky when I get my hands on them.'

'Fifteen seconds to open level.'

'What the h.e.l.l kind of klutz puts himself in the direct path of a world-devouring city-machine?'

'Unknown.'

'I mean do these people have a death wish or what?'

'Unknown. Five seconds.'

Green lights flared across the com unit just as Foley felt the liftpod grind to a halt.

'Open level,' the hologram told her, rather redundantly, she thought.

The doors swept open and Foley hurled herself out into the churning, howling night. The chopper on pad four was already lifting itself into the storm as she pitched herself through the rapidly closing door. She landed hard on her shoulder, jarring the muscles in her neck and almost ripping the ear off the side of her head. The sidegate buzzed shut and there was a sound as close to quiet as you ever did get in these tin bees. Foley struggled on to her knees and fell into her bucket seat.

Klute was up front. He looked back at her with a big fat grin.

'Where the h.e.l.l've you been?' he demanded. 'Seven seconds over drill.'

'I was just getting in the shower,' Foley informed him hotly as the chopper bounced around and she fought with the clip on her safety harness.

'You should've come as you were,' Downs smirked. He was already laced into the seat beside her.

43.'In your dreams, Downs.'

'Oh every night,' he smiled.

Foley felt a rush of animosity as she failed and failed again to lock the catch on her harness.

'Every night, sir sir!' she barked.

The silly grin was wiped from his face when he heard the tone of her voice.

'And can't you keep this bone-rattle crate under control, Sergeant Klute?'

Klute stiffened abruptly, grasping the joystick and brawling with the storm.

'Yes, sir sir,' he snapped.

At last the catch snapped home and Foley gritted her teeth in an attempt to keep her rising hostility under control. The men remained silent now, and she felt the chopper pitch and dip as it reached the edge of the city and plunged towards the ground.

'When we land, Downs comes with me,' Foley ordered. 'Klute will prepare the med unit. The life signs are weak and intermittent. That could be the storm interference or it could be critical readings. We'll a.s.sume the worst since they're well inside the red zone. When we get them back in the chopper, you'll take us home, Downs.'

'Yes, sir.'

There wasn't a trace of smirk left in him now, and that was just exactly how Foley liked it when they were on a mission.

'Coming in now, sir,' Mute shouted.

She felt the chopper hit ground and level out with a jerk. The door swung down and their safety catches sprang open on auto-release. Foley and Downs spilled out of the chopper into the freezing h.e.l.l that was Ceres Alpha. Downs already had a fix.

'Ten metres one o'clock,' he yelled above the wind, stomping off with the detector out in front of him.

But he was looking more at the detector than where he was walking, and Foley managed to grasp him by the shoulder as he was about to tumble into a small abyss that the groundworks had opened up.

'Hold on, Corporal,' she shouted. 'There's gonna be three critical if you don't watch where you're going.'

He might have looked embarra.s.sed, but Foley wasn't really interested. Down in the hole she could make out a prostrate figure, upturned pale face just visible above the churned muck. The ground here was uneven, potholed with hollows.

The leading edge of the city's awesome hunger was about thirty metres away now and it was difficult to remain on your feet under such conditions. More 44rubble dislodged from the edge of the surrounding precipice and fell into the hole. Foley watched it engulf the lifeless shape and suddenly she could see nothing down there except mud and dust.

Judgement. Risk two more lives or remove themselves to safety? These people were obviously suicidal anyway. Were they worth it? Decision. . .

Slapping Downs on the back, she led him down into the dip and started furiously digging in the dirt with her bare hands. Downs spun with the detector, his face a mask of concentration. She could hear nothing above the screams of the winds. The whole place was shaking enough to unearth the dead.

A face appeared in front of her, relinquished by the soil. It was a man. Dark hair. Quite good-looking in a curious sort of way. She could make out the collar of a dark-green coat. She managed to find an arm, and regardless of any potential spinal risk she grabbed hold and heaved the man out of the ground.

If she killed him they could revive him when they got back to the chopper. And she wasn't about to let him get away with this idiocy, anyway.

She found Downs a few short steps away, digging furiously on his knees.

Foley sensed movement, and turned to see a whole mountain of rocks and dirt plummeting into the hole behind them. Hoisting the man across her shoulders, she marched over to Downs and whacked him across the back, slicing her throat with her fingers to signal enough was enough. But Downs shook his head and continued to dig. He was nearly a metre down now and the soil here was loosely packed. Foley glanced back and saw the terrifying front face of the city towering over them, vanishing into the storm-filled turmoil that was the sky.

Again she punched Downs and again he refused to acknowledge. She spat abuse at him that was whisked up into the winds and lost in the night, before forcing her way out of the hole with the body a dead weight over her shoulder.

As she ascended, the dirt beneath her feet collapsed behind her, but somehow she managed to get back on the level and pushed through the storm to the chopper.

Klute seized the man from her and she stalked back to the edge of the hole, where she found Downs clambering towards her with another body. He was about halfway up when the whole thing collapsed in a fluid slide of dirt and rubble. Foley saw both Downs and the body vanish swiftly under the torrent, and launched herself into the ditch after them.

Fighting the treacherous ground, which writhed like a blanket of snakes below her feet, Foley pushed her hands through the muck, trying to find something human to grab hold of. The ground in front of her exploded, and she was relieved to see Downs's filthy top half rising out of the dirt like something 45.deceased returning to haunt her. She dragged him out, and found that he was still fervently holding the other body. Between the two of them, they scrambled with it uphill towards the chopper and safety.

Klute took the second body and Downs flung himself into the driving seat.

While Foley proceeded to help hook the body to the med unit, the chopper rose steeply and noisily into the storm.

'You're on report, Downs,' Foley yelled as she worked, fixing wires to the temples of the girl they'd pulled out.

'Yessir.'

'Don't ever, ever disobey me again. Is that perfectly b.l.o.o.d.y crystal b.l.o.o.d.y clear?'

'Yessir.'

Switching on the med unit, she saw the readings flare into life. Then she found Klute watching her in puzzlement.

'That's not right, is it?'

The readings were all over the place. Some of them flat on the floor, some of them dancing in the sky. Foley reached out and thumped the monitor, but it didn't make any difference to the sense it was making.

'How's the other one?' she asked.

'More odd readings,' Klute informed her.

Shuffling across the floor of the bucking and lunging chopper, Foley regarded the monitor for a few seconds, taking in the information and shaking her head.

'There's an echo on the heart readings, and some of this other stuff is outside normal parameters, but my guess is that he's probably alive.'

Turning back to the girl, Foley wasn't so sure.

'Ever seen anything like this, Klute?'

'No, sir. She's dead and alive and a dozen shades of in between. Never seen readings like these before. Heart rate looks like zilch, but her brain's certainly getting oxygen from somewhere. Look at those cerebral peaks. Must be something wrong with the machine.'

'When was the last systems check on this thing?'

'Twenty-eight days.'

'No problems?'

'No, sir.'

'Well, let's just see what they make of this at Medicare Central, shall we?'

There was motion over the other side of the floor, and Foley shuffled over to help the man raise himself to his elbows. He looked bewildered, eyes unfo-46cused, and he was muttering something but the words were almost unintelligi-ble at first. Foley leaned in close to catch what he was mumbling.

'Fitz. . . Fitz. . . Must get back for Fitz. . . '

'It's OK,' Foley a.s.sured him. 'We got Fitz here. She's going to be fine.'

He appeared relieved, if still confused. Then she saw a haze of incomprehension come down over his eyes, before they rolled upwards, closed, and the man finally collapsed backwards in her arms. She lowered him to the floor and grasped the seat support struts as she felt the chopper veer suddenly to come in to land.

Dr Pryce found Mij Peron and Captain Foley already in med-ops when he arrived there. Peron was busy with a man who lay unconscious on one of the two beds that had been wheeled in, while Foley leaned over the unresponsive shape of a young, olive-skinned woman on the other.

'What have we got?' Pryce asked as he swept into the room, doing his best to project a businesslike air of confidence that he didn't feel at all.

He received a flash of smile from Foley, while Peron indicated the man.

'Some weird stuff,' she told him, making hand adjustments to the monitor.

'The systems check out OK, but I just don't believe these readings. This guy, unless I'm very much mistaken, has a dual heart arrangement, and there's some other very bizarre stuff here I've never seen before. I'm sure n.o.body's achieved biological revision of this magnitude. Metabolism, tissue composition, circula-tion, the whole cardiac setup, there are even unrecognisable antigen profiles.

And just look at that electroencephalogram.'

'Did you run a systems diagnostic?' Pryce asked.

'I ran several. One of the heartbeats is erratic. I thought it must be some kind of data echo, another one of our little substructural glitches. But the system insists it's telling me the truth. Two hearts. Look for yourself.'

Pryce examined the information revealed on the monitor insets. There wasn't a single graph contour that he recognised. This man had quite obviously subjected himself to some very cutting-edge improvements. His internal make-up was no longer even remotely human. But he was obviously still no superman.

He was as susceptible to injury as anyone, as evidenced by his extensive lesions and bruises. Dark blood streaked his face and pooled at the corners of his mouth, but the blood was still red.

'Any response from him?' Pryce asked.

'Nothing. But according to the ECG he's wide awake.'

47.The man appeared to be quite young, although it was impossible to hazard a guess at his age considering the enhancements he'd obviously undergone. He had a strong facial structure that may or may not be natural. Good-looking, certainly, but not conspicuously so. He had brown hair that curled at the fringe to lend him a rebellious look. Cursory examination of his hands suggested that his work certainly didn't involve any kind of manual component, although he was obviously keen on physical fitness, going by the muscle structure not overheavy, but certainly robust. He must certainly lead an active life.

As Pryce took in the blood-and mud-gorged body, he suddenly noticed that the wrists had been locked into restraints.