'But why?'

'You a... ware of... e galact... ituation?'

'The planetary attacks? I thought they were isolated incidents.'

Perhaps through some fluke in the software, perhaps because of some local fluctuation in signal strength, the face of the Adjudicator in Extremis suddenly ballooned out to its full, impressive girth. Her voice regained its usual baritone boom. 'We have lost fifteen colony worlds in three weeks, Adjudicator. Azure, Qartopholos, Sifranos ecologies devastated, entire populations wiped out and we have absolutely no idea who's responsible! The Interstellar Taskforce is on continual stand*by alert. I am on a,' her pause was not due to a transmission fault, 'fact*finding tour of the outlying regions, and took the opportunity to contact you directly. All currently una.s.signed Adjudicators are working full*time following up leads, but frankly, the Guild does not look even remotely good. Besides,' her pudgy eyes suddenly narrowed and she ran a hand across her tattooed scalp, 'there are moves afoot which I am not at liberty to discuss. You may be receiving help soon from an unexpected source.'

'But Extremis, if you would only see the logic '

'Adjudicator Bishop, I need hardly remind you that so far your case list borders upon the ludicrous: one accident, possibly murder; one suicide, possibly murder; one disaster, possibly ma.s.s murder. No evidence and a baseful of suspects. This is how careers end, Adjudicator: not with a bang, but with a whimper.'

'But '

Bryn's face bulged and seethed in unlikely places as the signal began to corrupt again. Her eyes flickered sideways to read the digital cost display '...m afraid your budget... an no longer... ustain the price of... is transmission,' the Extremis said. '...uggest you... eep a tight watch on furth... penditure.' The picture flickered back into sync one more time before fading. 'I also recommend you wear your robes the right way round, Adjudicator; it's so much better for public relations.'

The transmission faded and he frowned, casting his mind back over the conversation.

How did she know that people had died on the Bridge? he wondered. All I did was mention sabotage.

As if he didn't have enough to worry about.

He sighed in frustration and reached for his tea.

It was cold.

It was cold in the crew room on Moloch Base.

Jesus Delporto's dying scream had followed Ace all the way to the lower moon, down the violently oscillating length of the Bridge, past bizarre machinery which seethed with naked power, and through the gap she had torched in the base of the column; it followed her as eager hands pulled her from the writhing Bridge, stripped away her suit and placed her with the others in the medical unit; followed her into sleep, forced a path into her dreams, drove her screaming and unrested into wakefulness.

One more failure on her part; one more life lost; one more friend pulled away by the black tide. She tried to use s.p.a.cefleet hypno*techniques to block the remorse, but either they weren't that good or she hadn't learned them well enough.

Ace glared at her face in the mirror. She poked a finger into the luggage beneath her eyes, stretching the skin, trying to make it look young again. All her life she'd striven to be older, more mature, to experience more of what the universe had to offer. Now, here she was, with her life's dream in the palm of her hand, trying to turn back the clock. She shook her head as a short, unexpectedly bitter laugh bubbled up from her chest.

She stifled the sound as the crew room door opened and Kosi walked in. Her hand hesitated by Ace's shoulder. Ace was thankful the touch was not completed. She felt vulnerable enough already.

'Come back to the operations room, Ace. Get your mind off it, all right?'

'Yeah, right.' Ace followed Kosi from the room. 'Ta.'

The Ops Room on the lower moon was a twin to Belial's; a s.p.a.cious, split*level hemisphere with a profusion of glimmering instrumentation, manned by serious*looking technicians, surrounding the towering bulk of a MultiCray Neural Net. Floor to ceiling simularity windows displayed the incredible landscape beyond the base, giving Ace the impression that the Operations Room was actually outdoors. Only the absence of wind marred the illusion.

She exchanged a few words with the shift supervisor, a dour Scot named Rachel McBride, and was told a message had been sent to Belial confirming their arrival and condition. Ace thanked the woman and then moved restlessly across to the windows, drawn by the view.

Whereas Belial Base had been built on the outer surface of a solid moon, Moloch Base was inside a hollow one; a miracle of planetary engineering which, after five years, still had Bannen and his team groping in the dark for answers to questions they didn't even know how to formulate. The ground of this bizarre world rose gradually in all directions, curving overhead until it was lost above the clouds. Vegetation ran riot. Duty teams maintained a neat lawn surrounding the base but, beyond the perimeter, a lush pink jungle rose in fantastic profusion towards the flat glare of a pale, artificial 'sun' whose energy was provided by the same mysterious means as powered the Bridge and the Lift. Translucent shapes undulated through the jungle, glimmering in the sunlight: the only life the Lucifer System had so far offered up for study. Ace felt her pulse racing at the sight. She grinned: all the s.h.i.t in the world could not blow away the simple wonder of this pastoral scene.

'Horrible, isn't it?' Kosi had moved up beside her after checking in with the duty manager. 'All that s.p.a.ce.'

Ace turned in surprise. 'You're not agoraphobic are you?'

'So what if I am?' Kosi replied a little defensively. 'All that open ground. No factories. No living towers. And those horrible white things floating up there, just waiting to fall down and smother us. Ugh!' Kosi shivered, seemingly unable to understand why Ace giggled softly.

'I can't understand you people,' Ace confided. 'All this s.p.a.ce*cadet, sense*of*wonder stuff, and you're happier with four blank walls around you.'

'You forget,' said a voice behind her. 'We have been here for five years. Our sense of wonder has pa.s.sed. Our sense of boredom has set in with a vengeance.'

Lars Ulrich smiled as Ace turned, and continued, 'Christine will be fine. Minus an arm, but fine. There is no infection. s.p.a.ce, it may be cold, but it is clean, at least.'

It's not s.p.a.ce you've got to worry about, Ace thought, it's the people in it. She said nothing, but instead left the two young people by the window and moved back to the duty manager's desk.

'I just wanted to say thanks for pulling us out of there.'

'No problem.' Rachel McBride smiled. 'Alex Bannen would've had a screaming fit if we'd left you to mess up his precious Bridge; G.o.d alone knows what Tiw would've done.'

'Given you a lecture on the sound of one hand clapping, I expect.'

'Aye clapping against the side of my head, I've no doubt!' Both women laughed. McBride had a pretty laugh, Ace noticed. A laugh it felt good to join in with. 'Have they told you what goes on down here, then?'

Ace shook her head. 'Nope.'

McBride shrugged. 'There's the bra.s.s for you.' She called to a white*haired technician, 'Chas, do us a favour will you? Keep an eye on this lot and shout if anything weird pops up.' She turned back to Ace. 'Come on then. I'll give you the tour.'

'Oh,' she said, as she led the way from the room, 'I've been meaning to ask you. What happened to Sam Russell? He was supposed to be down here on the second part of a double shift. When he didn't turn up, I a.s.sumed he'd overslept, but when he didn't radio through to apologize...'

Kosi and Lars turned from the window to watch Ace and McBride leave the Operations Room.

'What do you reckon, then?'

'Ace? She's fine, I reckon.'

'That's not what I meant.'

'You ask odd question. Ace, she saves Christine's life. Would have saved Yukio and Jesus too if not for bad luck.'

'Yeah, I know. But she makes me uneasy. She always looks... I dunno, ready for a fight.'

Lars tapped his fingers reflexively against his wax tablet, a sure sign he was thinking carefully about what Kosi had said. 'I think you make big refinery out of small process. Ace, she's fine. Fine person.'

'Then how come when we pulled her from her suit I found a folder full of Alex Bannen's notes stashed away inside the sleeve?'

The Atmospheric Vehicle Research Laboratory was a large, irregular enclosure filled with machinery of human design. In the centre of the room a large, asymmetric pod was suspended over an engineering pit. The pod was four metres in height, with a single hatch and an exoskeleton which supported various instrument modules and waldo limbs.

Ace touched the gleaming metal sides of the starpod. White alloy, highly polished, threw back the glare of multiple floodlights into her narrowed eyes.

'So this was what Paula was working on. An excursion module.'

McBride nodded. 'The girl was positive she could contact the Angels if only she could get deep enough into Lucifer's atmosphere. The ordinary starsuits are pretty handy bits of gear, especially compared with the emergency s.p.a.cesuits you used in the Lift, but the pod was designed to go deeper still. Thousands of kilometres, in fact. G.o.d only knows why she didn't wait until it was ready, rather than rely on a starsuit.'

Ace ran a finger lightly across the saddle for the instrument packs. 'Thousands? Just how deep is the atmosphere, anyway?'

McBride shrugged. She walked across the semicircular pod bay towards the monitor station, sealed behind a transparent part.i.tion. 'Actually, it's difficult to say. Deep down the heat and pressure are so great that even hydrogen is a metallic liquid.'

Ace followed McBride into the monitor station. 'So it's hard to tell where the atmosphere ends and the planet itself begins.'

McBride nodded. 'Hence the size of the instrument array. There's an ocean of liquid zelanite alloy down there, you know, floating in the sky: big as a normal planet.' McBride shook her head. 'The d.a.m.n thing's a bag of mysteries and no mistake.'

Ace skipped her fingers lightly across the tops of the consoles. She could see from the screen displays how the systems were designed to function. 'Nice system. Did Paula design it herself?'

'She specified the high*level design. Yukio wrote the software.'

'And now he's dead.' Ace frowned. 'Just like Paula.'

'You have a theory?'

'Naw, not really. It's just well, it's just that if whatever killed Paula was a software virus rather than an accident, then someone would have had to infect the suitbrain. That would implicate one of the system engineers someone like Yukio. The incident on the Bridge might have been a clumsy attempt by a third party to b.u.mp off the middle man.'

'Unless the same virus which attacked Paula's starsuit attacked Belial's neural net as well.'

'You're forgetting the Bridge functions are not controlled by human technology. The original, alien system, whatever that might be, is still running them.'

McBride huffed softly in acquiescence. 'Ever thought about becoming an Adjudicator?'

Ace grinned. 'I'd look like the flying nun.' She studied the rest of the monitor station. The back wall was lined with storage cabinets. 'What's in there?' she asked.

'Paula's research files. Simularities, mainly. Oh, and her diary as well. Why, do you want to take a look?'

'Do I ever.' Ace opened the first cabinet, scanned the hundred or so labels quickly, selected the most recent crystal and fed it into a reader. She blinked her contact lenses into place and began to watch the file.

'I think you might want to check this out,' Chas said.

Kosi left her plastic beaker of tea steaming gently on the nearest flat surface while she and Lars headed for the centre of the room. The elderly Chas Varley was peering in some confusion at an arc of screens which pulsed with read*outs and rippling waveforms. 'What's up?' she asked.

'You tell me, la.s.s.' Chas fine*tuned a few controls. 'I've never seen anything remotely like it.'

'Is software virus, maybe?' Lars asked.

'Yeah,' Kosi said, 'there seems to be a lot of it going around.'

Chas shook his head. 'No, look. It's a steady pattern. Not one of Lucifer's though.'

Kosi thought for a moment. 'Could it be the Angels, trying to talk to us at last?'

Before Chas could reply, Ace burst in from the main access corridor. McBride followed more slowly, wearing a worried frown.

'Oh, Rachel, I was just about to call you,' Chas said. 'The fifty*metre array is picking up an odd waveform. I've run a library comparison but none of the eigenvalues match with anything we've seen before. Do you recognize it?'

Before Rachel could reply, Ace walked quickly past them to the communications terminal. 'I have to talk to the Doctor,' she snapped angrily.

On Belial Base, Bernice and Cheryl walked back into the Operations Room, and into the middle of a furious argument.

At Miles's request, the two women had taken Alex Bannen and his son back to his quarters. He had curled up on to his bed at the first opportunity and fallen fast asleep. His son had just stood there, staring at them, until they left. They had returned to the Operations Room, where Bernice was surprised to hear Ace's voice as far as anyone knew she was recovering with the rest of her party on Moloch and even more surprised to hear it raised in anger and directed at of all people the Doctor.

'You didn't have to lie to me, Professor.'

'Ace, I don't understand '

'Oh shut up! You make me sick. You understand everything. And you use everyone, for whatever little scheme takes your fancy. Remember Jan, do you, back on Heaven? Remember what you did to him?'

'But that was different '

'What about this, then, eh?' Ace tried to thrust a ghostly neural net crystal underneath the Doctor's nose and only succeeded in pushing it out of the image field. 'Don't try to deny it. I don't know why you didn't erase it after her death. Never had a chance, I suppose. But you didn't expect me to go rummaging around in Paula's diary, did you?'

'Ace, if you'd only let me explain! I thought we were friends '

'Some friends you grow out of, Doctor Doctor.'

A sudden bang and a gabble of panicky voices distracted Ace's attention. She looked sideways. There were a few more garbled words, part of an argument, then a loud noise and a scream.

Something sprayed across Ace's face.

'What the h.e.l.l ' she said, disbelievingly.

She tried to blink the red mist from her eyes, failed, and toppled backwards out of the image field.

Static.

Bernice gaped.

The Operations Room was engulfed by sudden chaos. Miles was mumbling to himself. Technicians were frantically operating systems. Piper was yelling, 'I couldn't give a toss for the time*lag on the frequency search*and*lock processor, just re*establish the b.l.o.o.d.y link! Cheryl, help him will you. Or take over, I don't care which.' She turned to the shivering Administrator. 'Miles, your daughter's spirit is not walking the base, and none of us are going with her to the afterlife. Now for G.o.d's sake pull yourself together. We need you here.'

Miles blinked. 'Of course. Sorry.'

'I should think so too.'

Only the Doctor had not moved, through all this confusion.

Cheryl said, 'I have a transmission.'

'From Moloch?'