Bob and Bane, in their hired ship.

The common channel blinked. Tony ignored it. There was no point listening to their threats. He was driving towards the mirrors at the maximum acceleration permitted by the bias drive. His pursuers could do no more than match it, and would always be at least thirty minutes behind. He would have to think of some way of dealing with them when he reached his destination. Although if he really was heading into a trap, who knew, he might need their help.

47. 'Don't worry.'

When everything changed Lisa was down on Niflheimr, staying on the farm owned by Zandra and Nick Papandreou. Time out. A vacation while she waited for the ship to return to Terminus from the F8 star, resupply, and light out again, taking her with it. Ada Morange's people had offered her a huge bonus that overtopped the consultancy fee she had already been paid. More money than she knew what to do with, frankly, although she planned to send a hefty fraction of it to Bria, as an apology for fucking up her life. But mainly she was going because she was curious. She wanted to know how the eidolon would react with the lodestar just a hundred and sixteen light years away. She hoped to get a better idea of what Willie's jackpot had got her into.

Then she would come back to Terminus and help Ada Morange's science crew to come up with a way of exorcising her ghost.

That day she was out hiking with Isabelle Linder, her official minder until she boarded the ship, trying as usual to ignore the two bodyguards who tagged along wherever she went. They were walking alongside a creek that looped through sheep pastures Zandra and Nick owned some four thousand head, scattered across fifteen hundred hectares. The air was pleasantly cool, the sky shrouded edge to edge with grey clouds. Threadbare green pasture stretched away either side of the ribbon of native vegetation vegetation brought here long ago by various Elder Cultures that grew along the creek's winding course. Wire grass, stands of things a little like palm trees with dreadlocked tangles of violet straps, hummocks of a kind of blue-green moss, a single tree-thing jagged as a lightning strike, decked out in feathery webs.

The stony ridge where Zandra, Nick, and their two small sons would join them for lunch had just appeared at the close, visibly curved horizon when one of the guards hurried forward and said there was a problem, everyone had to return to the farm. He shrugged when Lisa asked what was wrong; Isabelle, poking at her phone, frowned and said, 'It is Investigator Nevers.'

Lisa felt a catch in her heartbeat. 'What do you mean?'

'He is here. On a ship that has just come through the wormhole. And he is accompanied by a crew of TCU agents and lawyers.'

'Are you sure?'

'I am afraid so,' Isabelle said. She seemed unreasonably calm. 'We have a contact in the TCU offices. They received a message just an hour ago. It seems they did not know he was coming here before he arrived.'

'But he isn't here yet. It will take him a day to get to the elevator terminal, ten hours to ride down to the surface . . . And anyway, he can't do anything. The Commonwealth doesn't recognise the TCU. That's why you're here.'

'We are to go to our compound at the elevator port, and await further instructions,' Isabelle said. 'Don't worry. The Professor knows what she is doing. And she has your best interests in mind.'

They were halfway home when Isabelle's phone chirped. 'Mais bien sr. la fois,' she told the caller, and handed the phone to Lisa. 'It is the Professor.'

'There has been a development,' Ada Morange told Lisa, without any preamble.

'Aside from this thing with Adam Nevers?'

'I am sending you a video.'

It was a brief clip pulled from one of Niflheimr's news sites. Two Jackaroo avatars in black tracksuits being interviewed by a young woman, their gold-tinted translucent faces vaguely reminiscent of half a dozen movie stars, their smiles and body language uncanny simulations of the smiles and body language of actual human beings.

'We are sightseers,' one said, when the young woman asked them about a rumour that they were here to investigate Karyotech Pharma.

'We love what you've done with the place,' said the other.

'There's more,' Ada Morange said, 'but it is only the usual polite evasions. The point is that they are here, on Niflheimr. That interview was posted ten minutes ago, shortly after they stepped out of a cargo elevator. My people believe that they arrived on a freighter from Earth that docked yesterday, and somehow evaded security.'

Lisa said, 'Are you sure that they are working with Nevers?'

'It would be a tremendous coincidence if they were not, because Jackaroo avatars have never before visited Niflheimr. We must assume that they know everything we know. That is how they are. And that means that Nevers knows it too.'

'But what can he do here, without authority?'

'He tried to stop my work on Mangala, without authority. And he nearly succeeded. But do not worry,' Ada Morange said. 'I have made arrangements to get you to a place of safety. This is no more than a bump in the road to your star.'

Ten minutes later, a helicopter resolved in the middle distance and swept towards them, scattering sheep.

'Don't worry, it's ours,' one of the bodyguards told Lisa.

The two of them were young men dressed in ordinary hiking gear, relaxed and vigilant.

Isabelle, poking at her phone again, said, 'There has been a change of plan. You are to go up to the terminal right away.'

'But that's where Nevers is heading,' Lisa said, deeply unsettled by the swift sudden crisis, the sense of unseen forces in motion all around her. It felt a lot like a kidnapping.

'A TCU vehicle picked up the Jackaroo avatars,' Isabelle said. 'It is heading in this direction. You must leave Niflheimr at once, Lisa. You will reach the terminal before Nevers arrives, and transfer to the timeship. You will be quite safe there.'

The helicopter made a circle overhead and dropped down, landing on its skids in the rough grass. It was the kind that ranchers used to herd cattle on the big ranges north of Port of Plenty, its two-blade rotor raised on a stalk above the little pod of its cabin. Lisa followed Isabelle towards it with a heavy feeling of resignation. The two bodyguards walking either side of her, everyone ducking under the chattering blades. Isabelle had a brief argument with the pilot. She wanted to go with Lisa; the pilot said that he had orders to take only Ms Dawes.

One of the bodyguards helped Lisa into the bucket seat next to the pilot, showed her how to buckle the safety harness. Isabelle told her that she would see her soon, and wished her bon voyage, something Lisa had thought only people who weren't actually French said, and the helicopter lifted with a jolt that left her stomach somewhere on the ground. The last she saw of Isabelle Linder, the woman was standing with the two bodyguards in a circle of flattened grass, blonde hair blown awry as she looked up, shading her eyes with her forearm. And then the helicopter turned and put its nose down and the pasture unravelled into scrub forest.

Half an hour later, the thread of the elevator cable rose beyond the horizon, leaning into the sky. The helicopter skimmed over the industrial clutter of the port, landed in front of a big steel-framed hangar. Michel Valis, the head of Karyotech Pharma's groundside security, was waiting there with two young men dressed in chinos and black roll-neck sweaters.

The security chief shook Lisa's hand and led her towards the hangar, where a big bus with ribbed aluminium sides and smoked-glass windows was parked. 'We'll drive you straight to the elevator, go right on up,' Michel said.

'And then?'

'Don't worry. It is all in hand.'

'Everyone keeps telling me not to worry,' Lisa said. Walking into the big hangar, mud still on her boots from the creek-side ramble, she had an odd sense of displacement, as if she was slightly out of synch with the world.

Michel followed her into the coach. She saw a hospital bed and a lot of medical equipment, a man and a woman in white lab coats, and Michel seized her in an armlock and slapped something on the side of her neck and everything instantly went woozy. Michel caught her as her knees gave way, turning her so she fell into a big chair that immediately tilted backwards. 'It's all right,' he told her. 'Just something to help you relax.'

She tried to ask what the fuck was going on, but her mouth was numb, her whole face was numb. She was having trouble keeping her eyelids open. The coach was moving, buildings drifting past its smoked-glass windows. The man and woman in white coats were on either side of her, the man wrapping a pressure cuff around her arm, the woman peeling the backing from little black dots, sensors they'd used on her before, when they'd visualised her brain activity, and sticking them on her forehead, behind her ears. She felt that she was sinking into some deep warm red space, woke briefly as the coach drove into the cage inside the big bubble of one of the elevators. There was a big-ass needle inserted into a vein inside her left elbow, taped down and connected to a clear plastic port and a line that looped up to some kind of pump.

'Infusing now,' a woman said, and Lisa felt a sudden warmth spreading up her arm, spreading across her chest.

There was a jolt; she was pressed into the chair by an enormous irresistible force. The elevator was rising, accelerating. The tingling warmth filled her entire body. A man leaned in, shone a light into each of her eyes, leaned away. Lisa was seeing double and everything was haloed with fuzzy light. She tried and failed to focus when the woman pressed some kind of clear plastic oxygen mask over her nose and mouth. A strong smell of vinyl; a harsh metallic taste flooding her mouth.

She was lying flat on a bed. Straps across her arms and chest, across her legs. Dim light. A ceiling curved overhead, quilted with white padding. The bed seemed to be floating on a tide, rising and falling with a steady rolling motion. She'd had epic hangovers back in her lost years. Had woken in strange rooms with strange men, some kind of industrial process clanging in her head and the residue of a mad chemistry experiment coating her tongue. There had been bruises. Sometimes there had been blood. The feeling that her body had been badly used, and the cold filthy realisation that she had fucked up again, and that as soon as she was able to roll over and grope for last night's last bottle she would definitely start to fuck up again.

She felt even worse than that now. She felt that she had spent about a thousand years in some tomb in the City of the Dead, and her desiccated husk had been only partly rehydrated. She couldn't move. She wasn't even breathing. There was a tube down her throat and tape over her mouth and air was passing in and out with a mechanical pulse. Her tongue was shrivelled, blasted by the same catastrophe that had scoured her mouth. Her teeth hurt. Her bones hurt. Her eyes were sandpapered.

'She is awake,' someone said. 'Awake and aware.'

The dim light slowly brightened. A man leaned into view. An old man, bald, hollow-cheeked, mouth pinched by deep lines. When he spoke, Lisa felt a rush of recognition.

That English accent. That knowing smile.

'Welcome to the future,' Adam Nevers said.

48. Committed.

Tony hailed Bob and Bane's ship on the seventh day. After passing through three mirror pairs it was more than two hours behind Abalunam's Pride because at each transition it lost time hunting for the next mirror in the sequence, but it was clear that Raqle Thornhilde's cloned sons were not going to give up.

Tony hoped that by now the broker had worked out that they still had a common interest in taking down Ada Morange. Hoped that he might gain a little wiggle room if he could persuade her that it would be better to be allies than enemies. But Bane answered his call, and was in no mood for negotiation. His brother had been killed by Adam Apostu, he said, and Tony was going to pay for it.

'Perhaps I could have a word with your mother,' Tony said.

'She's done talking with you,' Bane said. 'As far as she's concerned, you're a dead man. If the police or the Red Brigade haven't killed you by the end of this, I swear I will.'

According to Bane, Raqle Thornhilde had sold Tony to the police immediately after he had escaped from Adam Apostu's house. He was marked as a Red Brigade collaborator who had masterminded the attack on his own home world and escaped with important secrets. A squadron of police ships were on their way. They were just four days behind.

'You get lucky, maybe you can escape me,' Bane said. 'But you won't escape them. You got nowhere to run, dead man.'

Colonel X called a few hours later. Tony did not think it was a coincidence: the colonel had probably bugged his ship's comms. And he was not surprised to discover that the colonel knew most of what had happened on Dry Salvages and on Veles.

'You've done all I expected of you and more,' Colonel X said. 'The run-in with the broker was unfortunate. You shouldn't have allowed yourself to be blindsided like that. You should have taken her down, asked her some hard questions. But it has all worked out in the end.'

'You and I have very different ideas about things working out,' Tony said. 'I am still in serious trouble.'

'And you expect me to do what?' Colonel X said.

'You could find out whether police ships really are following me. And if they are, you could call them off.'

'Oh, they're following you all right,' Colonel X said. 'But even if I could find out who signed the order, I don't have the kind of weight to order them to stop. So as far as that goes, I'm afraid you're on your own.'

Tony had been expecting some kind of betrayal, but it still felt as if his heart was suddenly pumping ice.

He said, 'If you call them off, it will give me time to get close to Ada Morange and the Red Brigade. I can infiltrate her set-up. I can find out what she is planning.'

'But I already have a very good idea about that,' Colonel X said. He sounded faintly amused.

Tony said, 'I can find out more. She needs my help. That's why she helped me escape from Raqle Thornhilde. That's why she gave me the route through the mirrors.'

'If you think this is because of your eidolon, I should remind you that she took two of that unfortunate crew of wizards with her when she escaped. And they have copies of the eidolon in their heads.'

'She said that the copy in my ship's mind had made some interesting changes,' Tony said.

When she had hacked Abalunam's Pride, back on Dry Salvages, Ada Morange had thoroughly interrogated the bridle about those changes, and the bridle had answered all her questions.

'I didn't realise it was wrong,' she had told Tony. 'Aunty Jael is family. I have talked with her many times before.'

It was not the bridle's fault, not really. The eidolon had worked a sea change on her, but it had not altered her personality construct: she was still cheerfully naive and trusting. And besides, her innocent garrulousness was actually helpful. It helped Tony understand exactly what Ada Morange wanted from him.

Colonel X said, 'All I ever needed you to do was flush her out. And I was always planning to call in the police, if you managed it. And now Raqle Thornhilde has saved me the bother. It has all worked out very nicely.'

'As far as you're concerned,' Tony said, not bothering to hide his bitterness.

'It can work out for you, too,' Colonel X said. 'What you should do when you find the end of the rainbow is tell Ada Morange everything you know. Cooperate. She'll keep you safe from Raqle Thornhilde's son, and you should be able to string her along until the police arrive. If you survive that, surrender to them as soon as possible. You can use my name. Once the dust has settled, I'll write a note, let them know you were working for me.'

'You will write a note.'

'It will be a good one. And one you will be able to cash, too. I'm well on my way to finding what Ada and her friends in the Red Brigade want. I'm going to make sure they can't get it. When I'm finished, my credit will go through the roof. I might even be able to put in a word for your family.'

Tony had the sudden bad feeling that Colonel X was telling the truth. He said, 'You're looking for her starship, aren't you?'

'I wondered if you would find out about that,' Colonel X said. 'Two things. First, she actually called it a timeship. When it was accelerated to close to the speed of light it compressed time, and she hoped to ride it into the future. Second, I already have it. And it's going to lead me to something much bigger. Take care, Mr Okoye. If we meet on the far side of this, I promise I'll find some way of showing my appreciation.'

Tony brooded about that for a long time. He was on his couch, where he spent most of his time, enduring the 2.3 G-force during the stretches of constant acceleration and constant deceleration between mirrors. He was maxing out Abalunam's Pride's drive to make sure his pursuer couldn't haul alongside and board her, and because he wanted to get to where he was going as quickly as possible. Especially now that he knew the police were also on his tail.

This time he did not have the ship's hands to give him massages and otherwise attend to his needs. Although the bridle claimed that she alone had flown the ship from Dry Salvages to Veles, he was worried that Ada Morange might have found a way to get inside her; remembering the unrelenting fury with which Adam Apostu had attacked Bob, he had locked all the hands in storage, just in case. The bridle also claimed that, because her drones and other assets had been stripped out when she had been mothballed, she had hacked several of Freedonia's police drones and used them to search for Tony after he had been kidnapped. That, at least, appeared to be true: she had stored hours of footage taken by the drones. They had kept watch on Raqle Thornhilde's house and followed her around the city, but had lost contact after she had boarded small jet aircraft and flown beyond the limit of their operating range, to the village of the Real Free People.

The bridle could not explain how she had infiltrated police security. 'I wanted to find out what happened when your comms cut off,' she said, 'so I just sort of did. It was the right thing to do, wasn't it?'

'What would you have done if you had found me?' Tony said.

'Oh, I'm sure that I would have figured something out,' the bridle said.

That careless confidence was new, too. She had definitely changed, but she was by no means omniscient. She had been fooled by Raqle Thornhilde's subterfuge of hiring a ship through one of her shell companies, had not seen the broker's sons smuggle Tony aboard. And she readily agreed that from now on she would not take any initiatives without first consulting Tony.

'At least it all worked out in the end,' she said cheerfully.

'We are still a long way from the end,' Tony said.

After Colonel X's call, he opened a window to Unlikely Worlds, the first time in several days. The !Cha was hunkered down in the hold where Tony had kept the wizards and the stromatolites during the escape from the slime planet. A black drum squatting on what was presently the floor.

Tony told the !Cha that he believed that he had been used to divert Ada Morange's attention from Colonel X's plans. 'He could have intercepted that timeship while it was in the final stages of decelerating towards its destination. Months ago. Years ago. Long before Ada Morange found a way of escaping from my family. There must be something or someone aboard it that both of them want. Ada Morange was hoping that the Red Brigade would help her to take it back. But before she could, the colonel used me to lead the police to her.'

'Yes, why not?'

'You knew, didn't you?'

'It was a logical deduction. What will you do now?'

'I still want to find Ada Morange and make her answer for what she did. I owe it to myself, and to Cho Wing-James and the other wizards, and everyone else killed in the raid.'

'As far as I know, it is a universal rule that the dead have little interest in the sympathy of the living.'

'I care about them, even so.'

'Then you still hope to be a hero.'