'Then do nothing to provoke us. We will talk again,' Mina Saba said, and she and her host of captains vanished.

Tony told Unlikely Worlds that he thought that Mina Saba would not harm him because only he could interface with the ship's bridle. 'She is tailored to me, and she is the only connection to the ship's mind and the Ghajar eidolon that has infected it. And because she has been altered by the eidolon, the Red Brigade will not dare try to hack her.'

'It's quite possible,' Unlikely Worlds said.

'Perhaps I am making up a story to convince myself that they will not kill me.'

'You are more important than you think. Think of all you have discovered since being reunited with your ship.'

'I fear that all I have discovered is that I do not know enough.'

The bridle was frustratingly vague about how she had been changed; how the ship had been changed. She claimed that she saw things differently now, that she saw what she called the imprint of history, but when Tony had asked if that meant she could see the ghosts of the Ghajar she had said that it wasn't like that.

'I see the places they have been and the things they have done. I see all that, but I don't understand everything. Do you think I will? I hope I will.'

She still could not communicate directly with the eidolon, or understand how it had altered the ship's mind.

'It shows me pictures, sometimes,' she would say.

Or: 'Sometimes I just get this great notion.'

Tony said, 'Were you able to boot from Dry Salvages because the eidolon gave you the idea?'

'I don't know. Perhaps,' she said. 'All I know is it seemed to be the right thing to do.'

That was something Tony had learned, at least. He knew now that Ada Morange had told the bridle about his plight on Veles, but she had not been able to take control of the ship, as he had once thought. Instead, the bridle appeared to be under the influence of the unholy alliance between the eidolon and the ship's mind.

'We are all being driven by the desires of a ghost,' Tony told Unlikely Worlds. 'And we do not know what it wants, or what it can do.'

'Oh, I think we will soon find out,' the !Cha said.

51. Mad Ship.

'You'd better be ready to get your magic on,' the pilot told Lisa. 'Otherwise that ugly motherfucker is going to kill us. Or, even worse, drive us stark staring insane.'

They were sidling towards the mad ship in a tug not much bigger than Lisa's pickup truck, lying side by side in its cramped cabin. Various views of their target hung before them.

The mad ship was huge. It was dark. In visible light it was hardly there, a shadow against the galaxy's river of star-smoke, but radar and microwave images revealed its bulk: a fat egg more than three kilometres long. A city-sized structure just hanging there in vacuum. Spines of different lengths jutted from one end the smallest was taller than the UN building in Port of Plenty. The other end tailed away in a kind of mesh cone or funnel that narrowed to a flattened nozzle.

Ordinary Ghajar ships were divided into twenty-one classes, and every ship in a particular class was the same shape and size. But while all mad ships possessed those spines, that mesh funnel, they varied wildly in tonnage. There were eight mad ships in the sargasso that orbited the M0 dwarf, from sprats only a little larger than the tug to the monster it was approaching. And all were as dangerous as unshielded, unmoderated nuclear piles. People who approached too closely were either driven insane, or died when their brain-stem activity shut down. Animals and AI systems above a certain level of sophistication were killed, too. The mad ships appeared to selectively warp the fundamental properties of space-time in their immediate vicinity, specifically affecting electromagnetic activity associated with information processing. So far, no effective shielding had been discovered. They could be captured by remotely piloted haulers, but no one had yet discovered how to board them, let alone control them.

Lisa was heading towards the biggest of those killer ships in a frail human-built craft steered by the pilot of the timeship, Dave Clegg, a compact, shaven-headed Brit with the sour sarcastic manner of someone who always expects to be short-changed by life. He wouldn't talk about his defection or the deaths of the timeship's crew, said only that he'd done what needed to be done after he'd flown into an ambush, and his reward for cooperating with his hijackers was flying this shitty little tin can on shitty little missions.

Adam Nevers's crew of wizards what they called scientists here claimed that Dave Clegg had been infected with a copy of Lisa's eidolon. He had buzzed the outer edge of the mad ship's zone of affect several times, with no detectable effect on his brain activity. Now he was supposed to take Lisa deeper in.

She had managed to snatch a brief conversation with him while they were being prepped, saying that if she really could get control of the mad ship, they could fly away. 'After all, no one would dare follow us.'

She'd been half-joking, but Dave Clegg took it seriously. 'Were you paying attention at the briefing? If I deviate a millimetre from the flight plan, another pilot will take over, fly the tug by wire. Plus, we'll be watched by drones tipped with thermonuclear weapons. One wrong move and we're hot plasma.'

'They're probably bluffing,' Lisa said. 'They need me. You too.'

Nevers's wizards had begun a series of experiments designed to measure and define the activity of the eidolons imprinted in Lisa's and Dave Clegg's brains, subjecting them to low frequency electric pulses, tightly focused magnetic fields, patterns of flickering light and synchronised pulses of sound, so forth. They reminded Lisa of the tests she and Willie had undergone after the Bad Trip, and so far hadn't revealed anything she didn't already know.

'If you want to test that notion, do it on your own time,' Dave Clegg said. 'Meanwhile, just try to relax, will you? Enjoy the ride. And don't even think of trying anything funny.'

As if she could, in their coffin-sized quarters. She was studded with dots and patches that monitored her life signs and the activity of her brain and the eidolon, was dressed in a skintight one-piece pressure garment that had stiffened into a rigid casing as soon as the techs had buckled her into her couch. She couldn't even scratch her nose. All she could do was watch the shadow of the mad ship grow in various windows as the little tug edged closer. She tried to feel how her ghost felt, tried the Zen thing of emptying her mind of thought so that she might sense its sly presence, but all she got was a tension headache pulsing behind her eyes.

Beside her, Dave Clegg gave status checks and answered questions she couldn't hear. Over and again the stark shadow of the mad ship rolled off the screen and the tiny stars of the timeship and the S-class scow that housed Adam Nevers's operation appeared, more than a thousand kilometres distant. Lisa had glimpsed a close-up view of the timeship when the tug had been launched. It looked hard-used, ancient, its bulky shields fore and aft deeply pitted and cratered by explosive impacts with microscopic grains of interstellar dust, its whole length sandblasted. Incredible to believe that she had spent seven years aboard the thing, sleeping more deeply than any fairytale princess while howling through the interstellar void at close to the speed of light . . .

The mad ship reappeared at the upper edges of various windows and crept downwards and disappeared again. The tug's paper-thin hull pinged and creaked; Lisa sweated into her rigid pressure garment, remembering the jaunt in the Orion capsule when she'd visited Ada Morange a couple of lifetimes ago. At last, she gave in and asked how much longer they had to go until they reached the boundary of the zone of affect.

'We passed it twenty minutes ago,' Dave Clegg said. 'The fucking bastards running the show want us to get closer.'

'How much closer?'

'All the way in, could be. If I knew I'd tell you.'

'Well, we're not dead.'

'Not yet. Whatever it is you're doing, keep doing it, okay?'

'Right. You too.'

She had no idea how their ghosts were protecting them; the thought that they might suddenly stop whatever they were doing or be overwhelmed by the mad ship's malign warp crept into her mind like a trickle of ice-water. The silhouette and radar images of the mad ship revolved twice more, then stabilised and centred in every window. The reaction motor thumped distantly; Lisa felt a phantom of gravity pass through her as the tug briefly accelerated. The silhouette began to grow.

'They want us to do a drive-by,' Dave Clegg said. 'Skim past at a minimum distance of three hundred metres. If we survive this you're going to see some fine flying.'

They were aimed at the huge funnel at the stern of the mad ship. Details began to resolve in the radar images. There were structures embedded in the thick strands of the funnel's mesh: building-sized blocks and plates, a patch of pyramidal cones packed in a Fibonacci spiral like seeds in a sunflower head.

'No. No, I don't,' Dave Clegg said to someone on the other end of his comms. Then, 'I'm changing course now.'

His fingers made shapes in the air in front of his face.

The reaction motor thumped again. In the windows, the funnel slid sideways, foreshortened. The bulk of the rest of the mad ship showed beyond, and Lisa realised that the tug was swinging around to the pinched nozzle that terminated the funnel.

But it wasn't pinched shut now. A freezing watchfulness gripped Lisa. She couldn't tell if it was her fear or her ghost's fascination.

The nozzle was retracting and pulling apart in a roughly circular gape, like the mouth of a monstrous worm.

'Fucking hell,' Dave Clegg said reverentially.

The mad ship was waking up.

52. Somewhat Resembling Venus.

Four days into the voyage to the G2 star's Earth-sized planet, a flight of drones burst out of the mirror that Abalunam's Pride and the Red Brigade picket had left behind. They came through all at once, an expanding fast-moving swarm that immediately engaged with the drones and mines sown by the picket. A hyperkinetic wavefront of strikes and counterstrikes flared across a million cubic klicks; driving sunwards, Tony glimpsed a tiny glitter of X-ray and gamma-ray sources, a stuttering constellation of brief-lived stars. The picket ship's pilot shared an image snatched by a stealthed surveillance drone: ships emerging from the mirror, one after the other. Four J-class interceptors bristling with assets, heading from the ice giant in line-of-battle formation.

'They don't realise they are outnumbered,' the pilot said.

'They dealt with your drones easily enough,' Tony said.

He had been nursing the faint hope that Bane and Colonel X had been lying about the police ships, was dismayed by their appearance. It was a dangerous and unpredictable complication.

'Let 'em think they have the advantage,' the pilot said cheerfully. 'That little engagement was just a taster. Pretty soon you're going to see some real fun.'

A sentiment echoed by Mina Saba when she called an hour later, wanting to know if the police ships had been sent by Colonel X.

'Ada Morange tricked a broker into hiring me to help investigate the slime planet. Her hand killed one of the broker's sons on Veles. The broker told the police everything, and here we are,' Tony said.

'You have been less than honest with me, Mr Okoye. I'm disappointed,' Mina Saba said.

'I was hoping that the broker was bluffing,' Tony said. 'I'm sorry to see that she was not. Where is Ada Morange, by the way? Is she with you?'

'Don't expect any help from the police,' Mina Saba said. 'They have badly underestimated my resources. We will talk again when you reach my ship. We will talk face to face. And if you are less than candid with me, if there is any more trickery, I can promise you that things will go badly.'

'Ask Ada Morange what happened in her house in Tanrog,' Tony said. 'Ask her how she tricked Raqle Thornhilde. Ask her how she tricked my family. Ask yourself how she might be tricking you.'

But Mina Saba had cut the connection.

Abalunam's Pride and the picket ship flew on, separated by just ten kilometres, decelerating on a course that intersected with the planet. One of the police ships aimed a maser at them, transmitting a declaration that this was a designated forbidden zone, a command to prepare to surrender, and a message from Opeyemi, ordering Tony to give up his futile plans for the good of the family. Tony told the bridle to block anything else that the police sent.

'Do you want to reply to Opeyemi?' the bridle said.

'It probably wasn't even him,' Tony said. 'Just some avatar got up by the police.'

But it had woken the itches of old doubts. Colonel X had abandoned him. He had run from his family. And now he was running from the police into the arms of the Red Brigade, with no idea of what would happen when he got there.

His destination, presently showing as a crescent off to one side of the star's incandescent coin, was a cloud-wrapped hothouse planet somewhat resembling Venus. Like Venus, a runaway greenhouse effect had baked carbon dioxide from its crust, muffling it in a thick atmosphere several hundred kilometres deep; unlike Venus, it was protected from solar winds by a strong magnetic field, and had retained most of its water. Venus's clouds were mostly concentrated sulphuric acid; here, they were composed of tiny droplets of carbonic acid that constantly rained out towards the hot surface, turning into carbon dioxide and superheated steam that was recirculated high into the atmosphere to begin the cycle again.

The bridle reported that she had detected the signature of photosynthetic pigments in the calm upper layers of the clouds: aerial plankton whose rate of reproduction exceeded the rate of removal by rain falling towards the surface. A little later she said that she had detected a small fleet of ships in orbit around the planet's equator: a U-class hauler and twelve smaller ships in a higher, separate orbit.

Tony said, 'The hauler will be remotely controlled. And it contains a mad ship. That's why the other ships are keeping their distance.'

'I have found something else,' the bridle said. 'Several hundred small radar-reflective bodies in the planet's atmosphere.'

Tony wanted to know if they were ships. He imagined a fleet of them, each hung under giant balloons in the thick cloud cover. A floating sargasso drifting on the wind . . .

'We are too far away to resolve them,' the bridle said. 'But it is possible that at least one of them could be a mirror. The planet is emitting a small excess of tau neutrinos consistent with the operation of mirror machinery. And the eidolon . . .'

'What about the eidolon?' Tony said, after a few seconds' silence.

'It is very interested in the planet. I think it is searching for something down there. Or maybe it has found it, and is talking to it,' the bridle said. 'It isn't clear. I wish I knew more, but there it is.'

'Has anyone ever found a mirror floating in a planetary atmosphere?'

'I know! Isn't it amazing?'

'Can you locate it? If it is a mirror.'

'Not yet. It may be possible when we are closer. Also, I could build more detectors. Do you want me to do that?'

'If it will help you find this mirror,' Tony said carefully. He was still wary of the bridle's new abilities. He was worried that she might decide that her interests or the interests of the eidolon were more important than his.

'I think it will. Yes. It's exciting, isn't it?' the bridle said happily.

'Keep looking,' Tony said. 'Keep looking everywhere. And open a line to that picket.'

He was going to tell its pilot that he wanted to talk to Mina Saba again. He believed that he finally had some leverage in this game.

53. 'We are here to help.'

After Lisa had been extracted from the tug and stripped of her sensor patches, a guard clipped a short cable to her waist and towed her down the length of the hold. Gliding in free fall through deep shadow and splashes of brilliant light, past two A-class jaunt ships, actual alien spaceships like giant whiskery catfish carved from obsidian, to a curtain of plastic webbing on the far bulkhead, where Adam Nevers and three Jackaroo avatars were waiting.

'We wanted to congratulate you in person,' Nevers said.

He was gripping the webbing with both hands, as if afraid that he would fall if he let go. The three avatars hung quiet and still in the air beside him. It was a shock to see them, but not a surprise. Their translucent gold skin. Their black tracksuits, which here in the future must look like antiques. The dark glasses that masked the white stones of their eyes.

'So who's really in charge?' Lisa said, hooking a couple of fingers in the webbing and turning to the avatars. It was a little like floating in water, except that there was no sense of up or down. 'You or Mr Nevers?'

'We are here to help,' the middle one said.

'Yeah, I know all about your help.'

Lisa was shaky and exhausted after the jaunt in the tug, her spine and hips ached from hours of being immobilised in the rigid shell of her pressure garment, and for the first time since she had woken in the future she badly needed a drink. It parched her tongue and throat, burned in her belly.

'One of you was with Mr Nevers when he raided my place,' she said. 'And a couple of your buddies turned up at Terminus, scaring Ada Morange into kidnapping me and booting me into the future.'

Nevers said, 'If you must blame anyone for your plight, Lisa, blame Ada Morange.'

That even, faintly sarcastic tone of his, as if speaking to a child.