Over a hundred combat wasps launched in less than twenty seconds. The glare from their drives shimmered off the nighttime clouds below, a radiance far exceeding any natural moonlight.

Despite the continuing electronic warfare emission from the SD platforms, none of the orbiting network sensors could miss such a deadly spectacle. Threat analysis programs controlling each network initiated what they estimated was an appropriate level of response.

Officially, Tonala’s ironberg foundry yard sprawled for over eighteen kilometres along the coast, extending back inland between eight and ten kilometres according to the lie of the land. That, anyway, was the area which the government had originally set aside for the project in 2407, with an optimism which matched the one prevalent during Floreso’s arrival into Nyvan orbit three years earlier. Apart from the asteroid’s biosphere cavern, the foundry became Tonala’s largest ever civil engineering development.

It started off in a promising enough fashion. First came a small coastal port to berth the tugs which recovered the ironbergs from their mid-ocean splashdown. With that construction under way, the engineers started excavating a huge seawater canal running parallel to the coastline. A hundred and twenty metres wide and thirty deep, it was designed to accommodate the ironbergs, allowing them to be towed into the Disassembly Sheds which were to be the centrepiece of the yard. The main canal branched twenty times, sprouting kilometre-long channels which would each end at a shed.

After the first seven Disassembly Sheds were completed, an audit by the Tonalan Treasury revealed the nation didn’t require the metal production capacity already built. Funds for the remaining Disassembly Sheds were suspended until the economy expanded to warrant them. That was in 2458. Since then, the thirteen unused branch canals gradually choked up with weeds and silt until they eventually became nothing more than large, perfectly rectangular saltwater marshes. In 2580, Harrisburg University’s biology department successfully had them declared part of the national nature park reserve.

Those Disassembly Sheds which did get built were massive cuboid structures, two hundred metres a side, and very basic. An immense skeletal framework was thrown up, bridging the end of the branch canal, then cloaked in flat composite panels. A vertical petal door above the canal allowed the ironberg egress. Inside, powerful fission blades on the end of gantry arms performed a preprogrammed dissection, slicing the ironberg into thousand-tonne segments like some gigantic metal fruit.

A second network of smaller canals connected the Disassembly Sheds with the actual foundry buildings, allowing the bulky, awkwardly shaped segments of spongesteel to be floated directly to the smelter intakes. The desolate land between the Disassembly Sheds, foundry buildings, and canals was crisscrossed by a maze of roads, some no more than dirt tracks, while others were broad decaying roadways built to carry heavy plant during the heady early days of construction. None of them had modern guidance tracking cables; foundry crews didn’t care, they knew the layout and drove manually. It meant that any visitors venturing deep into the yard invariably took wrong turnings. Not that they could ever get lost, the gargantuan Disassembly Sheds were visible for tens of kilometres, rising up out of the featureless alluvial plain like the blocks some local god had forgotten to sculpt mountains out of during Nyvan’s creation. They made perfect navigational reference aides. Under normal conditions.

The road was over eighty years old; coastal winters had washed soil away from under it and frozen the surface, flexing it up and down until it snapped. There wasn’t a single flat stretch anywhere, a fact disguised by fancifully windsculpted drifts of snow. Alkad’s car lumbered along at barely more than walking pace as the suspension rocked the body from side to side.

They’d driven into the yard at a dangerously high speed along the roadway. A fifth car had been wiped out behind them, then the blasts of energy from space seemed to stop. Alkad datavised the car’s control processor to turn off at the first junction. According to the map she had loaded into her neural nanonics memory cell, the Disassembly Sheds were strung out across the yard’s northern quadrant.

But as she was rapidly discovering: the map is not the territory.

“I can’t see a bloody thing,” Voi said. “I don’t even know if we’re on a road anymore.”

Eriba peered forwards, his nose almost touching the windshield. “The Sheds have to be out there somewhere. They’re huge.”

“The guidance processor says we’re heading north,” Alkad said. “Keep looking.” She glanced out of the back window to see the car following her bouncing about heavily, its headlight beams slashing about through the snow. “Can you sense Baranovich?” she asked Gelai.

“Faintly, yes.” Her hand waved ahead and slightly to the left. “He’s out there; and he’s got a lot of friends with him.”

“How many?”

“About twenty, maybe more. It’s difficult at this distance, and they’re moving about.”

Voi sucked her breath in fiercely. “Too many.”

“Is Lodi with them?”

“Possibly.”

A massive chunk of machinery lay along the side of the road, some metallic fossil from the age of greater ambitions. Once they’d passed it, a strong red-gold radiance flooded over the car. A faint roar made the windows tremble.

“One of the smelters,” Ngong said.

“Which means the Disassembly Sheds are on this side.” Voi pointed confidently.

The road became smoother, and the car picked up speed. Its tyres began to squelch through slush that had melted in the radiance of the smelter. They could see the silhouette of the furnace building now, a long black rectangle with hangarlike doors fully open to show eight streams of radiant molten metal pouring out of the hulking smelter into narrow channels which wound away deeper into the building. Thick jets of steam were shooting out of vents in the roof. Snowflakes reverted to sour rain as they fell through them.

Alkad yelled in fright, and datavised an emergency stop order to the car’s control processor. They juddered to a halt two metres short of the canal. A segment of ironberg was sliding along sedately just in front of them, a tarnished silver banana shape with its skin pocked by millions of tiny black craters.

The sky above turned a brilliant silver, stamping a black and white image of the canal and the ironberg segment on the back of Alkad’s retina. “Holy Mother Mary,” she breathed.

The awesome light faded.

“My processor block’s crashed,” Eriba said. He was twisting his head around, trying to find the source of the light. “What was that?”

“They’re shooting at the cars again,” Voi said.

Alkad datavised the car’s control processor, not surprised when she couldn’t get a response. It confirmed the cause: emp. “I wish it was only that,” she told them, marvelling sadly at their innocence. Even now they didn’t grasp the enormity of what was involved, the length to which others would go. She reached under the dashboard and twisted the release for the manual steering column. Thankfully, it swung up in front of a startled Eriba. “Drive,” she instructed. “There’ll be a bridge or something in a minute. But just drive.”

“Oh, bloody hell,” Sarha grumbled. “Here we go again.”

Lady Mac ’s combat sensor clusters were relaying an all-too-clear image of space above Nyvan into her neural nanonics. Ten seconds ago all had been clear and calm. The various SD platforms were still conducting their pointless electronic war unabated. Ships were moving towards the three abandoned asteroids, two squadrons of frigates from different nations were closing on Jesup; while Tonala’s low-orbit squadron was moving to intercept the Organization ships. This orbital chess game between the nations could have gone on for hours yet, allowing Joshua and the others plenty of time to get back up to the ship, and for all of them to jump the hell away from this deranged planet.

Then the Organization frigates had started shooting. The voidhawks accelerated out of parking orbit. And space was full of combat wasps.

“Velocity confirmed,” Beaulieu barked. “Forty gees, plus. Antimatter propulsion.”

“Christ,” Liol said. “Now what do we do?”

“Nothing,” Sarha snapped. So far, the conflict was ahead of them and at a slightly higher altitude. “Standby for emp.” She datavised a procedural stand-by order into the flight computer. “Damn, I wish Joshua were here, he could fly us out of this in his sleep.”

Liol gave her a hurt look.

Four swarms of combat wasps were in flight, etching dazzling strands of light across the darkened continents and oceans. They began to jettison their submunitions, and everything became far too complicated for the human mind to follow. Symbols erupted across the display Sarha’s neural nanonics provided as she asked the tactical analysis program for simplified interpretations.

Nyvan’s nightside had ceased to become dark, enlivened by hundreds of incandescent exhausts blurring together as they engaged each other. It was the fusion bombs which went off first, then an antimatter charge detonated.

Space ahead of Lady Mac went into blazeout. No sensor was capable of penetrating that stupendous energy release.

Tactically, it wasn’t the best action. The blast destroyed every combat wasp submunitions friend or foe within a hundred kilometres, while its emp disabled an even larger number.

“Damage report?” Sarha asked.

“Some sensor damage,” Beaulieu said. “Backups coming on-line. No fuselage energy penetration.”

“Liol!”

“Uh? Oh. Yeah. Flight systems intact, generators on-line. Attitude stable.”

“The SD platforms are launching,” Beaulieu warned. “They’re really letting loose. Saturation assault!”

“I can get us out of here,” Liol said. “Two minutes to jump altitude.”

“No,” Sarha said. “If we move, they’ll target us. Right now we stay low and inert. We don’t launch, we don’t emit. If anything does lock on, we kill it with the masers and countermeasure its launch origin. Then you shift our inclination three degrees either way, not our altitude. Got that?”

“Got it.” His voice was hot and high.

“Relax, Liol, everyone’s forgotten about us. We just stay intact to pick Joshua up, that’s our mission, that’s all we do. I want you cool for a smooth response when it comes. And it will. Use a stim program if you have to.”

“No. I’m all right now.”

Another antimatter explosion obliterated a vast section of the universe. Broken submunitions came spinning out of the epicentre.

“Lock on,” Beaulieu reported. “Three submunitions. One kinetic, two nukes. I think; catalogue match is sixty per cent. Twenty gees only, real geriatrics.”

“Okay,” Sarha said, proud to find how calm she was. “Kick-ass time.”

A deluge of light from the second antimatter explosion revealed the Disassembly Sheds to all the cars speeding across the foundry yard. A row of blank two-dimensional squares receding to the horizon.

“Go for it!” Alkad urged.

Eriba thumbed the throttle forwards. The snow was abating now, revealing more of the ground ahead, giving him confidence. Furnaces glowed in the distance, coronas of slumbering dragons smeared by flurries of grey flakes. The battered road took them past long-forsaken fields of carbon concrete where ranks of sun-bleached gantries stood as memorials to machinery and buildings aborted by financial reality. Pipes wide enough to swallow the car angled up out of the stony soil like metallized worms; their ends capped by rusting grilles which issued strange heavy vapours. Lonely wolf-analogues prowled among the destitute technological carcasses, skulking in the shadows whenever the car’s headlights ventured close.

Seeing the other cars falling behind, Eriba aimed for a swing bridge over the next small canal. The car wheels left the floor as it charged over the apex of the two segments. Alkad was flung forwards as it banged down on the other side.

“That’s Shed Six,” Voi said, eagerly looking out of a side window. “One more canal to go.”

“We’re going to make it,” Eriba shouted back. He was completely absorbed by the race, adrenaline rush giving his world a provocative edge.

“That’s good,” Alkad said. Anything else would have sounded churlish.

The snow clouds above the yard were slowly tearing open, showing ragged tracts of evening sky. It was alight with plasma fire; drive exhausts and explosions merging and expanding into a single blanket of iridescence that was alive with choppy internal tides.

Joshua kinked his neck back at a difficult angle to watch it. The car jounced about, determined to deny him an uninterrupted view. Since the first antimatter bomb’s emp had wrecked their car’s electronics Dahybi had been driving them manually. It was a bumpy ride.

Another antimatter explosion turned the remaining clouds transparent. Joshua’s retinal implants prevented any lasting damage to his eyes, but he still had to blink furiously to clear the brilliant purple afterimage away.

“Jesus, I hope they’re all right up there.”

“Sarha knows what she’s doing,” Melvyn said. “Besides, we’ve got another twenty minutes before they’re above the horizon, and that blast was almost directly overhead.”

“Sure, right.”

“Hang on,” Dahybi called.

The car shot over a swing bridge, taking flight at the top. They thumped down, skittling sideways until the rear bumper smacked into the road’s side barrier. A wicked grinding sound told them they’d lost more bodywork until Dahybi managed to straighten out again.

“She’s pulling ahead,” Melvyn pointed out calmly.

“Can you do any fucking better?” Dahybi yelled back.

Joshua couldn’t remember the composed node specialist ever getting so aggrieved before. He heard another crunch behind them as the first embassy car cleared the bridge.

“Just keep on her,” Joshua said. “You’re doing fine.”

“Where the hell is she going?” Melvyn wondered out loud.

“More to the point, why doesn’t she care that this circus procession is following her?” Joshua replied. “She has to be pretty confident about whoever she’s meeting.”

“Who or what.” Melvyn sucked in a breath. “You don’t think the Alchemist is hidden around here, do you? I mean, look at this place, you could lose a squadron of starships out here.”

“Don’t let’s imagine things worse than they are,” Joshua said. “My main concern is those two possessed with her.”

“I should be able to deal with them,” a serjeant said. It touched one of the weapons clipped to its belt.

Joshua managed a twitched smile. It was becoming harder for him to associate these increasingly combat-adept serjeants with the old sweet, sexy Ione.

“What’s the Alchemist?” Dick Keaton asked.

When Joshua turned back to their passenger, he was startled by the flood of curiosity emanating from the man. It was what he imagined Edenist affinity must be like. The emotion dominated. “Need to know only, sorry.”

Dick Keaton seemed to have some trouble returning to his usual blas

It bothered Joshua quite badly for some reason. The first glimpse of something hidden behind the mask. Something very wrong, and very deeply hidden.

“They’re changing direction,” Dahybi warned.

Mzu’s car had left the narrow road which ran between the swing bridges, turning onto a more substantial road which led towards Disassembly Shed Four. Dahybi tugged the steering column over as far as it would go, almost missing the junction as they careered around after her.

After standing up against two centuries of saltwater corrosion, cheap slipshod maintenance, bird excrement, algae, and in one memorable instance a small aircraft crash, the walls and roof of Disassembly Shed Four were in a sorry state. Despite that, the structure’s scale was still impressive to the point of intimidating. Joshua had seen far bigger buildings, but not in isolation like this.

“Joshua, look at the last car,” a serjeant said.

Five other cars were still part of the chase. Four of them were big towncars from the Kulu embassy; all smooth dark bodies with opaque windows and powerful fanbeam headlights. The fifth had started out an ordinary car with dark green bodywork; now it was some primitive monstrosity with bright scarlet paint that was covered in brash stickers. Six round headlights were affixed to a lattice of metal struts which covered the front grille. Primitive it might have been, but it was closing up fast on the last embassy car, its broad tyres giving it excellent traction on the slush.

“Jesus, they’re in front and behind.”

“This might be a good time for us to retire gracefully,” Melvyn said.

Joshua glanced ahead. They were already in the shadow thrown by Disassembly Shed Four. Mzu’s car was almost at the base of the colossal wall, and braking to a halt.

It was very tempting. And he was in an agony of denial not knowing what had happened to Lady Mac .

“Trouble,” Dick Keaton said. He was holding up a processor block, swinging it around to try to locate something. “Some kind of electronic distortion is focusing on us. Don’t know what kind, it’s more powerful than the emp though.”

Joshua ordered his neural nanonics to run a diagnostic. The program never completed. “Possessed!” intuition was screaming at him. “Out, everybody out. Go for cover.”

Dahybi slammed the brakes on. The doors were opening before they stopped. Mzu’s car was fifteen metres in front of them, stationary and empty.

Joshua threw himself out of the car, taking a couple of fast steps before flinging himself flat onto the slush. One of the serjeants hit the road beside him.

A tremendous jet of white fire squirted down from the shed. It swamped the top of the car, sending ravenous tentacles curling down through the open doors. Glass blew out, and the interior combusted instantly, burning with eerie fury.

Ione knew exactly what she had to do, one consciousness puppeting two bodies. As soon as the first wave of heat swelled overhead she was rising, adopting a crouch position. Four hands were bringing four different guns to bear. As there was one serjeant on either side of the car, she could triangulate the source of the energistic attack perfectly: a line of dirt-greyed windows thirty metres up the shed wall. Two of them had swung open.

She opened fire. First priority was to suppress the possessed, give them so much to worry about they’d be unable to continue their own assault. Two of the guns she held were rapid-fire machine pistols, capable of firing over a hundred bullets a second. She used them in half-second bursts, swinging them in fast arcs. The windows, surrounding panels, stress rods, and secondary structural girders disintegrated into an avalanche of scything chips as the bullets savaged them. The heavy-calibre rifles followed, explosive-tipped shells chewing ferociously at the edges of the initial devastation. Then she began slamming rounds into the panelling where she estimated the walkway the possessed were using was situated.

“Go!” she bellowed from both throats. “Get inside, there’s cover there.”

Joshua rolled over fast and started sprinting. Melvyn was right behind him. There was nothing to hear above the bone-jarring vibration of the rifles, no pounding footsteps or shouts of alarm. He just kept running.

A streamer of white fire churned through the air above him. It was hard to distinguish in the light fluxing down from the orbital battle. The foundry yard was soaked in a brightness twice as great as the noonday sun, a glare made all the worse by the snow.

Ione saw the fire coming right at her down one half of her vision and pointed the rifle and machine gun along the angle of approach. She held the triggers down on both of them, bullets flaring indigo as if they were tracer rounds. The white fire struck, and she cancelled the serjeant’s tactile nerves, banishing pain. Her machine-gun magazine was exhausted, but she kept on firing the rifle, holding it steady even though the fire burned away her eyes along with her leathery skin.

Then her consciousness was in only one of the bitek constructs; she could see the flaming outline of the other fall to the ground. And shadows were flittering in the dusk behind the yawning hole she’d blasted in the wall. She slapped a new magazine in the machine gun and raised both barrels.

Joshua had just passed Mzu’s car when the explosive round went crack mere centimetres from his skull. He flinched, throwing his arms up defensively. A small door in the shed wall just in front of him disintegrated. It took a tremendous act of trust, but he kept on going. Ione had opened the way. There had to be some kind of sanctuary in there.

Alkad Mzu didn’t regard the interior of Disassembly Shed Four as sanctuary, exactly, but she was grateful to reach it nonetheless. The cars were still pursuing her, berserk high-speed skids and swerves across the road showing just how intent their occupants were. At least inside the shed she could choose her opponents.

Just as Ngong closed the small door she caught a glimpse of the surviving police cars leaping the swing bridge, their blue and red strobes flashing. The snow was hot with irradiated light from the battle above, and growing ever brighter. Ngong clanged the door shut and slammed the bolts across.

Alkad stood waiting for her retinal implants to adjust to the sombre darkness. It took them longer than it should; and her neural nanonics were totally off-line. Baranovich was close.

They made their way forwards through a forest of metal pillars. The shed’s framework structure extended some distance from the panel wall it was supporting, uncountable trusses and struts melding together in asymmetric junctions. Looking straight up, it was impossible to see the roof, only the labyrinthine intertexture of black metal forming an impenetrable barrier. Each tube and I-beam was slick with water, beads of condensation tickled by gravity until they dropped. With the shed’s conditioning turned off, the inside was a permanent drizzle.

Alkad led the others forwards, out from under the artless pillars. There was no ironberg in the huge basin at the middle of the shed, so the water was slopping quietly against the rim. The cranes, the gantry arms with their huge fission blades, the mobile inspection platforms, all of them hung still and silent around the sides of the central high bay. Sounds didn’t echo here, they were absorbed by the prickly fur of metal inside the walls. Scraps of light escaped through lacunas in the roof buttresses, producing a crisscross of white beams that always seemed to fade away before they reached the ground. Big seabirds scurried about through the air, endlessly swapping perches as if they were searching for the perfect vantage point.

“Up here, Dr Mzu,” a voice called out.

She turned around, head tilted back, hand held in a salute to shield her face from the gentle rain. Baranovich was standing on a walkway forty metres above the ground, leaning casually against the safety railing. His colourful Cossack costume shone splendidly amid the gloom. Several people stood in the shadows behind him.

“All right,” she said. “I’m here. Where’s my transport off-planet? From what I can see, there’s some difficulty in orbit right now.”

“Don’t get smart with me, Doctor. The Organization isn’t going to be wiped out by one small war between SD platforms.”

“Lodi is up there,” Gelai said quietly. “The other possessed are becoming agitated by the approaching cars.”

“I don’t suppose it will,” Alkad shouted back. “So our arrangement still stands. You let Lodi go, and I’ll come with you.”

“The arrangement, Doctor, was that you come alone. But I’m a reasonable man. I’ll see to it that you reach the Organization. Oh, and here’s Lodi.”

He was flung over the safety barrier just as Ione’s guns started to demolish the windows and panelling. His screams were lost amid the roar of the explosive rounds. Arms windmilled in pathetic desperation, their motion caught by the strobe effect of the explosions. He hit the carbon concrete with a dreadful wet thud.

“See, Doctor? I let him go.”

Alkad stared at the lad’s body, desperate to reject what she’d seen. It was, she realized in some shock, the first time she’d actually witnessed somebody being killed. Murdered.

“Mother Mary, he was just a boy.”

Voi whimpered behind her.

Baranovich was laughing. Those on the walkway with him joined hands. A plume of white fire speared down towards Alkad.

Both Gelai and Ngong grabbed hold of her arms. When the white fire hit, it was like a sluice of dazzling warm water. She swayed backwards under the impact, crying out from surprise rather than pain. The strike abated, leaving her itching all over.

“Step aside,” Baranovich shouted angrily. “She belongs to us.”

Gelai grinned evilly and raised a hand as if to wave. The walkway under Baranovich’s feet split with a loud brassy creak. He gave a dismayed yell and made a grab for the safety rail.

“Run!” Gelai urged.

Alkad hesitated for an instant, looking back at Lodi’s body for any conceivable sign of life. There was too much blood for that. Together with the others, she pelted back to the relative safety of the metal support pillars.

“I can’t die yet,” she said frantically. “I have to get to the Alchemist first. I have to, it’s the only way.”

A figure stepped out in front of her. “Dr Mzu, I presume,” said Joshua. “Remember me?”

She gaped at him, too incredulous to speak. Three other men were standing behind him; two of them were nervously pointing machine guns at Gelai and Ngong.

“Who is this ?” a very confused Voi asked.

Alkad gave a little laugh that was close to hysteria. “Captain Calvert, from Tranquillity.”

Joshua clicked his heels and did a little bow. “On the button, Doc. I’m flattered. And Lady Mac ’s in orbit here ready to take you back home. The Lord of Ruin is pretty pissed at you for disappearing, but she says she’ll forgive you providing your nasty little secret stays secret forever.”

“You work for Ione Saldana?”

“Yeah. She’ll be here in the sort-of flesh in a minute to confirm the offer. But right now, my priority is to get you and your friends out of here.” He gave Gelai and Ngong the eye. “Some of your friends. I don’t know what the story with these two is, but I’m not having—” The cold, unmistakable shape of a pistol muzzle was pressed firmly into the back of his neck.

“Thank you, Captain Calvert,” Monica’s voice purred with triumph. “But us professionals will take it from here.”

The air on board the Urschel was clotted by rank gases and far too much humidity. Those conditioning filters still functioning emitted an alarmingly loud buzzing as fan motors spun towards overload. Innumerable light panels had failed, hatch actuators were unreliable at best, discarded food wrappers fluttered about everywhere.

Cherri Barnes hated the sloppiness and disorder. Efficiency on a starship was more than just habit, it was an essential survival requirement. A crew was utterly dependent on its equipment.

But two of the possessed (her fellow possessed, she tried to tell herself) were from the late nineteenth—early twentieth century. Arrogant oafs who didn’t or wouldn’t understand the basic preconditions of shipboard routine. And their so-called commander, Oscar Kearn, didn’t seem too bothered, either. He just assumed that the non-possessed crew would go around scooping up the shit. They didn’t.

Cherri had given up advising and demanding. She was actually quite surprised that they’d survived the orbital battle for so long—although antimatter-powered combat wasps did load the odds in their favour. And for once the non-possessed were understandably performing their duties with a high level of proficiency. There was little for the possessed to do except wait. Oscar Kearn occupied himself by studying the hologram screen displays, and muttering the odd comment to his non-possessed subordinate. In reality he was contributing little, other than continually urging their combat wasps be directed at the voidhawks. The concept of keeping a reserve for their own defence seemed elusive.

When the explosions and energy cascades outside the hull were reaching an appalling crescendo, Cherri slipped quietly out of the bridge. Under ordinary combat conditions the companionways linking the frigate’s four life-support capsules should have been sealed tight. Now, she glided past open hatches as she made her way along to B capsule’s maintenance engineering deck. As soon as she was inside she closed the ceiling hatch and engaged the manual lock.

She pulled herself over to one of the three processor consoles and tapped the power stud. Not being able to datavise the frigate’s flight computer was a big hindrance; she wasn’t used to voice response programs. Eventually, though, she established an auxiliary command circuit, cutting the bridge officers out of the loop. The systems and displays she wanted slowly came on-line.

Combat wasps and their submunitions still flocked through space above Nyvan, though not quite as many as before. And the blanket electronic warfare interference had ended; quite simply, there were no SD platforms left intact to wage that aspect of the conflict.

One of the ten phased array antennae positioned around the Urschel ’s hull focused on the Lady Macbeth . Cherri pulled herself closer to the console’s mike.

“Is anyone receiving this? Sarha, Warlow, can you hear me? If you can, use a five-millimetre aperture signal maser for a direct com return. Do not, repeat not lock on to Urschel ’s main antenna.”