Both the other Intelligence operatives turned to look at the sharpness in Samuel’s voice. The two serjeants began to walk forwards over the beach.

Ione!tranquillity’s thoughts rang with surprise, turning to alarm. I can sense a gravitonic-distortion zone building.

So?she asked. every starship emerging above Mirchusko registered in the habitat’s mass-sensitive organs. There was no requirement for the usual network of strategic warning grav-distortion-detector satellites which guarded ordinary asteroid settlements and planets, Tranquillity’s perception of local space was unrivalled, making threat response a near-instantaneous affair. Is the starship emerging too close? Arm the strategic-defence platforms.

No use. It’s—

At first Samuel mistook it for a shadow cast by an evening cloud. There was still enough pearly radiance coming from the light-tube to give the circumfluous sea a sparse shimmer, a cloud would produce exactly that patch of darkness. But there was only one patch of darkness; and when he glanced up the air was clear. Then the noise began, a distant thunderclap which lasted for several seconds, then chopped off abruptly. A brilliant star shone at the centre of the darkness, sending long radials of frigid white light into the habitat.

Mzu was silhouetted perfectly against the white blaze reflected off the sea, encased in the black skin of the spacesuit, a consummate monochrome picture.

Shock immobilized Samuel’s body for a precious second. Out of the centre of the fading star a blackhawk came skimming silently over the sea towards Mzu; a compressed ovoid one hundred and thirty metres long, with a horseshoe life-support section moulded round the rear dorsal bulge. Its blue polyp hull was marbled with an imperial-purple web.

“Jesus wept!” Pauline said in an aghast whisper. “It jumped inside. It’s come right into the fucking habitat!”

“Get her!” Monica cried. “For Christ’s sake stop the bitch!” She ran forwards.

“No, stop! Come back,” Samuel yelled. But Pauline was already charging out of the trees after the ESA agent, boosted muscles accelerating her to a phenomenal speed. “Oh, shit.” He started to run.

Meyer saw the small spacesuited woman standing at the water’s edge, and Udat obligingly angled round towards her. Tension had condensed his guts into a solid lump. Swallowing inside a habitat, it had to be the craziest stunt in the history of spaceflight. Yet they’d done it!

We are in,Udat observed sagely. That’s halfway.

And don’t I know it.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING?tranquillity’s outraged broadcast thundered into the blackhawk’s mind.

Meyer winced. Even Udat ’s calm thoughts fluttered.

The woman is a political dissident being persecuted by the Kulu ESA,meyer replied with shaky bravado. Of all people, Ione Saldana should sympathize with that. We’re taking her where she will be safe.

STOP IMMEDIATELY. I WILL NOT PERMIT THIS. UDAT , SWALLOW OUT NOW.the force of the mental compulsion which the habitat personality exerted was incredible. Meyer felt as though someone had smashed a meat hook into his skull to pull his brain out by the roots. He groaned, clutching at the cushioning of his acceleration couch, heart pounding in his ears.

STOP!

“Keep going,” he gasped. His nose started to bleed. Neural nanonics sent out a flurry of metabolic overrides.

Alkad waded through the shallows as the blackhawk descended, gliding fastidiously round one of the cove’s small islands. She hadn’t grasped how big the bitek creature was. To see that almighty bulk suspended so easily in the air was an uncanny marvel. Its rounded nose was streaked with long frost rays as the sea’s humidity gusted over polyp which was accustomed to the radiative chill of deep space. A huge patch of water below the hull began to foam and churn as the distortion field interacted with it. She suddenly felt as though the horizontal was rolling. Udat turned through ninety degrees, and tilted sharply, bringing the portside wing of its life-support horseshoe down towards the water. An airlock slid open. Cherri Barnes stood inside, wearing her spacesuit. Orange silicon-fibre straps tethered her securely to the sides of the small chamber. She threw a rope-ladder down.

On the beach five figures were racing over the dunes.

Ione said: Kill her.

The serjeants pulled laser pistols from their holsters. Alkad Mzu already had her foot on the first rung.

Udat ’s maser cannon fired.

Monica Foulkes pounded hard across the sand, neural nanonics commands and boosted muscles meshing so that her body ate the distance effortlessly, a hundred and fifty metres in nine seconds. The prime order of the ESA’s Tranquillity operation was to prevent Mzu from leaving, that took precedence over everything. It didn’t look like Monica was going to get to the blackhawk in time, Mzu had started to claw her way up the rocking ladder. She reviewed which of her weapon implants would have the best chance; the trouble was most of them were designed for unobtrusive close-range work. And that bloody Lunar SII spacesuit didn’t help. It would have to be a microdart, and hope the tip penetrated. She was aware of the serjeants off to her left pulling out their laser pistols.

A metre-wide column of air fluoresced a faint violet, drawing a line from a silver bubble on the blackhawk’s lower hull to a serjeant. The bitek servitor blew apart in an explosion of steam and carbon granules. Fifteen metres behind it, where the beam struck the beach, a patch of sand became a puddle of glass, glowing a vivid rose-gold.

Over-hyped nerves sent Monica diving for cover the instant the beam appeared. She hit the loose sand, momentum ploughing a two and a half metre long furrow. There were two near-simultaneous thuds behind her as Samuel and Pauline flung themselves down. The second serjeant erupted into a black-grain mist with a loud burping sound as the maser hit it. Monica’s mind gibbered as she waited, head buried in the sand. At least with that power rating it’ll be quick . . .

A wind began howling over the dunes.

Samuel raised his head to see his worst expectation confirmed. A wormhole interstice was opening around the nose of the blackhawk. Alkad Mzu was halfway up the rope-ladder.

You must not take her from here,he pleaded with the starship. You must not!

The interstice widened, a light-devouring tunnel boring through infinity. Air streamed in.

“Hang on!” Samuel shouted to the two women agents.

COME BACK!tranquillity commanded.

Meyer, his mind twinned with the blackhawk, quailed under the habitat’s furious demand. It was too much, the storm voice had raged inside his skull for what seemed like days, bruising his neurons with its violence. Welcome surrender beckoned—to hell with Mzu, nothing was worth this. Then he felt local space twisting under the immense distortion which Udat ’s energy patterning cells exterted. A pseudoabyss leading into freedom opened before him. Go,he ordered. the cold physical blackness outside invaded his mind, plunging him into glorious oblivion.

A small but ferocious hurricane set Alkad spinning like a runaway propeller at the end of her precarious silicon-fibre ladder. “Wait!” she datavised in mounting terror. “You’re supposed to wait till I’m in the airlock.” Her digitalized vehemence made no impression on Udat . The air buoyed her up as though she had become weightless, swinging her round until the ladder was horizontal. Oscillating gravity was doing terrible things to her inner ears. Screaming air tried to tear her from the ladder. Neural nanonics pumped muscle-lock orders into her hands and calves to reinforce her grip. She could feel ligaments ripping. Collar sensors showed her the fuzzy rim of the wormhole interstice sliding inexorably along the hull towards her. “No. In the name of Mary, wait!” And then Dr Alkad Mzu was suddenly presented with every physicist’s dream opportunity: observing the fabric of the universe from the outside.