Murphy had detailed him to escort their prisoner; he could just about manage that. She said her name was Jacqueline Couteur, a middle-aged woman, small, overweight, with greying hair, dressed in jeans and a thick cotton shirt. She could punch harder than any of the supplement-boosted marines (Louis Beith had a broken arm to prove it), she had more stamina than them, and she could work that electronic warfare trick on their suit blocks if she wasn’t being prodded with one of their heavy-calibre Bradfield chemical-projectile rifles.

They had captured her ten minutes after their last contact with Jenny Harris. That was when they’d let the horses go. The animals were panicking as balls of white fire arched down out of the sky, a deceitfully majestic display of borealis rockets.

Something made a slithering sound in the red and black jungle off to Murphy’s right. Garrett Tucci fired his Bradfield, slamming explosive bullets into the vegetation. Murphy caught the swiftest glimpse of a luminous red figure scurrying away; it was either a man with a warm cloak spread wide, or else a giant bat standing on its hind legs.

“Bloody implants are shot,” he muttered under his breath. He checked his TIP carbine’s power reserve. He was down to the last heavy-duty power cell: twelve per cent. “Niels, Garrett, take the prisoner onto the boat and get the motor going. Louis, you and I are laying down a sweep-scorch. It might give us the time we need.”

“Yes, sir,” he answered.

Murphy felt an immense pride in the tiny squad. Nobody could have done better, they were the best, the very best. And they were his.

He drew a breath, and brought the TIP carbine up again. Niels was shoving his Bradfield’s muzzle into the small of Jacqueline Couteur’s back, urging her towards the boat. Murphy suddenly realized she could see as well as them in the dark. It didn’t matter now. One of the day’s smaller mysteries.

His TIP carbine fired, nozzle aimed by his neural nanonics. Flames rose before him, leaping from tree to tree, incinerating the twigs, biting deeply into the larger branches. Vines flared and sparkled like fused electrical cables, swinging in short arcs before falling to the ground and writhing ferociously as they spat and hissed. A solid breaker of heat rolled around him, shunted into the ground by his suit’s dispersal layer. Smoke rose from his feet. The medical nanonic package around his knee datavised a heat-overload warning into his neural nanonics.

“Come on, Lieutenant!” Garrett shouted.

Through the heavy crackling of the flames Murphy could hear the familiar chugging sound of the Isakore ’s motor. The suit’s rear optical sensors showed him the boat backing out from under the cherry oak, water boiling ferociously around its stern.

“Go,” Murphy told Louis Beith.

They turned and raced for the Isakore . Murphy could just targeting graphics circling his back.

We’ll never make it, not out of this.

Flames were rising thirty metres into the night behind them. Isakore was completely free of the cherry oak. Niels was leaning over the gunwale, holding out a hand. The green-tinted medical nanonic package leaching to his face looked like some massive and grotesque wart.

Water splashed around his boots. Once he nearly slipped on the mud and tangled snowlily fronds. But then he was clinging to the side of the wooden boat, hauling himself up onto the deck.

“Holy shit, we made it!” He was laughing uncontrollably, tears streaming out of his eyes. “We actually bloody made it.” He pulled his shell-helmet off, and lay on his back, looking at the fire. A stretch of jungle four hundred metres long was in flames, hurling orange sparks into the black sky far above.

The impenetrable water of the Zamjan shimmered with long orange reflections. Garrett was turning the boat, aiming the prow downriver.

“What about the Kulu team?” Louis asked. He’d taken his shell-helmet off, showing a face glinting with sweat. His breathing was heavy.

“I think that was a sonic boom we heard this afternoon,” Murphy said, raising his voice above the flames. “Those Kulu bastards, always one move ahead of everyone else.”

“They’re soft, that’s all,” Garrett shouted from the wheel-house. “Can’t take the pressure. We can. We’re the fucking Confed fucking Navy fucking Marines.” He whooped.

Murphy grinned back at him; fatigue pulled at every limb. He’d been using his boosted muscles almost constantly, which meant he’d have to make sure he ate plenty of high-protein rations to regain his proper blood energy levels. He loaded a memo into his neural nanonics.

His communication block let out a bleep for the first time in five hours; the datavise told him that there was a channel to the navy ELINT satellite open.

“Bloody hell,” Murphy said. He datavised the block: “Sir, is that you, sir?”

“Christ, Murphy,” Kelven Solanki’s datavise gushed into his mind. “What’s happening?”

“Spot of trouble, sir. Nothing we can’t handle. We’re back on the boat now, heading downriver.”

Louis gave an exhausted laugh, and flopped onto his back.

“The Kulu team evacuated,” Kelven Solanki reported. “Their whole embassy contingent upped and left in the Ekwan this evening. Ralph Hiltch called me from orbit to say there wasn’t enough room on the spaceplane to pick you up.”

Murphy could sense a great deal of anger lying behind the lieutenant-commander’s smooth signal. “Doesn’t matter, sir; we got you a prisoner.”

“Fantastic. One of the sequestrated ones?”

Murphy glanced over his shoulder. Jacqueline Couteur was sitting on the deck with her back to the wheel-house. She gave him a dour stare.

“I think so, sir, she can interfere with our electronics if we give her half a chance. She’s got to be watched constantly.”

“OK, when can you have her back in—” Kelven Solanki’s datavise vanished under a peal of static. The communications block reported the channel was lost.

Murphy picked up his TIP carbine and pointed it at Jacqueline Couteur. “Is that you?”

She shrugged. “No.”

Murphy looked back at the fire on the bank. They were half a kilometre away now. People were walking along the shoreline where the Isakore had been anchored. The big cherry oak was still standing, intact, a black silhouette against the blanket of flame.

“Can they affect our electronics from here?”

“We don’t care about your electronics,” she said. “Such things have no place in our world.”

“Are you talking to them?”

“No.”

“Sir!” Garrett yelled.

Murphy swung round. The people on the shore were standing in a ring, holding hands. A large ball of white fire emerged from the ground in their midst and curved over their heads, soaring out across the river.

“Down!” Murphy shouted.

The fireball flashed overhead, making the air roil from its passage, bringing a false daylight to the boat. Murphy ground his teeth together, anticipating the strike, the pain as it vaporized his legs or spine. There was a clamorous BOOM from behind the wheel-house, the boat rocked violently, and the light went out.

“Oh shit, oh shit.” Garrett was crying.

“What is it?” Murphy demanded. He pulled himself onto his feet.

The boxy wooden structure behind the wheel-house was a smoking ruin. Fractured planks with charred edges pointed vacantly at the sky. The micro-fusion generator it had covered was a shambolic mass of heat-tarnished metal and dripping plastic.

“You will come to us in time,” Jacqueline Couteur said calmly. She hadn’t moved from her sitting position. “We have no hurry.”

The Isakore drifted round a bend in the river, water gurgling idly around the hull, pulling the fire from view. A duet of night and silence closed over the boat, a void surer than vacuum.

Ione wore a gown of rich blue-green silk gauze. A single strip of cloth which clung to her torso then flared and flowed into a long skirt, it forked around her neck, producing two ribbonlike tassels that trailed from each shoulder. Her hair had been given a damp look, it was bound up and held in place at the back by an exquisite red flower brooch, its tissue-thin petals carved from some exotic stone. A long platinum chain formed a cobweb around her neck.