“Here,” Voi said triumphantly. She opened her palm to reveal a tiny squashed spider.

“Mother Mary! Have you completely flipped?”

“No, listen. You know you said you thought the intelligence agencies were following you.”

“I should never have told you that. Voi, you don’t know what you’re getting involved with.”

“Oh, yes I do. We started checking the spaceport log. There’s a delegation of Edenists here to discuss strengthening our defences. Three voidhawks brought thirty of them.”

“Yes?”

“Mapire only rated one voidhawk, and six Edenists to discuss our mutual defence with the council. It should be the other way around, the capital should have got the larger delegation, not Ayacucho.”

Alkad glanced at the little brown blob in the girl’s hand, a bad feeling sinking through her. “Go on.”

“So we thought about how Edenists would search the asteroid for you. Adamists would use spylenses and hack into the communications net to get at public monitor security cameras. Edenists would use bitek systems, either simulants or affinity-bonded animals. We started looking. And here they are. Spiders. They’re everywhere, Alkad. We checked. Ayacucho is totally infested.”

“That doesn’t necessarily prove—” she said slowly.

“Yes it does.” The hand with the crushed blob was shaken violently. “This is from the Lycosidae family. Ayacucho’s ecologists never introduced any Lycosidaes into the biosphere. Check the public records if you don’t believe me.”

“All sorts of things can get through bio-quarantine; irradiation screening isn’t perfect.”

“Then why are they all male? We haven’t found a single female, not one. It’s got to be so they can’t mate, they won’t reproduce. They’ll die off without causing any sort of ecological imbalance. Nobody will ever notice them.”

Strangely enough, Alkad was almost impressed. “Thank you, Voi. I’d better go back in there and tell them I need more security.”

“Them?” Voi was utterly derisory. “Did they leap to help you? No. Of course not. I said they wouldn’t.”

“They have what I need, Voi.”

“They have nothing we don’t. Nothing. Why don’t you trust us? Trust me? What does it take to make you believe in us?”

“I do believe in your sincerity.”

“Then come with me!” It was an agonized plea. “I can get you out of here. They don’t even have any way to get you out of the office without the spiders seeing.”

“That’s because they don’t know about them.”

“They don’t know, because they’re not concerned about security. Look at them, they’ve got enough bodyguards in there to form a small army. Everybody in the asteroid knows who they are.”

“Truthfully?”

“All right, not everybody. But certainly every reporter. The only reason they don’t say anything is because of Cabral. Anyone coming to the Dorados who really wanted to make contact with the partizan movement wouldn’t need more than two hours to find a name.”

“Mary be damned!” Alkad glanced back at the door to the anteroom, then at the tall girl. Voi was everything her father was not: dedicated, determined, hurting to help. “You have some kind of safe route out of here?”

“Yes!”

“Okay. You can take me out of this section. After that I’ll get in touch with your father again, see what they’re going to do for me.”

“And if they won’t help?”

“Then it looks like you’re on.”

“Yeah? So, I’m late. Sue me. Listen, this meeting caused me a shitload of grief. I don’t need no lecture from the ESA on contact procedures right now.”

. . .

“Yeah, she’s here all right, in the flesh. Mother Mary, she’s really got the Alchemist stashed away somewhere. She’s not kidding. I mean, shit, she really wants to take out Omuta’s star.”

. . .

“Course I don’t know where it is, she wouldn’t say. But, Mary, Ikela used to be a frigate captain in the Omuta navy. He flew escort on the Alchemist mission. I never knew. Twenty years we’ve been plotting away together, and I never knew.”

. . .

“Sure you want to know where we are. Look, you’re going to come in here shooting, right? I mean, how do I know you’re not going to snuff me? This is serious heavy-duty shit.”

. . .

“All right, but if you’re lying you’d better make sure you finish me. I’ll have you if you don’t, no matter what it costs. And hey, even if you do kill me, I can come back and get you that way. Yeah. So you’d better not be fucking me over.”

. . .

“Oh, absolutely. I always believe every word you people say. Okay, listen, we’re in Laxa and Ahmad’s conference office. The bodyguards are all in the anteroom. Tell your people to be fucking careful when they come in. You let them know I’m on your side, yeah?”

. . .

“No, she’s out in the anteroom. She went out there twenty minutes ago so we could argue about what to do. The vote was three to two for wasting Omuta’s star. Guess how I voted.”

“Laxa and Ahmad, the conference office,” Monica said. “Mzu’s in the anteroom along with the bodyguards.”

Go,samuel ordered.

The twenty Edenist agents closed on the Laxa and Ahmad offices. Floor plans were pulled from the asteroid’s civil engineering memory cores. Entry routes and tactics were formulated and finalized while they jogged towards their target, the general affinity band thick with tense exchanges.

Monica kept three paces behind Samuel the whole way. It irked her, and she wasn’t looking forwards to her debrief, either. Teaming up with Edenists! But at least this way the Alchemist would be neutered. Providing Samuel kept his part of the agreement. Which she was sure he would do. Although high politics could still screw everything up. God!

It took them four minutes to reach Laxa and Ahmad. One featureless corridor after another. Thankfully there were few people about, with only a handful of workaholics left. They barged past an old man carrying several flek cases, a man and a woman who looked so guilty they were obviously having an affair, a pair of teenage girls, one very tall and skinny and black, the other small and white, both wearing red handkerchiefs around their ankles.

When she reached Laxa and Ahmad the Edenist team was already inside. Two agents stood guard out in the corridor. Monica stepped wearily through the crumpled door, drawing her pistol.

Samuel drew his breath sharply. “Damnation.”

“What?” she asked. By then they had reached the conference office anteroom. The partizan bodyguards were all sprawled on the floor with limbs twitching erratically. Six Edenists stood over them, their TIP pistols pointing down. Three scorch lines slashed the walls where laser fire had burned the composite. A pair of spent nerve short-out grenades rolled around on the carpet.

“Where’s Mzu?” Monica asked.

Samuel beckoned her into the conference office. The partizan leadership had been caught by the nerve short-out pulses, but the door and security screening had saved them from the worst effects. They were still conscious. Four of them. The fifth was dead.

Monica grimaced when she saw the broad char mark on the side of Ikela’s skull. The beam had fractured the bone in several places, roasting the brain to a black pulp. Someone had made very sure his neural nanonics were ruined. “God, what happened here?”

Two Edenist agents were standing behind Feira Ile, their pistol muzzles pressed into his neck. His wrists had been secured in a composite zipcuff behind his back. Crumbs of vomit were sticking to his lip; he was sweating profusely from the grenade assault, but otherwise defiant. A laser pistol was lying on the table in front of him.

“He shot Ikela,” Samuel said in bewildered dismay. He squatted down beside Ikela’s chair. “Why? What was the point? He was one of yours.”

Feira Ile grinned savagely. “My last duty for the Garissan navy.”