“What do you mean?”

“Ikela flew escort duty on the Alchemist. He probably knew where it is. Now he can’t tell you.”

Monica and Samuel swapped a grim glance.

“She’s gone, hasn’t she?” Monica said bitterly.

“It would seem so.”

“Fuck it!” She stamped over to Kaliua Lamu, who had an agent holding him upright in his chair. “Where did Mzu go?” Monica asked.

“Screw you.”

Monica gave an amused glance at the other partizans around the table. “Oh, come on, Kaliua,” she said sweetly. “You were eager enough to tell us this meeting’s location.”

“Liar!”

She took out a Royal Kulu Bank credit disk. “A hundred thousand pounds, wasn’t it?”

“Bitch whore! I never,” he shouted at his comrades. “It wasn’t me. For Mary’s sake, it wasn’t.”

Monica grabbed his chin, and slowly exerted her boosted grip. Kaliua Lamu gagged fearfully at the force which threatened to shatter his jawbone.

“You said I’d better be certain when I finish you. Well, I intend to be extremely thorough extinguishing your life unless I know where she went.”

“I don’t know.”

“Debrief nanonics would be the pleasant option, but we don’t have time for that. Fortunately, old-fashioned pain can still produce some pretty impressive results during field interrogation. And they trained me very well, Kaliua.” She pushed her face centimetres from his bugging eyes. “Would you like to try calling my bluff? Or perhaps you think you’re strong enough to resist me for a couple of hours after I’ve fused your neural nanonics into ash? Once they’re dead you can’t block the pain. And the field way to fuse neural nanonics is with electrodes. Crude, but it works. Guess where they’re applied.”

“No. Please! Don’t.” His eyes were watering as he started shaking.

“Where then?”

“I don’t know. I promise. She was gone when we finished. I told you she was supposed to be waiting outside for us to finish. But she wasn’t there.”

“Then who did she leave with?”

“It was a girl, my bodyguard said. Ikela’s daughter, Voi. She’s tall, young. They were talking together and never came back. Honestly , that’s all I know.”

Monica let go of his chin. He slumped back in the chair, trembling in relief.

“A tall girl,” Monica whispered. She was looking at Samuel in dawning dismay as the memory blossomed. She hurriedly accessed the neural nanonics memory cell she’d kept running to record the operation.

In the corridor on the way up. Two girls, one tall and black, the other white and small. Pressed against the wall in alarm as she and Samuel ran past. The memory cell image froze. Green neon grid lines closed around the smaller girl, calculating her height. It matched Mzu’s. So did the approximated weight.

A backpack fitted with a long shoulder strap hung at the girl’s side.

Monica had seen that backpack once before. Never in her life would she need help from neural nanonics to remember that time. The backpack had been flapping behind a small spacesuit-clad figure who was clinging desperately to a rope ladder.

“Dear God, we walked right bloody past her,” she told an aghast Samuel. “The bitch is wearing a chameleon suit.”