Because of this, waves of information would spread out like ripples through the inhabited star systems within the Confederation. And as the stars were not arranged in a tidy geometrical lattice, such wavefronts became more and more distorted as time went on. News companies had long since refined a set of equations defining the most effective distribution procedure between their offices. On receiving a hot item (such as the appearance of Ione Saldana), an office would typically charter eight to twelve starships to relay the flek depending on when and where the story originated. Towards the end of the distribution coverage, the information could well arrive in one system from several directions over the course of a fortnight. The nature of the starships employed also had a strong influence on the timing, depending on the marque of ship used, how good the captain was, component malfunctions, a hundred diverse circumstances all contributing to the uncertainty.

Laton’s appearance had naturally received an overriding precedence from all the Time Universe offices receiving Graeme Nicholson’s flek. But Srinagar was over four hundred light-years away from Tranquillity. News of the Yaku ’s existence, and who it was carrying, arrived several days after the Yaku itself had departed from Valisk.

Laton!

Rubra was astonished. They might have been fellow Serpents, but that hardly made them allies. So for the first time in a hundred and thirty years he expanded his affinity and grudgingly contacted the Edenist habitats orbiting Kohistan to tell them the starship had docked briefly.

But Laton did not come inside,he assured them. Only three crew came through immigration: Marie Skibbow, Alicia Cochrane, and Manza Balyuzi.

Skibbow was definitely sequestrated, and the other two are likely recipients,the kohistan consensus replied. Where are they?

I don’t know.it was a humiliating, dismaying admission, especially to make to his former peers. But Rubra had immediately made the connection between Marie Skibbow and Anders Bospoort, in whose apartment Dariat’s corpse had been found. Such a chain of events worried him enormously. But his supposedly infallible memory storage facility had failed him utterly. After Marie and Anders had gone down the starscraper that first time they had simply vanished from his perception; and the sub-routine in the starscraper hadn’t noticed their absence. Nor could he locate them now, not even with his perception sub-routines expanded and upgraded with a new batch of safeguards.

Do you require our assistance?the kohistan consensus asked. Our neuropathologists may be able to analyse the nature of the distortion in your sub-routines.

No! You’d love that, wouldn’t you? Getting into my mind again. Poking around to see what makes me pulse.

Rubra—

You shits don’t ever give up, don’t ever stop.

Given the circumstances, do you not think it would be sensible to put old antagonisms behind us?

I’ll deal with it. By myself. They can only fuck with my peripheral routines. They can’t touch me.

As far as you know.

I know! Believe me, I know. I’m me; same as I ever was.

Rubra, this is only the beginning. They will try to infiltrate your higher-order thought routines.

They won’t succeed, not now I know what to watch for.

Very well. But we must recommend to the Srinagar system assembly that starships are prohibited from docking with you. We cannot risk the prospect of any contamination spreading.

Suits me fine.

Will you at least cooperate with us on that?

Yes, yes. But only until I’ve tracked down the three Yaku crew and exterminated them.

Please be careful, Rubra. Laton’s proteanic virus is extremely dangerous.

So that’s what you think I’ve got, why my routines are failing. Bastards!

It took several minutes for his anger to sink back into more rational, passive thought currents. By the time he was thinking logically again, Valisk’s SD sensor network alerted him to five voidhawks emerging from their wormhole termini to take up station half a million kilometres away. Spies! They didn’t trust him.

He had to find the three people from the Yaku , and those members of his family whose monitor routines had been tampered with.

While the rest of the Srinagar system went to an agitated stage one military alert status, he tried again and again to scan his own interior for the renegades. Standard visual pattern recognition routines were useless. He upgraded and changed the perception interpretation routines several times. To no avail. He tried loading similar search orders into the servitors, hoping that they might succeed where the sensitive cells woven into every polyp surface had failed. He swept through entire starscrapers with his principal consciousness, certain that they still hadn’t managed to infiltrate and corrupt his identity core. He found nothing.

After ten hours, the watching voidhawks were joined by three Srinagar navy frigates.

Inside the habitat, Time Universe played Graeme Nicholson’s recording continuously, agitating the population badly. Opinions were divided. Some said Laton and Rubra were obviously colleagues, comrades in antagonism. Laton wouldn’t hurt Valisk. Others pointed out that the two had never met, and had chosen very different paths through life.

There was unease, but no actual problems. Not for the first few hours. Then some idiot from the spaceport’s civil traffic control centre leaked the news (actually he was paid two hundred thousand fuseodollars by Collins for the data) that the Yaku had docked at Valisk. Twenty starships immediately filed for departure flights, which Rubra refused.

Unease began to slip into resentment, anger, and alarm. Given the nature of the residents, they had no trouble asserting their feelings in a manner which the rentcops employed by Magellanic Itg had a hard time damping down. Riots broke out in several starscrapers. Localized ‘councils’ were formed, demanding the right to petition Rubra—who simply ignored them (after memorizing the ringleaders). More thoughtful and prudent members of the population started to hike out into the remoter sections of parkland, taking camping gear with them.

Such strife was almost designed to make Rubra’s frantic search for the three Yaku crew members difficult verging on impossible.

Thirty-eight hours after Graeme Nicholson’s flek arrived in the Srinagar system, a voidhawk came from Avon, exposing the true nature of the threat the Confederation was facing. Such was the priority, it even beat the First Admiral’s earlier communiqué warning of a possible energy virus.

In its wake all incoming starships were isolated and told to prepare for boarding and inspection by fully armed military teams. Civil starflight effectively shut down overnight. Proclamations were issued, requiring all newly arrived travellers to report to the police. Failure to comply was roughly equivalent to thumbprinting your own death warrant. Navy reserves were called in. Industrial astroengineering stations began producing combat wasps at full capacity.

In one respect, news of the possessed assisted Rubra. It seemed to shock Valisk’s population out of their confrontational attitude. Rubra judged it an appropriate time to appeal to them for help. Every communications net processor, holoscreen, and AV pillar in the habitat relayed the same image of him: a man in his prime, handsome and capable, speaking calmly and authoritatively. Given that he’d had nothing to do with the general population for a century, it was an event unusual enough to draw everyone’s attention.

“There are only three possessed at large in the habitat at this moment,” he told his audience. “While they are certainly a cause for concern, they do not as yet present a threat to us. I have issued the police with the kind of heavy-calibre weapons necessary to surmount their energistic ability. And if circumstances warrant, several citizens have the kind of experience which might prove useful in a confrontation.” An ironic, knowing curl of his lip brought an appreciative smile from many watchers. “However, their ability to alter their appearance means they are proving hard for me to track down. I’m therefore asking all of you to look out for them and inform me immediately. Don’t trust people just because they look the same as they’ve always been; these bastards are probably masquerading as friends of yours. Another effect to watch for is the way they interfere with electronic equipment; if any of your processors start glitching, inform me immediately. There’s a half-million-fuseodollar reward for the information which results in their elimination. Good hunting.”