“The Ritz,” she said finally.

That just left getting there. With Genevieve getting progressively more impatient, as evidenced by overloud sighs and shuffling feet, Louise requested surface transport options from Kings Cross to the Ritz. After ten minutes struggling with horribly complicated maps and London Metro timetables that kept flashing up she realized she wasn’t quite as adept at operating the block as she thought she was. However, the screen did tell her there were taxis available.

“We’ll take a cab.”

Under Gen’s ungenerously sceptical look, she picked her shoulder bag up, and started off towards the oaks at the rim of the plaza. Flocks of parakeets and budgerigars pecking at the stone slabs stampeded out of her way. Most of the subway entrances had the name of the streets they led to, but a few had the London Transport symbol on top: blue circle cut by a red line, with a crown in the middle. Louise went down one to find herself in a short passage that opened out into a narrow parking bay. Five identical silver-blue taxi cars were waiting silently, streamlined bubbles with very fat tyres.

“Now what?” Genevieve said.

Louise consulted the block. She walked up to the first taxi, and keyed the Commence Journey icon on the block’s screen. The door hissed out five centimetres, then slid back along the body. “We get in,” she told her sister smugly.

“Oh very clever. What happens if you don’t have a block to do that for you?”

“I don’t know.” She couldn’t see a handle anywhere. “I suppose everyone on this world is taught how to use things like this. Most of them have neural nanonics, after all.”

There wasn’t much room inside, enough for four seats with deep curving backs. Louise shoved her bag in the storage bin underneath, and studied the screen again. The block was interfacing with the taxi’s control processor, which made life a lot simpler for her. The whole activation procedure was presented to her as a simple, easy-to-understand-menu. She fed in their destination, and the door slid shut. The taxi told the block what their fee was (as much as the vac-train fare from Mount Kenya), and explained how to use the seat straps.

“Ready?” she asked Gen, when they’d fastened themselves in.

“Yes.” The little girl couldn’t hide her enthusiasm.

Louise held her Jovian Bank disk up to the small panel on the taxi’s central column, and transferred the money over. They started to roll forward. The taxi took them up a steep ramp, accelerating fast enough to press the sisters back into their seat cushioning. The reason was simple enough, they emerged right in the middle of the traffic racing round the Kings Cross plaza, slotting in without the slightest fuss.

Genevieve laughed excitedly as they zipped across several lanes, then slowed slightly to turn off down one of the broad streets. “Golly, this is better than the aeroambulance.” The little girl grinned.

Louise rolled her eyes. Though once she accepted the fact that the control processor did know how to drive, she began to breathe normally again. The buildings rushing past were old and sombre, which gave them a dignity all of their own. On the other side of the pavement barrier, pedestrians jostled their way along in a permanent scrum.

“I never knew there were so many people,” Gen said. “London must have more than live on the whole of Norfolk.”

“Probably,” Louise agreed.

The taxi took them a third of the way round the expressway, then turned off, heading back down to ground level. There were parks on both sides of the road when they started their descent, then buildings rose up to their left, and they were back on one of the ancient streets again. The pavements here didn’t seem so crowded. They slowed drastically, pulling over to the right alongside a large cube of white-grey stone with tall windows lined by iron railings and a steep state roof. An open arcade ran along the front, supported by wide arches. The taxi stopped level with a gate in the roadside barrier, which a doorman opened smartly. He was dressed in a dark blue coat and top hat, a double row of brass buttons gleamed down his chest. At last, Louise felt at home. This was something she could deal with.

If the doorman was surprised at who climbed out of the taxi he never showed it. “Are you staying here, miss?” he asked.

“I hope so, yes.”

He nodded politely, and ushered them under the arcade towards the main entrance.

Genevieve eyed the front of the stolid building sceptically. “It looks dreadfully gloomy.”

The lobby inside was white and gold, with chandeliers resembling frost-encrusted branches that had dazzling stars at the tip of each twig. Arches along the long central aisle opened into big rooms that were full of prim white tables where people were sitting having tea. Waiters in long black tailcoats bustled about, carrying trays with silver teapots and very tempting cakes.

Louise marched confidently over to the gleaming oak reception desk. “A twin room, please.”

The young woman standing behind smiled professionally. “Yes, madam. How long for?”

“Um. A week to start with.”

“Of course. I’ll need your ident flek, please, to register. And there is a deposit.”

“Oh, we haven’t got an ident flek.”

“We’re from Norfolk,” Gen said eagerly.

The receptionist’s composure flickered. “Really?” She cleared her throat. “If you’re from offworld, your passports will be satisfactory.”

Louise handed the passports over, thinking briefly of Endron again, and wondering how much trouble the Martian was in right now. The receptionist scanned the passports in a block and took the deposit from Louise. A bellboy came forward and relieved the sisters of their bags before showing them into a lift.

Their room was on the fourth floor, with a large window overlooking the park. The decor was so reminiscent of the kind Norfolk landowners worshiped it gave Louise a sense of dйjа vu; regal-purple wallpaper and furniture so old the wood was virtually black beneath the polish. Her feet sank into a carpet well over an inch thick.

“Where are we?” Gen asked the bellboy. She was pressed up against the window, staring out. “I mean, what’s that park called?”

“That’s Green Park, miss.”

“So are we near anywhere famous?”

“Buckingham Palace is on the other side of the park.”

“Gosh.”

He showed Louise the room’s processor block, which was built in to the dresser. “Any information you need on the city for your stay should be in here; it has a comprehensive tourist section,” he said. She tipped him a couple of fuseodollars when he left. He’d been holding his own credit disk, casually visible through fingers splayed wide.

Genevieve waited until the door shut. “What’s Buckingham Palace?”

The AI was alert to the glitch within a hundredth of a second. Two ticket dispenser processors and an informational projector. It brought additional analysis programs on line, and ran an immediate verification sweep of every electronic circuit in Grand Central Station.

Half a second. The response to a general acknowledgement datavise from five sets of neural nanonics was incorrect. All of them were within a seven metre zone, which also incorporated the failing ticket dispensers.

Two seconds. Security sensors in Grand Central’s concourse focused on the suspect area. The AI datavised to B7’s North American supervisor the fact it had located a possessed-type glitch in New York. He had just framed his query in reply when the sensors observed Bud Johnson go cartwheeling over someone in a black robe crouched on the floor.

Three and a half seconds. There was a visual discontinuity. None of the sensor short-term memory buffers had registered the black clad figure before. It was as if he’d just materialized out of nowhere. If he had neural nanonics, then they were not responding to the ident request datavise.