You're paranoid, girl, she told herself.

Another code and Grandpa was there, plugged into the study's systems. She talked banalities with the three of them as the first raindrops of the afternoon began to speckle the lead-framed windows. Sluggish grey clouds lumbered over the Nene valley, making the oak-panelled study seem funereal. Wall-mounted biolum globes came on, giant luminous pearls on curving tubular brass arms.

Lucas's unmistakable soft knock sounded on the door. He ushered Greg and Eleanor in.

Julia listened to their résumé of the case, trying to conceal a shudder when Greg ran through his interview with Liam Bursken. She could see he was still wound up about it, and it took a lot to affect Greg. Whenever she glanced at Cormac, he had the same politely attentive expression in place.

Can't fool me, Cormac, she thought, not any more. His aloofness was a defence against the craziness and stupidity of the world, as much as his physical retreat into his laboratory complex. But now the world had pierced clean through and bitten him.

With some surprise, she realized she was actually feeling sorry for him.

After Eleanor finished talking Julia asked Greg to squirt all the police files stored in his cybofax into the NN core. "Grandpa can run correlation exercises for us," she said.

"That's right, bloody skivvy I am," Philip muttered. "Nice to know why I was invited."

Greg smiled thinly and aimed his cybofax at her terminal. Eleanor added the bytes she'd built up.

"So it's definitely not one of the students," Gabriel said thoughtfully.

"Yes, I'm sure they didn't kill Kitchener," said Greg. "Although how my opinion would stand up in court, I'm not so certain about. But the physical evidence does tend to corroborate my interviews. Besides, none of them had a mind anything like Bursken's."

"Your opinion is good enough for me," Morgan said.

"Even your new friend Rosette Harding-Clarke is in the clear," Eleanor flashed Greg a spartan grin. "Her family is very rich, and according to Julia's legal office the child wouldn't get a penny out of Kitchener's estate. If the Harding-Clarkes were poor, Rosette might have been able to apply for a maintenance order against the estate. However, the question doesn't arise."

"Then it must have been a tekmerc snuff," Morgan said.

YOUR SECURITY GEAR PROTECTING LAUNDE ABBEY WAS THE BEST NO ONE ON THE CIRCUIT HAS HEARD OF ANYBODY WANTING TO BUY THE KIND OF PROGRAMS WHICH COULD BURN THROUGH.

Morgan turned his head to look at the flatscreen. "How reliable are your sources?"

VERY VERY VERY

"Somebody got in."

"I still maintain it would be difficult for anyone to get in and out of the Chater valley that night," Greg said.

"Then who did do it?" Walshaw asked, his voice had risen a notch.

Gabriel caught his eye, a silent rebuke.

"Logically, it was a tekmerc snuff," Greg said unhappily. "Nobody else would have the know-how and operational expertise to get in and out without leaving a trace. That's what I find incredible. There wasn't a single trace, not one." He shook his head.

"We're missing method and motive at the moment," Eleanor said.

MOTIVE I HAVE PLENTY OF

"What?" Julia asked.

ACCORDING TO THE CIRCUIT KITCHENER WAS WORKING ON A BORON PROTON REACTOR FOR YOU.

"Edward was doing no such thing," Cormac objected.

Philip chortled, the sound reverberating out of hidden speakers, directionless. "Ah, but it fits, m'boy. Doesn't it? Kitchener's speciality was atomic and molecular interaction. A successful boron proton reaction would be almost as worthwhile as giga-conductor. Look at it from an economic point of view, a successful boron proton fusion produces energized helium, that's all, no pollutants, no radioactive emission. It's a bloody marvel, or it would be if we could build one. Kitchener is just the kind of man to iron out the bugs involved in getting a smooth fusion process going."

"It would be a logical assumption," Morgan said grudgingly. "If someone was aware Kitchener was contracted to Event Horizon, was receiving money from us, they could well think it was for energy research. Especially if they knew it was coming from Cormac's office, the inventor of the giga-conductor."

Eleanor rapped a knuckle lightly on the table, and tilted her head to look at Julia. "How are you going to power Prior's Fen?"

It took a second for her thoughts to jump between subjects. "I'm considering two options. The first is an Ocean Thermal generator system, with floating platforms anchored out in the Atlantic, and bringing the electricity ashore with superconductor cables. Second is to drill a couple of hundred deep bore holes across the Fens basin, then insert direct thermocouple cables down them, siphon energy right out of the mantle. The tower and the projected cyber precincts certainly can't be powered from existing mainland sources, the capacity simply doesn't exist. Costwise, direct coupling has the edge, naturally since there are no moving parts to maintain once the holes have been sunk. In engineering terms, ocean thermal is a more mature technology. So at the moment I'm just waiting to see if Cormac makes any significant progress on direct thermocoupling in the next ten months. We don't have to make the actual selection until the end of the year."

"I'd like it to be earlier," Philip muttered.

"Behave, Grandpa." She found the camera lens, above the flatscreen, and gave it a stern look.

"So it would make a lot of sense for you to be working on third, fourth, even fifth alternatives," Eleanor mused.

"Yes, absolutely. But we're not."

"What other embryonic technologies could supply the rise in industrial demand?" Greg asked. "And more importantly, who is working on them?"

"Grandpa?"

"Easy enough, m'girl. There are really only five viable candidates. Jetstream turbines, when you tether large vacuum bubbles twelve kilometres up and fit them out with giant rotor blades. The wind velocities up there are pretty impressive. Next, you've got cold fusion."

Cormac grunted disparagingly. But when Julia looked at him, he just moued and went back to gazing out of the window.

"Well they might crack it," Philip said grumpily. "I'm just listing options."

"Go on, Grandpa."

"Microfusion reactors, which is a sort of advanced version of cold fusion, using molecular-scale compression techniques to fuse extremely small clusters of deuterium atoms in a gizmo the size of a processor chip. Something that small does away with the heat sink problems you get in tokamaks, but you'd need to group a lot of reactors together to produce a decent output. Ocean current turbines. But there's a question mark over which currents. Gulf Stream, Mozambique current, the Kuro Shio, East Australian current, Cape Horn current; they're all possibles, but they're all remote from Europe. Then there's solar satellites. Cheap and practical, especially now we've got the Clarke spaceplane. But there isn't a government in the world that'll grant a licence to site a receiver array. Too many environmental—or rather environmentalist—problems when it comes to beaming energy through the atmosphere."

"Who is researching them?" Greg asked.

"Apart from the powersats, just about every kombinate, plus dozens of universities under government contract. The whole world needs an energy source which won't add to the Greenhouse effect."

Julia clasped her hands together, mind devouring the problem eagerly. She didn't even need to bring the nodes on line. "Grandpa, are there any research teams working on boron proton fusion?"

"Yes, several."

"OK, compile a list of the twenty-five most promising research and design teams for boron proton reactors, and each of the other projects you mentioned, then cross-reference them with Diessenburg Mercantile."