"Afternoon, Sean. Has Greg Mandel's team settled in?"

"Absolutely fine, no problem. They've just left the residence to go and look for Miss Fielder's Celestial Apostle."

"Excellent. I'll be joining you myself in about three hours. In the mean time I want you to cut New London's communication links with Earth."

Sean Francis looked as though he'd misheard. "Cut our communications?"

"Completely. I want New London isolated from Earth. Leave the company security link, but shut down all business, private, and finance links. And all the channel linkages as well, please. We have the franchise from English Telecom, it shouldn't be difficult."

"But what can I say, what reason? And there's the spacecraft traffic, yes? They'll need guidance updates from flight control."

"I was just coming to that. Turn back all vehicles on their way up from Earth, their docking clearance is revoked as from now. Keep the local communication frequencies open, of course, we don't want any accidents with the commuter pods and tugs. But the direct relays to geostationary platforms must go; tell them it's solar flare activity, or the exchange 'ware has crashed. Nobody will believe it, but cover yourself. It's only until tomorrow."

"I suppose I could," he said unhappily.

"You're my representative up there, you've got the authority. I'll take full responsibility. But unplug New London, now."

Victor was waiting on the lawn outside the library's French windows as she hurried out, still sealing the front of her topaz-coloured shipsuit.

"How did it go?" he asked.

"No use. Clifford's scared of me. But he's more scared of losing out on atomic structuring."

"Pity."

They walked over to the CHO-808 Falcon spaceplane sitting between the two Pegasus hypersonics. It looked like a stretched version of the executive jets, slightly fatter, a lead grey in colour, with a single induction ram intake protruding from the underbelly. There was something coldly daunting about its lines, an impression of hidden power.

Event Horizon produced the marque: it was a rapid response vehicle for the RAF, and the Greater European Defence Alliance. They used it primarily to investigate new satellites, checking to make sure they weren't kinetic harpoons. It could also carry six technicians and a two-tonne payload up to geostationary orbit.

Might as well concrete the lawn over, she thought as she went up the Falcon's composite airstair. It's used as a landing pad more than anything else.

The small cabin had seating for seven including the pilot, Maria Garrick. She was an ex-RAF officer who had flown Julia around for eight years, highly competent, and loyal. Julia liked her, one of that rare breed, like Victor, who gave an honest opinion when asked.

Julia ducked her head to avoid the low ceiling as she walked over to the seat behind Maria. The Falcon had none of the padding and trimming of commercial spaceplanes, apart from the active cushioning of the seats. A functional composite cave.

"Take us straight up to New London," Julia said. The seat cushioning flowed round her legs, gripping them like a vice made of sponge.

Maria twisted round, giving her a bright stare. "How straight?"

"Fast as we can, please."

"Right-oh, one purple corridor coming up." Maria turned back to the graphics on the heavily shielded windscreen slit.

Pilots were all the same, Julia reflected, can't resist a dramatic race against time.

The cabin hatch slid shut, its actuators drowned out by the sound of compressors winding up. They lifted with a jolt, the cabin tilting up thirty degrees. Acceleration pressed Julia down into the seat, rising quickly to two Gs. The Falcon was already doing Mach two when it passed over Yaxley and charged out over the Fens basin.

There was a rush of giddiness when the induction ram cut off abruptly, dropping Julia into freefall; with her eyes closed she could believe she was diving headlong through space. There was nothing to be seen through the curving windscreen, a few stars and the diffuse rose-pink glow of the friction-heated nose. It faded to nothing as she watched.

"I can't establish a datalink with New London," Maria said. "Inmarsat says their microwave antennas have shut down. Solar-flare activity." She turned her head, glancing back over her shoulder. "That's pure bullshit, you know that."

"Yes," Julia said. "Use the company security link, you'll get through that way."

"You're the boss."

"Did you unplug New London?" Victor asked.

"Yes. I want the alien isolated until we've made contact."

"It might not like that."

"I thought you didn't believe in it?"

"If it exists, it might not like that."

Somehow Julia couldn't raise a smile. "I don't like the way it's messed me around."

Twenty-five thousand kilometres up, and the Earth was a gibbous white and blue apparition beyond the windscreen.

Julia watched the terminator crawl across Italy and Africa, igniting a multitude of city lights in its wake. Apart from the equatorial band, she noted. That remained ominously dark.

"We've got company," Maria said.

"What sort?" Victor asked sharply.

"Spaceplanes. One is three thousand kilometres behind us, the other another ten behind them. Both on a New London intercept trajectory. I wouldn't mention it, but neither had clearance, not with Inmarsat's linkage still down."

Open Channel to Falcon Command Circuitry. Access External Sensor Feed.

The starfield wrapped itself around her, Earth dominating one quadrant, the silver splash of New London directly opposite it. There was the beginnings of a faint necklace in geostationary orbit, bright sequins strung out in a fragmented loop, the vast commercial communication dishes interspaced with strategic defence platforms from all five major defence alliance networks.

The high-orbit platforms were an act of mass political paranoia which always rankled, despite the fact that Event Horizon earned a great deal of money from supplying the Greater European Alliance with platforms, and components to all the other networks.

Over half the global armaments budget was spent on low Earth orbit SD platforms to guard against the possibility of sneak attacks. Since the West African slamdown war, kinetic bombardment from space had been the number one public bogeyman. Anybody with a spaceplane could launch harpoons at any target on the planet. A ten-tonne projectile protected against re-entry ablation, travelling at orbital velocity, was a thousand times cheaper than nuclear or electroncompression weapons. And there was no worry about radioactive fallout if the intended victim was a neighbouring country.

It resulted in the five independent defence networks, assembled more or less along regional groupings rather than the political combinations which dominated the previous century. A triumph of practicality over ideology, Julia always thought, with nominally hostile neighbours co-operating. She had drawn a lot of comfort from that at the time; political commentators were hoping it would lay the foundations for a more stable world order. There were even discussions of combining some of the networks into a single global defence system under the control of the UN. But so far nothing had come from them.

The geostationary platforms were a good reminder that for all the progress made in defusing the worst international tensions, there was still a long way to go. There was so much commercial hardware in geostationary orbit, along with national military communications satellites, that the aerospace-force generals and marshals had worried about harpoons being hidden among the antenna platforms. Squadrons of sensor satellites from the Asian-African Pact and the Greater European Alliance had been positioned in geostationary orbit to watch for clandestine harpoon launches. They were swiftly followed by similar spysats from the Chinese and Eastern Federation Co-Defence League, and the Pacific Treaty Nations. The Southern and Central American Defence Partnership brought up the rear three months later. And after the sensors came the weapons platforms. Strictly for defensive interception duties, the network chiefs said.