The tip of the hypersonic's nose was sticking over the end of the roof, like a bird of prey crouched ready to pounce on the supine bodies laid out invitingly below it.

Access Concierge. Identify Incoming Plane Ownership.

Suzi took a drink of orange from her glass. She was skipping alcohol right now, it wasn't fair on Andria.

Pegasus G-ALPH Registered with Event Horizon Corporation. Suzi glanced thoughtfully at the white nose cone.

The phone shrilled.

Andria pressed the sound-only button. "Yes?"

"Guests for you, Miss Landon," the concierge 'ware's construct voice said. "Julia Evans and Greg Mandel."

Suzi heard Andria's indrawn breath at the mention of Julia, she smiled at the girl's innocent enquiring gaze, and began hunting round for her robe. "Well, send 'em in, then."

Suzi hadn't seen Greg for over six months, though she did make an effort to stay in touch. Sort of. Julia she hadn't talked to for nearly three years. The multibillionairess was only a couple of years older than Suzi. When she came through the front door, Suzi couldn't find any appreciable signs of ageing. Julia still looked like a young twenty-five-year-old. And she didn't possess the kind of conceit which would send her scurrying to the surgeons. Rich and youthful; there just wasn't any justice.

Greg gave her a quick hug and a kiss. Julia seemed at a loss what to do, kiss, shake hands, wave…

"I thought you aristo types always knew what to do in every social situation," Suzi scoffed. "Inbred etiquette along with all the other deviances."

Julia screwed up her face and stuck her tongue out.

Suzi turned the white presentation box over in her hands. Flowers weren't her thing, though she had to admit it was a bid odd. But—"Extraterrestrial?"

"Yes." Julia was sitting on one of the lounge's white-leather pillow chairs. A real close look showed she had stress lines around her eyes and mouth.

Suzi shot Greg a look. "And what do you make of it?" She'd always been awed, and not a little envious of his intuition. If she had anything like it, no way would Leol Reiger ever have taken her so easily. What Greg said about the flower she'd be happy to go along with.

Aliens were something so far outside her norm she hadn't got a clue how to react at all—except maybe scream and run. But if Julia was right about them arriving in the solar system, they were behaving fucking odd. And what did they look like? More important, what did they want? Why all this secrecy?

Just thinking about it made her ache inside.

"The flower is real enough," Greg said. "But as to what the aliens are like, I've no idea."

"Shit. You're a big help."

"Forget the implications, if it makes you feel any easier," Greg said. "Concentrate on the immediate. All we're going to do tomorrow is track down the courier girl, find out where she got the flower from. Julia takes over from there." He kept glancing out at the balcony where Andria was lying on the lounger.

"I'll bet you take over," Suzi muttered. "Starship technology should bring in a bundle, even by your standards."

Julia played nervously with her fingers in her lap. "I just want Royan back," she said. "That's all."

That name was an omen, all bad. Suzi could feel it shackling her to the past, reeling her in. Greg was the same, she figured, all edgy underneath. He really wasn't up to any of this any more, not at his age, he'd been out of it for too long, things had changed. Respect was gone, violence was on the up. Trouble was, they all owed Royan in a big way. Without him, his hotrod expertise, the Trinities would have been wiped off the map.

"You really going looking for the little pillock?" she asked Greg.

"Yeah."

"Oh, bollocks, count me in."

CHAPTER SEVEN

On top of everything else, this. Julia came down the hypersonic's stairs in a foul mood. It was the children's speech day at school, she never missed that, and wasn't about to start now.

The wind on the top of the Event Horizon tower was cool, blowing off the land. Down below, a thick milky mist covered the quagmire and the deep-water channels, even rising high enough to claim the interlocking metro rail lines. The sun was an anaemic pink nebula hovering somewhere out over the Wash.

Kirsten McAndrews waited for her at the side of the landing pad. "Is Mutizen's negotiator here yet?" Julia asked her.

"Yes, he arrived on the metro right after you called to set up the meeting." Kirsten cleared her throat delicately. "The Welsh delegation are waiting as well."

"Bloody hell! What do they do, sleep here?"

Kirsten maintained a diplomatic silence.

Julia glanced back down at the Prior's Fen Atoll, where the Mutizen kombinate's arcology lifted out of the oily mist, up-draughts around its sloping walls stirred slow-moving eddies all around the base.

Open Channel to SelfCores. You three had better be right about this, she told them crisply.

We are, NN core one replied levelly. The Cambridge laboratory team has been up all night assessing the data; the concept is radically different from any current technology.

Julia paused at that. Different, or just more advanced?

Different, there's a whole new set of principles involved. Mutizen have come up with a real breakthrough, by the look of things. That's why we gave Peter Cavendish's message a priority one grading.

Right, thanks. She screwed some of the sleep out of her eyes with her knuckles. The Fens Basin was so much quieter at this time of day, passive and clean, less fraught. "I'd forgotten how refreshing a sea dawn can be," she told Kirsten McAndrews as they walked into the lift.

Royan had loved to sit on the beach and watch the dawn creeping up out of the Atlantic.

It had taken Event Horizon's Bristol clinic twenty months to rebuild him. They cloned his muscles, blood vessels, tendons, nerves, skin, and bones, a hundred diverse glands, organs, and cell clusters, then painstakingly stitched the components together into entire limbs. It was a hugely expensive procedure, not that the money meant anything to her. She had to buy the clinic an extra thirty clone vats, draft in a regiment of specialists. Their so-called Frankenstein department was already one of the most advanced in Europe, but they didn't have anything approaching the necessary capacity. None of the medical team had heard of a case where all four limbs had to be replaced. Normally amputees used kinaware prosthetics, but she wanted him whole again, human. She knew that was the only way he could ever hope to banish the past.

Julia visited once a week, never shirking, closing her ears to the pitiful pleas and wails, his demands just to end it all. Royan hated the clinic, it was a constant reminder of the time he had spent hospitalized after the riot, a helpless pain-racked dependant. At least in Mucklands Wood he had been somebody; Son, the one the Trinities depended on for information and technology, an electronic guru. Vital. Venerated. Now she had reduced him to a slab of meat again.

When the process of grafting his new limbs began, the clinic kept him in a near-permanent state of induced somnolence. The few times she visited when he was awake he hadn't been lucid, crying out at the pain, trapped in a looped nightmare of flames and black whips.

Then one day, more than a year after they rescued him from Mucklands, she walked into his room to find him standing, skinny paper-white hands gripping a zimmer frame, blue veins bulging. Pride and wonder illuminated his face. The nurses had to catch him almost straight away, but he'd wanted her to be the first to see him upright again. She had to turn quickly so he couldn't see her tears.