But they hadn't asked anyone to visit today; or more likely Daniella had bullied Matthew into not asking his friends, mistakenly believing they'd be helping her.

There was a knock on the door, and Peter Cavendish came in, dabbing at his forehead with a navy-blue silk handkerchief. His face was heavily flushed, pure white hair damp with perspiration.

Julia turned away from the window and gave him a welcoming smile. If it hadn't been for the fact he was wearing a different suit from yesterday she would have said he hadn't been home, he certainly looked like he hadn't slept at all. "Sit down, Peter, you look like you've been overdoing it to me."

He slipped into one of the black chairs round the table, sighing gratefully. "I don't understand it, Julia. Negotiating with Mutizen is like wrestling fog. We've had our contractual team sitting up with their Mutizen counterparts for eighteen hours solid, and every time we look like we're reaching an agreement, they throw us a blocker. I'd say they're deliberately stalling, but that doesn't make any sense. They came to us, remember?"

"Yes. But I'm afraid you're right, they are stalling. They are not in possession of the generator data, nor have they ever been in possession. The offer was purely an attempt to goad me into taking some hasty action."

"Oh, for Christ's sake!"

"I'm sorry. I only found out myself early this morning."

"Great. Hell, what now?"

"Fall back on Clifford Jepson and Globecast. How's that negotiation going?"

Peter Cavendish tucked his handkerchief back into his suit pocket. "Second disaster. We've thrashed out a more or less satisfactory contract with Globecast's lawyers, but it hasn't been costed out yet. And it won't be until we submit it officially. We were waiting for Michael Harcourt to come through with the data on the other bids, like you said."

"Oh, Lord… Sorry, I haven't decided if I'm going to take Harcourt up on that yet. It turns out he's Jepson's cyborg, so we probably couldn't rely on his figures anyway. But David Marchant has made a counter-bid for our co-operation, quite a good one."

He gave her a long look, then slipped a couple of centimetres deeper into his seat. "Hell, Julia, I'm not sure if I belong here any more. Nothing stays stable long enough to establish a picture these days. I mean, we get a perfectly ordinary contract finalized. Then it's not just the goalposts which get moved, we're not even playing the same game we were when we started. I've got to have something that doesn't twist on me, Julia, a set of values I can depend on."

She returned his mournful gaze. "It's not us, Peter. We're not at fault."

"Yes, sure, in a perfect world."

"Something like that."

"But in the mean time—"

"We do what we can."

"OK, Julia, you win."

"Just think how the other side must feel."

"Some comfort. You want me to go ahead with the Clifford Jepson partnership, then?"

"Yes."

"OK, how high do you want us to bid?"

"How high is up?" she murmured. "I'll get the Finance Division to work out what sort of bid we can realistically afford, and commercial intelligence to provide estimates on the opposition's bids. Then we'll sit down this evening and decide what to offer Clifford. One piece of good news, I can have Treasury backing any time I want." She didn't mention the price tag which came with it; Peter didn't need to know. Come to that, would he care about Wales?

"Right," he said. "At least that's something concrete."

"Have you managed to bring any of the kombinates in on our side, put in a joint offer?"

He shook his head. "Ha, no chance. There's no alliances in this war. Everyone wants atomic structuring, and they want it exclusively. You should see the Stock Exchange this morning. There's not a share moving. The floor's waiting to see what's going to happen after the bids are in."

"Maybe nothing will happen. I have yet to be convinced Clifford Jepson has the generator data."

Peter Cavendish held up his hand. "No. Don't. I don't want to know." He showed her a plaintive little grin. "Win or lose, I'll be glad when this is over."

"Yes." Yet deep down in her mind there was an intuitive worry that this would never be over, that this alien was just the beginning. There were a hundred billion stars in the galaxy; each one of them waiting to pounce.

She remembered a newscast she'd seen on one of the channels, years ago; a drought-stricken village in Africa, Ethiopia, or the Sudan, somewhere that had never broken the poverty and drought cycle even in the twentieth century. And by the time the new millennium arrived they never stood a chance. A place where the Warming had killed even the dreams that there could be an end to suffering.

The village had been equipped with condenser mats, sucking precious drops of moisture out of the night air. They were pinned to the roof of every hut, the way European houses wore solar panels; a donation from some grandiose Bible-belt American Church charity. The inhabitants had been dying, now the flatscreen showed her healthy children, fat cattle, vegetables growing in hydroponic troughs. It was an oasis, surrounded by dead land, soil so dry it had long since crumbled to dust; the air was completely motionless, had been for years, a decade-long doldrum zone. There were bones out there beyond the huts; cattle, goats, chickens, bleached platinum-white, half buried by the slowly building dunes, they were circled by the skeletons of vultures.

The channel crew was there because the headman had killed the Church technician who'd installed the mats. A centenarian with wrinkled leather skin, protruding bones, a ragged old loincloth; the embodiment of land wisdom. He looked directly into the camera with cloned black eyes, undaunted and contemptuous. "Why have you done this?" he asked. "First you murdered the air with your greed, now you send us machines that bring water from nothing. You have stretched our agony across time. We live on the price of your pity, coins you have cast away. Miserable beggars whose piety and distress is our only weapon. We are reduced to eternal compassion victims. If you truly pity us, give us back our dependence on the weather. Bring back the rain and the wind. Then all men may be equal in our dependency again."

She had understood what the headman had meant, how he felt. The insulting humiliation of relying on a technology he couldn't begin to understand, sent as a gift by people he did not know, reducing him and his relatives to little more than chattels. A primitive culture preserved by godlike science, a throw-away act of charity. He'd lost every shred of dignity, his entire existence subject to whims outside his control. Whims of a culture that had wrecked his land in the pursuit of its own comfort. Unforgivable.

Primitive cultures were always assimilated into advanced cultures. Values supplanted, and finally ruined. A fundamental law of nature. And her own genetics laboratories had said the aliens were billions of years more advanced than humans.

Atomic structuring was the condenser mat all over again, and now she was a peasant villager. Greg's Russian general had the right idea, she thought, the same one as the headman.

The Pegasus dropped smoothly on to the Hambleton peninsula's mudflats, finishing up at a slight angle, nose pointing up towards the Mandel farmhouse. Julia made a grab for Matthew as the belly hatch opened. "Now listen, your aunty Eleanor is pregnant, and that means you're not going to cause the slightest trouble for her. You'll do exactly as you're asked, you'll do it without complaining, and without arguing. Understood?"

His face transformed itself into a picture of hurt innocence. "Mummy!"

"Is that understood?"

"Yes."

She narrowed her eyes.

"Really," he said.