Hang on, I'll access that lab's memory cores again. They've already been reviewed once.

Victor thought he detected a hint of resentment in the soundless voice. "When Royan left, what did he take with him, can you remember?" he asked.

Eliot Haydon was still looking at Kiley, left hand stroking one of the thermal radiator panels. "Just a standard air cargo pod." He brought his hand away, rubbing his fingers together. "Oh, and a plant. Funny looking thing, like a cross between a cacti and a palm. He was carrying it when he got on the plane, that's why I remember."

Victor felt a tingle of alarm. "Was it flowering?"

"Was it…" Eliot Haydon trailed off into uncertain bemusement.

"Flowering? Did it have any flowers?"

"I don't think so, no."

I still can't locate anything, Victor, NN core one said.

He turned a full circle. The personality package had to be here. Royan would expect him to work it out, to come in and see the obvious.

Start with the basics, he told himself. A data construct has to be stored in 'ware. And it has to be obvious. Royan wasn't hiding anything, they were supposed to be warnings. A location proof against accidental discovery, but not obscure.

He wanted Greg and his intuition here in the lab. Greg would have seen it straight off.

Victor turned slowly and looked at Kiley. The tiny glass eye of the interface key stared back at him. He pulled his cybofax out of his inside jacket pocket and held it up.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The armoury was a long windowless concrete room, metal lockers along one wall and weapons racks along the other. There were ten tables running down the middle, fitted with test rigs and the various cybernetic tools the armourers used. The sight and warm oil smell of the place took Greg right back to his squaddie days. Even the pre-mission chatter of the security crash team was the same, brash with that unique brand of strained humour.

He was sitting on a bench watching Suzi being kitted out by Alex Lahey, one of the armourers. He had found a muscle armour suit small enough for her, and now he was programming it to accept motor neurone impulses from her implant. A thick bundle of fibre-optic cables ran from the 'ware interface socket on the suit's chest to the terminal he was operating on the table. Only the helmet had been left off, leaving Suzi's head sticking out of the black barrel-like torso.

"First there's healthy paranoia," Greg said. "And then there's obsessive psychosis. The dividing line is pretty thin."

"Bollocks. Leol got out of that hospital in Nigeria. You think he's going to give up on Charlotte now?"

"No. But how's he going to find her?"

Suzi gave a disparaging grunt. "The bastard's good, Greg. Give him that. And he's got Clifford Jepson's money behind him."

"Victor's better. And we've got Julia's money."

"Yeah, sure."

Alex Lahey looked up from the terminal he had plugged into Suzi's armour suit. "Could you raise your left arm, please."

She moved it up slowly until it was level with her shoulder, then it suddenly shot up to point at the ceiling. "Fuck's sake!"

"Sorry," Alex Lahey said. He studied the terminal cube, muttering to himself.

"Hey, can I lower it, or what?"

Alex Lahey didn't look up. "Yes, yes."

"This personalized tank, bit over the top, isn't it?"

Suzi's gauntleted left hand slapped her torso, producing a hollow thud. "I can face him now, Greg. No more running, no more evasion and decoy. Christ, that was fucking humiliating. You should try a suit out, gives your confidence an orgasm."

"No thanks, muscle armour was after my time. I'll stick to what I've got. Good old mystic intuition. It's kept me alive this long."

"Yeah? So what does it say about Royan?" Suzi asked.

"Tell you, he's up there." He surprised himself. The words had come out without any conscious thought, he hadn't ordered a gland secretion, either.

"Huh," Suzi grunted.

"Would you touch your toes, please," Alex Lahey said.

Greg kept his amusement in check at the slightly ridiculous sight of a muscle armour suit doing callisthenics as Suzi tested each limb's articulation. The rest of the crash team started to check out their weapons from the rack.

Suzi's armour suit split open down the side of the torso, and she began to wriggle her legs out. Her tracksuit fabric was heavily creased where the suit's spongy internal lining had contracted about her.

Alex Lahey began to unplug the fibre-optic cables. "Your knee shouldn't be a problem," he said as Suzi emerged. "The suit will support it."

"Great." She dropped lightly on to the floor, and promptly flexed her leg, rubbing at the bioware sheath.

"Could you thumbprint this, please?" He proffered a cybofax. "It's the release authorization for the suit."

Greg looked at the bare concrete of the ceiling, offering up a small prayer.

"You betcha."

Suzi was smiling acid sweet as she pressed her thumb against the cybofax's sensitive pad. She eyed the weapons rack. "I'd like one of those Honeywell pulsed plasma carbines; a Konica rip gun, plus eight power magazine cells; five Loral fifteen-centimetre pattern-homing missiles, programmable from my implant; and ten directed lance charges with timed and remote detonators. And have you recharged my Browning?"

Alex Lahey sagged in place, his watery eyes giving Suzi a disbelieving stare.

"What's up? Do you need another thumbprint?"

"Whatever the lady wants, Alex," Melvyn Ambler said in a pained tone. "Put it all in with the rest of our gear."

"You're a gent," Suzi grinned.

Greg turned round to see the crash team captain standing behind him.

"The spaceplane will be here in five minutes," Melvyn said. "We'll load our gear and launch straight away." He held up two maroon flight bags. "I've got your shipsuits. Put your clothes in the bag, you can wear them again in New London. Do either of you need an anti-nausea infusion for the flight?"

"Not me," Greg said. "I've been in freefall before. Didn't suffer then."

"I'll take one," Suzi said brightly.

"Right." Melvyn Ambler hesitated. "Are we likely to meet a hazard up there?"

"I'll give you a full briefing on the spaceplane," Greg said. "But you're along mainly for your deterrence value."

"Thank you. Mr. Tyo said you are in complete control of the operation."

"He's got to be flicking kidding," Suzi muttered.

Spaceplane shipsuits seemed to have improved. The last time Greg had gone into orbit the rubber garment they gave him looked like it was sprayed on. You needed to be a mesormorph to wear one with any dignity. This time Melvyn had provided him with a comfortable, fairly loose, ginger-coloured onepiece with elasticated wrist and ankle bands; the wide pinnedback lapels taken straight off the kind of jacket a nineteenthirties flying ace would've worn. A multifunction 'ware wafer was clipped into its pocket on his upper right arm, monitoring his physiologicaI functions, along with the atmospheric pressure, temperature, gas composition, and radiation levels.

He carried his maroon flight bag out to Anastasia, the Orion-class spaceplane that had landed in the centre of the generator platform. The twenty-strong crash team were trooping into the airlock in front of him, all of them in the same ginger one-piece, a cyborg army. Charlotte and Fabian walked behind, talking in low tones.

Anastasia was a simple delta shape, twenty-six metres long, built around a pair of induction rams; convergent tubes which compressed incoming air, heated it with a battery of radio-frequency induction coils, and blasted it out through expansion nozzles. A simple, clean propulsion system which took over from the fans at Mach seven and boosted the spaceplane up to orbital velocity. There was also an auxiliary reaction drive fitted which made her capable of lifting twenty-five tonnes of payload direct to New London. Her pearly lofriction fuselage glinted bright and cool under the mid-morning sun. Big scarlet dragon escutcheons were painted on the fin.