A convoy of five small drone lorries had drawn up underneath, and the crash team's armourers were loading pods of equipment into the rear cargo bay through hatches in the tail cone.

Greg ordered a small neurohormone secretion as he waited at the foot of the airstair. His intuition didn't say much about anything, a grudging sense of inevitability was the best it could manage. He always thought of the ability as being slightly timeloose, a weak form of precognition. That ought to mean death should ring out loud and clear.

"Anything?" Suzi asked. She knew how he relied on it.

"No. Not a thing." He turned to Charlotte and Fabian. The ginger shipsuit looked stunning on the girl. "Time to go," he told her.

She bent down and gave Fabian a long, lingering kiss.

Greg shifted uncomfortably; Suzi chortled and started up the airstairs, swinging her flight bag jauntily.

Charlotte eventually broke off the embrace. "This won't take long," she murmured in a voice so quiet Greg could barely make out the words. She and Fabian looked as if they were being parted for eternity. Fabian flipped some hair out of his eyes. "Come back to me," he pleaded mournfully.

"You know I will." Charlotte planted a final kiss on his brow, and went up the stairs in a hurry. Greg tugged his cap on, a close-fitting padded dome that came down over his ears, protection against hard corners when he was in freefall. He followed Charlotte up the stairs; when he looked back Fabian was sprinting for the crew quarters, a hardline bodyguard in pursuit.

Anastasia seated forty passengers in her cabin. It was compact, but not cramped. The walls were covered in a quilt of grey padding, even the deck was slightly springy as Greg walked down the aisle. A biolum strip ran along the centre of the ceiling, fabric hoops banging on either side, reminding him of the handholds for standing passengers on a bus. At the rear of the cabin was a galley and a couple of toilet cubicles. He eyed them warily, a series of unwelcome memories surfacing, painfully tight tubes and suction holes that pinched. Best to wait until New London.

There was no separate cockpit. The pilot sat behind the narrow curving windscreen, dressed in the same kind of ship-suit as Greg, except his was silvery grey. He didn't even have a flight console, no controls of any kind. Sitting with arms neatly folded across his lap, eyes half-closed in some zen-like contemplation. Multicoloured geometric spiderwebs rolled across the windscreen itself. Greg guessed the pilot must use a processor node to interface with the spaceplane's flight 'ware.

He didn't enjoy the idea. When he was in the army he used to fly parafoils and microlites; direct physical control, you shifted your weight and the wing banked in response. It was something you could feel, solid and dependable. Real flying.

Surely the spaceplane must have some kind of manual fallback? The pilot would probably laugh if he asked. He looked young, mid-twenties; a generation that wasn't so much 'ware literate as 'ware addicted.

The crash team were choosing their seats noisily, like a small-town rugby club on their way to a match, all jokes and laughs. Two stewards helped to stow their flight bags in the lockers under the seats.

Suzi was sitting in one of the seats behind the pilot. Greg claimed the one next to her, where he could see out of the graphic-etched windscreen. He touched the activation stud on his armrest, and the seat cushioning slid round his legs, gripping gently.

Charlotte and Melvyn Ambler were sitting across the aisle from them, Rick in the row behind. The security captain leaned forward. "That's everyone," he told the pilot.

"OK. Flight time will be about three and a half hours, we should rendezvous with New London somewhere over South America." The airlock hatch closed, cutting off the thrum of the platform's thermal generators.

Greg heard the compressors wind up. There was a tremble of motion, and the corner of the thermal generator building was dropping out of sight through the windscreen.

"You told Eleanor where we were going?" Suzi asked.

"Yeah. She'll worry about it, but she'd worry more if she found out and I hadn't told her. I said the crash team was providing hardline cover now. That ought to help."

"Mean she'll be happier that you're not dependent on me no more."

Anastasia shifted to horizontal flight mode, deck tilted at fifteen degrees as it climbed, pushing eastwards, aiming for the Bay of Biscay. Greg sniffed at the air; the pervasive sulphur smell of the thermal generator vent pipes was missing, filtered out by the life-support system. The spaceplane's purified air was curiously empty, an absence of scent more than anything.

"Why do all the women in my life give me such a hard time?" he complained.

Suzi laughed. "Eleanor's not a problem. You two, fucking lucky, you are."

"I don't know what you're moaning about. Andria seemed like a nice girl."

Suzi glanced over at Charlotte and Melvyn Ambler, her voice dropped. "The greatest, Greg. No shit. Me and her, it's happening. Funny, I mean, what I am, who'd want me? But she does."

He didn't need his gland to see how earnest she was. Suzi taking life that seriously would take some getting used to. "You'll have to bring her out to the farm some time."

"She's pregnant."

"So's Eleanor. They'll get on all right."

"Right." She whistled through her teeth. "Greg? I'm gonna get out after this. For the kid, you know? So, like, if you hear of anything coming up on the market, pub or something, let me know."

"Sure." He ought to have a word with Julia, see if she could find a likely club, sell it to Suzi through a front. He settled back into the seat. Attention to detail, that's what it was all about. He'd put a note in his cybofax, later, when Suzi couldn't see.

Anastasia switched to her induction rams three hundred kilometres south-west of the Scully Isles. Greg heard a crackling roar build until it was loud enough to block ordinary talking. He was pressed down in the seat, estimating the G-force at about one and three-quarters. There was a disorientating sensation as the deck began to level out once they reached thirty-five kilometres altitude, yet at the same time the growing acceleration effect made it seem like the angle was increasing. Perhaps he should have taken that infusion after all.

The pale azure sky began to darken beyond the windscreen.

It took seven minutes after the induction rams came on to reach their orbital transfer trajectory, slicing cleanly through the mesosphere and into the rarefied lower chemosphere where the power-to-thrust ratio decayed drastically. The induction rams cut off over Egypt. Anastasia was doing Mach twenty-nine, coasting gently upwards.

The stars had come out, burning steadily in the night sky. Earth was a fringe of blue-white light along the bottom of the windscreen.

Greg let out an alarmingly damp burp as the nearly forgotten sensation of freefall buoyed his stomach up towards his sternum.

"We'll be performing our New London flight trajectory burn in eighty seconds—mark," the pilot said.

The silence Greg had been expecting was punctuated by sharp snapping sounds of the induction ram linings contracting as they shed their thermal load. Electrohydrostatic actuators whined on the threshold of hearing.

Suzi pulled a sour face. "Bollocks, three more hours of this."

"Isn't the infusion working?" Greg asked.

"Yeah. But that only holds your gut together, it doesn't stop this whole scene from being a major downer. Floating about like this ain't right, Greg. I'm not a fucking fish."

A small portion of his mind was secretly glad there was something he could handle better than her. Of course, he'd done a lot of flying in his Army days, burning the nausea out.