She shook herself out of it. "He's still together enough to junk a knife missile," she told the machine, watching the hazy, cloud-shadowed ocean scroll beneath the dropping module. They were approaching the cloud tops.

"That was for him. For us, it'll be another Winter Palace job; I can feel it."

She shook her head, apparently hypnotised by the view of cloud and curving ocean. "I don't know what happened there. He got into that siege and just wouldn't break out. We warned him; we told him, in the end, but he just wouldn't… couldn't do it. I don't know what happened to him, I really don't; he just wasn't himself."

"Well, he lost his head on Fohls. Maybe he lost more than that. Perhaps he lost it all on Fohls. Maybe we didn't quite save him in time."

"We got to him in time," Sma said, remembering Fohls as well now, as they plunged into a bulging cloud-top and the screen went grey. She didn't bother to adjust the wavelength, apparently content to look at the glowing, featureless interior of the cumulus.

"It was still traumatic," the drone said.

"I'm sure, but…" she shrugged. The view of ocean and clouds burst clear onto the screen again, and the module angled steeper, powering down towards the waves. The sea flashed up towards them; Sma turned the screen off. She looked bashfully at Skaffen-Amtiskaw. "I never like watching that," she confessed. The drone said nothing. Inside the module, all was peace and quiet. After a moment, she asked, "We in yet?"

"Doing our submarine impression," the drone said crisply. "Landfall in fifteen minutes."

She turned the screen back on, got it to adjust for a sonic display, and watched the rolling sea floor speed by beneath. The module was manoeuvring hard, swinging and diving and zooming all the time, avoiding sea creatures as it followed the slowly rising slope of continental shelf towards the land. The view on the screen was disconcerting; she switched it off again, turned to the drone.

"He'll be all right, and he'll come with us; we still know where that woman is."

"Livueta the Contemptuous?" sneered the drone. "Short shrift she gave him last time. She'd have blown his head off if I hadn't been there. Why the hell should Zakalwe want to meet her again?"

"I don't know," Sma frowned. "He won't say, and Contact hasn't got round to doing the full procedure on the place we think he came from. I think it must involve something from his past… something he did, once, before we ever heard of him. I don't know. I think he loves her, or did, and still thinks he does… or just wants…"

"What? Wants what? Go on; you tell me."

"Forgiveness?"

"Sma, given all the things Zakalwe's done, just since we've known him, they'd have to invent a personal deity for him alone, to even start forgiving him."

Sma turned away to look at the blank screen again. She shook her head and said quietly, "It doesn't work that way, Skaffen-Amtiskaw."

Or any other way, the drone thought to itself, but didn't say anything.

The module surfaced in a deserted dock in the middle of the city, amongst the flotsam and jetsam. It roughed the texture of its outermost fields, so that the oily scum on the surface of the water stuck to it.

Sma watched its top hatch close, and stepped off the back of the drone, onto the pitted concrete of the dock. The module was ninety-per cent submerged; it looked like some flat-bottomed boat turned turtle. She straightened the rather vulgar culottes which were, regrettably, the height of fashion here just now, and looked up and around at the crumbling empty warehouses which all but enclosed the quiet dock. The city — she was oddly gratified to find — grumbled beyond.

"What was that you were saying about not looking in cities?" Skaffen-Amtiskaw inquired.

"Don't be crass," she said, then clapped her hands and rubbed them. Looking down at the drone, she grinned. "Anyway: time to start thinking like a suitcase, old chum. Make with a handle."

"I hope you realise I find this every bit as demeaning as you think I must," Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, with quiet dignity, then extended a soligram handle from one side, and flipped over. Sma gripped the handle and strained at it.

"An empty suitcase, asshole," she grunted.

"Oh, pardon me, I'm sure," Skaffen-Amtiskaw muttered, and went light.

Sma opened a wallet full of money displaced only hours earlier from a city-centre bank by the good ship Xenophobe, and paid the cab driver. She watched a line of troop carriers thunder past, heading down the boulevard, then sat on a bench which formed part of a stone wall bordering a narrow strip of trees and grass, and looked out over the broad sidewalk and the boulevard beyond, to the large and impressive stone building on the far side. She place the drone beside her. Traffic roared past; people hurried to and fro in front of her.

At least, she thought, they're fairly Standard. She had never liked being altered to impersonate the natives. Anyway; they had inter-system travel here, and were fairly used to seeing people who looked different, even alien on occasion. As usual, of course, she was very tall in comparison, but she could live with a few stares.

"He's still in there?" she said quietly, looking at the armed guards outside the Foreign Ministry.

"Discussing some sort of weird trust set-up with the top brass," the drone whispered. "Want to eavesdrop?"

"Hmm. No."

They had a bug in the appropriate conference chamber; literally a fly on the wall.

"Wa!" the drone yelped. "I don't believe this man!"

Sma glanced at the drone, despite herself. She frowned. "What's he said?"

"Not that!" the drone gasped. "The Very Little Gravitas Indeed just worked out what the maniac's been up to here."

The GCU was still in orbit, providing back-up for the Xenophobe; its Contact procedures and equipment had provided and were providing most of the information about the place; its bug was monitoring the conference chamber. Meanwhile, it was scanning computers and information banks over the entire planet.

"Well?" Sma said, watching another troop carrier rumble past on the boulevard.

"The man's insane. Power mad!" the drone muttered, seemingly to itself. "Forget Voerenhutz; we have to get him out of here for the sake of these people."

Sma elbowed the suitcase-drone. " What, dammit?"

"Okay; here, Zakalwe's a goddamn magnate, right? Mega-powerful; interests everywhere; initial stake what he brought with him from the place he junked the knife missile; the loot we gave him last time, plus profits. And what is the core of his business empire, here? Genetechnology."

Sma thought for a moment. "Oh-oh," she said, sitting back on the bench, crossing her arms.

"Whatever you're imagining, it's worse. Sma; there are five rather elderly autocrats on this planet, in competing hegemonies. They are all getting healthier. They are all getting, in fact, younger. That oughtn't to be possible for another twenty, thirty years."

Sma said nothing. There was a funny feeling in her belly.

"Zakalwe's corporation," the drone said quickly, "is receiving crazy money from each of those five people. It was on the take from a sixth geezer, but he died about one-twenty days ago; assassinated. The Ethnarch Kerian. He controlled the other half of this continent. It's his demise that has led to all this military activity. Also, with the exception of the Ethnarch Kerian, these suddenly rejuvenated autocrats were showing signs of becoming uncharacteristically benign, from about the time they started getting so suspiciously frisky."

Sma closed her eyes for a moment, opened them. "Is it working?" she said, through a dry mouth.

"Like hell; they're all under threat from coups; their own military, as a rule. Worse than that, Kerian's death lit a slow fuse. This whole place is going super-critical! And we are talking tootsies on the event horizon; these meatbrained loonies have thermonukes. He's crazy!" the drone suddenly screeched. Sma hissed to quiet it, even though she knew the drone would be sound-fielding its words so that only she could hear. The drone spluttered on: "He must have cracked the gene-coding in his own cells; the steady-state retro-ageing that we gave him; he's been selling it! For money and favours, trying to get these monomaniac dictators to behave like nice people. Sma! He's trying to set up his own contact section! And he's fucking it! Completely!"