'I haven't finished yet,' he said.

Stanton turned and looked out through the gap in the rusting cargo shell at the light of the just-risen sun. Three hours they had been in here. He studied Svent and Dusache. Dusache supposedly didn't like this sort of thing, yet he seemed as avid as Svent and Pelter. Corlackis had, some time ago, suggested someone should keep watch and had gone to do so himself. Stanton looked back at Pelter.

'You've had all you can out of him. He's got nothing else to say.'

'I won't know that, John, until I've tortured him to death,' Pelter replied.

Stanton saw that the man had heard, and saw the look of terror in his face.

'He'll only start making it up if you carry on,' he said.

Pelter just stared at Stanton for a long moment. 'All right,' he eventually said, 'I'll kill him.' As he said this he held up the nerve-inducer and clicked the switch. He gave a dead smile, then stooped down and pressed the inducer against the man's stomach. He was still screaming by the time Stanton had walked out to join Corlackis.

'He's not giving him time to answer questions,' Corlackis said.

'He doesn't want answers. He's just killing him with the nerve-inducer.'

'That's just a bit sick,' said Corlackis.

Stanton moved away. He thought of Corlackis describing his homicidal brother as 'not so bad', and he thought of what Pelter was doing, and he wondered if just maybe he was getting a little sick himself.

15

The shuttle bucked as it hit turbulence and a hail of black crystals hissed across the screen. Cormac was not too worried, but it was disconcerting to be sitting in a hemisphere of chainglass at the front of a nacelle. The flying wing was without a central body and this positioning seemed to imply indirect control of the craft, rather as if it was being shepherded. Moreover, there was an awful lot of empty space below Cormac's feet.

'One hundred and fifty kilometre winds, up here,' Jane observed.

'Should be no problem with dispersal then,' said Cormac and peered out at the gleaming noses of the pods distributed along the wing. Each was merely an aerodynamic cover and heating unit for the spray heads inside.

'There could be. We have to seed the counteragent where it will be distributed following the weather patterns since the blast, and we cannot be certain what they have been like since then.'

'Hubris estimated a dispersal across about ninety per cent of Samarkand.'

'Yes, a lot of material would have been thrown into the upper atmosphere, and the weather then, during the initial cooling of the planet, would have been a lot worse than it is now. There would have been winds of up to four hundred kilometres an hour. Some of the mycelium has probably been carried right round the planet.'

'I see… but the counteragent will get to it?'

Jane nodded. 'In time. And this area will be saturated.'

'Will that be enough?'

'With safety measures implemented, and ceramal left out of the equation. It's mostly been replaced with chainglass now anyway.'

Cormac looked down between his feet again and thought about what was down there. He felt a momentary surge of anger, and repressed it. No matter what had been said about his humanity, emotion did get in the way of efficiency.

'Coming up on first release point,' said Jane.

She punched out a sequence on the console. On a screen showing a rear view of the shuttle, Cormac saw a contrail snake out from one of the pods as the warm counteragent hit the frigid air. Another screen showed it further back, being chopped into sections and dispersed by the vicious winds. Jane released the joystick and sat back.

'The automatics will take us in a circle fifty kilometres wide.'

Cormac glanced at the air-speed indicator; 950 kilometres per hour. Ten minutes, then. 'You'll save the scatter bomb for last, I take it?'

'Yes, four pods up here, then we go in low and drop it. An arbitrary decision, really. It makes no difference in what order we do it,' said Jane.

Cormac got out of his seat and headed off into the wing of the shuttle, searching for something to eat or drink. He could have stayed on Hubris, as his presence here was not required, but he was fed up with waiting for something to happen or something to be found by the ship's scanners. Chaline and her technicians were well enough employed preparing their runcible to be taken down, and he had not had much opportunity to talk to her - or any wish either, to be honest. She was just the kind of involvement he did not need right now, or was he kidding himself? Mika was becoming increasingly involved in her study of the dracomen, and had already induced the four Sparkind and a few of the crew to assist her. The rest of the crew were involved in replacing mycelium-damaged components and superstructure. Hubris, of course, was involved in just about every aspect of all these activities, while simultaneously scanning the planet. Cormac had felt like a spare wheel, so grabbed the first opportunity offered to get out of the ship. He needed action, not introspection.

Under one of the bench seats that lined the front edge of the wing Cormac found a ration box. From it he removed a foil package that the label identified as 'egg mayonnaise sandwiches'. He glanced at the lid of the box, where a logo identified it as ECS property. Was this the Sparkind's secret? He grinned and also removed a self-heating coffee from the box before replacing the lid. He pulled the tab on the coffee and, while it heated, he studied the globular tanks distributed along the wing, and the mesh of pipes running into the floor. Full of counteragent. He remembered the image Mika had shown him on the screen of her nanoscope. The thing had claws, damn it, and a mouth. He had asked why its skin was so… knobbly. He once again considered her reply, before returning to Jane: 'Those are atoms,' Mika had told him.

'How long should this take us?' Cormac asked Jane, after swallowing a mouthful of egg mayonnaise washed down with scalding coffee.

'Four hours.' Jane turned to inspect him. 'You are easier now about not being gridlinked?'

'A lot. It seems to me that I'd been living a vicarious life: all my involvement with the external world had become secondary. Blegg was right about the twenty-year limit. I should have been taken off the grid ten years ago.'

'I am surprised that was not done. Obviously your usefulness to Earth Central outweighed their concern for your mental health.'

'It didn't take me long to recover.'

'There are fifty-eight people on the Hubris.'

He looked at her in surprise. She went on.

'Four of them are the Sparkind; twenty-two of them are crew; the rest are technicians. That you did not know this is not surprising. After being gridlinked you find there are a lot of questions you forget how to ask. Had you had any normal social interaction, this fact would have become evident.'

'So you're saying I'm not recovered yet.' He found he was having trouble keeping a smug grin off his face.