He stared past Truck at something on the wall, shrugged. 'I presume the girl has told you why I asked you here?'

Truck sneered sideways at Angina Seng. ''What would I know about it? I thought she'd found her level in the IWG embassy on Sad al Bari.' He hardly knew what he was saying. He got a quick sight of his stomach, heaved; drew the sodden cloak about him, blushing miserably and thinking of Grishkin's victorious smile.

'I see. Make us some mint tea please, Angina. The Captain looks cold.'

Off by the window, a sudden, impatient movement 'Oh, for Christ's sake Gadaffi tell him why he's here and then get out. He hasn't got a clue what he's got bold of. The old cow obviously never told him, and half the time he's so drugged that he doesn't even know where he is. Why should I have told him? He's never listened to a word I've said.' She watched the rain, lacing her fingers, rubbing one thumb with the other. 'I'm sick of both of you.'

'Make us some mint tea, please, Angina.'

'Oh, come on — '

'Make us some mint tea, please, Angina.'

There was a greasy sink in one corner. She began to smash things about in it.

Truck swallowed. 'Shell sell you out, too, ben Barka. She'll do it for practice.'

The colonel smiled wanly to himself. 'There's no need to feel injured, Captain. This is an informal sort of meeting, there was no coercion intended.' The hashishin rubbed their tanned noses. 'An exploratory meeting, really.'

'I wasn't thinking of myself.'

'There will be no betrayal,' ben Barka insisted, rapping his stick briskly on the table and looking irritated for a moment or two.

'I told you he was a bloody moron,' said Angina. 'He doesn't even know what year it is.'

'Our arrangement has certain safeguards built in, Captain, You, of all people, should be familiar with the kind of thing I'm thinking of. The General herself was good enough to institute them a long time ago. And, of course, Angina is hardly welcome in that sector any more. Now let's — Ah, thank you, Angina.'

She had slopped two small plastic cups on the table between them, full of something green and steaming. Truck looked dismally into his. A slight glutinous scum had already formed at its rim, like algae at the high-water mark of an abandoned canal. Something was floating in there. Something was floating.

Truck staggered to his feet, eyes filling with tears, and headed blindly for the door, thinking solely of relief. The hashishin stepped thoughtfully forward to intercept him, beaming and swinging hands like edged slabs of sandstone. Simultaneously, ben Barka shouted something, kicked his chair out of the way, and came up aiming a Chambers gun in fashionable military style — feet well apart, arms out straight, left hand gripping right wrist. That he could prevent himself from firing after all that, was a minor miracle; but Truck didn't care.

He hardly saw any of it. Somewhere in a limpid personal twilight, he was groaning with fear and revulsion and heaving up the whole contents of the universe. After a while, he felt the Arabs bending over him. Somebody called his name a couple of times. The last thing he properly understood for a while was Angina Seng saying: 'He's always doing that. Well, you can damn well clean it up before you go.'

They dragged him through the drenching rain, dashing along like a night retreat from some El Bira or Ein Keren of the mind. Sudden vicious squalls of wind groaned between the black violent buildings, flushing up the losers of Avernus (to drive them, mere bundles of rag, feeble impersonations of life, from one cold corner to another, all the long night through). Every time his foot went down, pain lighted him up like a dancing man in a neon sign.

They came to a halt, panting and staring about, some three hundred yards down the street from Angina's shack; pushed him into some sort of ground vehicle; took off into the dark on a wave of mud and transmission noise. Egerton's Port receded but not far. Ben Barka drove nervously, craning forward to peer through the water pouring down the windshield. In the back seat, the fellaheen wiped condensation from the windows then shoved their faces so close to the glass that it misted up again immediately.

Later, they left the road. Distant thunder smoked from the sky with a smell of cold-drawn steel wire and manganese slag; the car veered and bucked and smashed its underparts repeatedly down against the ruts and cinders of a ruined landscape; flares of white light bleached the faces of the hashishin. For a moment, hung between sky and waste by a particularly brutal spasm, Truck imagined Earth's war reaching out for Avernus like a bleeding hand. But when he looked for the telltale violet ionization trails of descending MIEV warheads, he could see nothing.

He retched comfortably a couple of times and fell into a doze alternately hag-ridden and beatific. His head lolled onto the shoulder of one of the Arabs. They looked across it at each other with distaste.

ELEVEN

A Thin Time in 'Junk City'

Waking up ten minutes later, he rubbed his mouth and nose, sneezed. Odd silhouettes were forming and shifting somewhere beyond the streaming windscreen. He sat up and looked around. 'What do you know?' he said, his respect for ben Barka declining rapidly as the car lurched its way deeper into the mean and soulless night of Junk City.

'Shut your mouth,' suggested one of the Hashishin.

Junk City, a fair-sized industrial complex that had processed the raw materials for the pit-warehouse quarter of Egerton's Port during the early stages of colonization, was falling apart ten years after the fact in the evil glare of a failing temporary power plant that had somehow never been shut down, its foundries and plastics factories links in a well-established chain of warrens which served the hinterland pushers.

It was a nerve-racking horizon of slag tips and cooling-towers, leaning chimneys and gutted workshops, cold furnaces sadly gravid with congealed ore and fluxes, all linked together by a black etched spider-work of gantries, man-high conduits and precarious diagonal conveyors. Smoke and vapors vented from the overtaxed condensers of the power plant roiled between the rusting hoppers, drifted across the soaked ashy earth at the height of a man's waist to hang reeking over the terraces of the opencast mines.

Reactor-glare beat its way up and down the spectrum, now white and electric, now somnolent and purple — a constant unhealthy flicker of partially contained plasma struggling against the abused lines of force that restrained it, filling the wind with an awful, modulating, voracious roar like junk-tides on an abandoned planet at the very gutter-edge of Time. The denizens of this city, white-eyes and thin demented bones, watched the light racing and arcing across their grim skyline, and huddled close. Why should they be any less desperate for comfort than their customers? That leaky old engine menaced them, but they depended on it.

'I was on Centauri VII, Captain. I know what I saw when Grishkin burst through into the final bunker. I had been operating the cutter not a minute before he began to scrabble his way through, bare-handed. Yusef Karem saw it too, but later, and his report was garbled; Fleet agents were already close behind him — by then, they had cooked my sergeant's brains and knew we were there.'

Ben Barka had a bolt-hole in the ganger's shed of an ore furnace: a dusty room with faded yellow duty rosters pinned to the walls and a collection of the shaky, scuffed furniture that always seems to find its way into such places — two or three hard chairs, some adjustable metal shelving, and a half-made folding bed.