'I've no time, Captain. You'd better shoot, if that's what you feel, because I'm not waiting around any longer. Whatever you feel necessary.'

And she turned on her heel and trudged off, arms folded, head down, breasting some personal hinterland wind.

'Look here — ' He watched her receding shoulders for a minute, glanced at his guns. He felt a bit of a fool. He hurried after her like some mad philosopher chasing the Numenon forever down a gradient of misunderstanding. 'Why do you always treat me like a child?' He complained. 'If you'd leveled with me just once — '

She stopped, swung on him, her eyes blaring and alive for the first time in his experience of her.

'Because you know nothing! Because you understand nothing! Because people like you are always too puzzled and decent to shoot people like me. Because that's what you are, Captain.'

She shrugged.

'Oh, what's the use? Truck, you're a baby: there's always someone shielding you and all the other odd little people like you — if you want me to apologize for your naïvete', then bloody well forget it!'

Off she went again, and this time all he got from her when he caught up was, 'Shouldn't you be running away? They've got half the Arabs in Junk City out looking for you.'

'I was rather hoping you'd help me,' he said diffidently. 'You keep getting me into these things. You've conned me twice and I think you owe me for that.'

She looked weary and compassionate. 'You see?' she said. Then: 'Why should I, Captain, why should I owe you anything?' She looked him up and down, shook her head. 'I see no reason to help you, Captain, no reason at all.'

On the other hand, she did nothing to discourage him; so, despite his armory, he simply followed her. She was familiar, and he couldn't think of anything else to do. Walking at a fair clip, she got about ten yards ahead of him. He could always, he reasoned, shoot her in the back if she turned out to be bait in an ambush. Somehow, he didn't think he'd ever be able to shoot her in the front.

The floor took on a downward slope. Patches of congealed plastic ridged the metal underfoot, trapping little runnels of bitter condensation. Up ahead, there was a ninety-degree bend in the main. He let her go round it, stopped, put his ear to the wall. He was close enough to the reactor to feel its soul in the steel and hear the distant moan of convection currents: but other than that, only moisture dripping from the lighting cable with a sound like tapped porcelain. Angina had stopped moving. She coughed, and shuffled her feet.

Truck checked his pistols, sucked his split lip indecisively. 'Oh shit,' he murmured, and went around the corner like an armored train. There was nothing up there he feared more than what lay behind.

He was in a shadowy alcove where cold stale air licked his face like a sick animal. The conduit terminated a few feet away in a screen of thick wire mesh, into which was set a wicket-gate of the same material. A vague brightness lay beyond it. In the alcove nothing moved but Angina's sharp black silhouette. She was standing with her face pressed up against the mesh, as if trying to see through it.

Truck crouched there sweating and ready to kill something, then relaxed. 'What do we do now, then?' he asked brightly.

'We do nothing, Captain,' staring through the mesh.

'Sorry I spoke.'

He investigated the alcove, rubbing his chin with the end of one of his weapons. 'You might be wrong about me not being able to shoot you,' he said. 'I'm not saying you are — ' There didn't seem to be any other way out. 'If you'll just stand aside,' he said, 'I'll open it for you' — sighting up on the wicket-gate — 'with no trouble at all.'

She gasped, turned away from the grille, an odd complex of fear and yearning in her eyes.

'Don't!'

She stared over his shoulder. Her lips moved, but it wasn't she who whispered eerily into the gloom:

'You don't want to go any further, Captain Truck.'

He was there suddenly, but with a look of permanence, as if he'd been waiting just beyond the periphery of Truck's vision ever since the debacle beneath Carter's Snort. As if once acknowledged, he would never go away again. His emaciated and reptilian body was hung with a pale fawn suit cut in that good twentieth-century fashion; his shoes were of the finest alligator; on his head was a straw panama, bent and grimy at the brim from being pulled down over his eyes. At a glance you could see he belonged to the streets of Egerton's Port, that he'd get you anything you needed: with the end of the longest-running party in the history of the universe, it seemed he'd found his level.

'You aren't a king any more Veronica,' said Truck; narrowing his eyes. 'Don't try and stop me.'

He felt something that might have been sympathy. Chalice Veronica had fallen from grace. He was fading away. What gray cheesy junk flesh he'd once possessed had melted off the bone, which shone through like a lamp behind waxed paper; he was all eyes and resentment, all paranoid jaw and gray stubble; he smelled like an old, old pusher who'd had his hand in the stock cupboard just once too often.

'You're a little fool, Truck,' he hissed, 'and I wish I'd never seen you. It's still a supplier's Galaxy. The King, even in exile, knows things, sees all — Timelines whip the Moment across the Universe like broken hawsers — Intimations input spinal sensors — H signals flicker like heliographs across the spaces of the dyne — I — see — ' He shuddered.

'Ben Barka or General Gaw, what difference can it make to you who owns your callow little brain?' He chuckled. 'I see one of my little dogs has found you again — '

He swung his blunt, shapeless head and — as if using some other sense than sight, some slow junk radar — located Angina Seng, up there rigid by the wicket-gate. Since his appearance, she had developed little muscle tremors; her face was drawn and white, her eyes were fixed on him.

'I want my stuff, Veronica,' she said. 'I want it.'

Veronica smiled at Truck. 'Pardon an old man's sentimentality, Captain. I say "my" little dogs, but of course I really only feed them. Angina liked what I gave her so much that she came with me when the General withdrew her patronage. It was quite lucky for Angina that we both — left — the General at the same time. The same Moment, eh, Angina?' And he rolled his lizard's eyes to show a thin rim of white veined like hairline cracks in ancient china.

'I want my stuff, Veronica, you bastard,' said Angina, and her voice was perfectly empty.

'Oh, my dear, we all want our stuff. But we have to be patient, don't we?'

He took a pace backward into the gloom. Only a ghost, only a thin spirit hanging on, an echo of habits past and a withered kingship under the earth. Truck shot out a hand and grasped the loose wattled skin of his throat. It was like touching a dead, damp leaf. 'What are you doing on Avernus, Veronica?' He felt sick. His fingers trembled with the effort of gripping that awful flesh. Only a ghost: but even in eclipse those old junk pores still oozed some stink of mold and darkness. Yellow teeth snapped at him. Veronica's breath rattled, but his head was already dead.

'I'm the paymaster, Captain. Ben Barka needs me as much as the old cow ever did. They all need what I sell, to keep their agents enthusiastic and faithful. Sometimes, ideology isn't enough. The law, the administrators on both sides, why, they're some of my best customers (I'd say "most regular," but all my customers are that) — '

'What sort of rubbish is this? What's behind that door?' Truck released his grip, flung the eroded bag of bones away from him. It chuckled.

'You're finished, Veronica.'

'Don't knock it until you can do it, my boy.'

He wasn't even trying to get away. He took out a small pewter pillbox and slipped something into his mouth — the merest delicate flicker of a black, saurian tongue. 'The General cut off Angina's supply the day after you refused your services on Sad al Bari, Captain. She's an impatient woman. What could poor Angina do?'