“You heard just about right. Bradley will deliver the equipment to complete the last eight. Don’t worry.”

“He’s cutting it very fine.”

“I’m sure they have their problems out there in the Commonwealth.”

“Yeah,” she said, not liking what a gripe she sounded.

“But what?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Did you have to?”

“All right,” she admitted. “I wanted to be on the team that goes up to Aphrodite’s Seat.”

“Well, the dreaming heavens know you’ve earned a place. If you finish the last two stations on schedule, and Bradley delivers the remaining components to bring the network up to operational status, you should get to the Nalosyle Vales in time to make the rendezvous.”

“That’s bribery.”

Harvey chuckled, a nasty liquid rumbling sound.

They reached the first parked truck. Over a dozen Guardians were grouped around it, waiting. Ferelith was holding on to an excited Lennox. When she let go, the little boy toddled unsteadily to his mother, a delighted smile on his face. Samantha picked him up, and turned to face the new station they’d built. Valentine and the last two technicians were running down the track. She could just see the edge of the black pyramid about six hundred meters away in the shelter’s new clearing.

The latecomers all pulled their helmets off.

“Everyone here?” Valentine asked. Without waiting, he raised a handheld array, and entered the activation sequence. Samantha brought up her own handheld array, juggling Lennox onto one arm as she tried to watch the power supply symbols.

The air around the clearing sparkled as the pyramid generated its base force field eight hundred meters wide, stabilizing the whole structure. She could feel the ground trembling slightly as the force field permeated the rock beneath them, anchoring itself solidly into place. It was that single function that had made construction of the generators so difficult, almost half of the components had to be custom built for them inside the Commonwealth. Standard force fields couldn’t permeate solid matter for more than a few meters at best. Nothing moved inside the bubble of energy, the leaves on every tree were stilled as the now-lustrous air solidified.

“Stage two,” Valentine shouted.

Samantha tilted her head back, and pointed for Lennox. The little boy stared up curiously into the sky.

Five long blades of air shimmered above the existing force field. Their shape was tenuous at first, but as the initial energy surge was absorbed, the air calmed as its molecules were rearranged and locked into new shapes. There was only the faintest of diffraction layers left to reveal the contours, slight pressure fissures cutting through the clear sapphire sky, but it was sufficient for the naked eye to make out. From Samantha’s angle, it was as though the blade shapes were made from high-quality glass. They curved away gently from each other, expanding until they were half a kilometer wide and separated by three kilometers; then they began the long curve back to a single point eight kilometers above the fresh clearing in the forest.

“The universe’s biggest egg-whisk,” Harvey growled.

As Samantha watched, grinning at his description, thin streamers of cloud hit a couple of the unyielding blades and twisted sharply away. Gentle gusts were washing against her as the breeze that blew constantly along Trevathan’s Gulf was deflected by the blades.

“Stage three,” Valentine warned.

The blades began to move, rotating clockwise, very slowly. After five minutes they’d finished a complete circle, and stopped. Samantha felt the wind they’d stirred race across the road in a giant slothful pressure wave, causing the trees to sway. Her protective suit flapped about, while her sweaty hair swirled around her head. Lennox laughed delightedly.

“We did it,” Harvey said. “Again. What was the power use?”

Samantha consulted her handheld array. “Four percent.”

“That’s a lot.”

Above them, the blades vanished. Then the base force field released its grip on the surrounding rock and air. A zephyr swept along the road as the air currents churned back into their original patterns.

“Initialization uses a disproportionate amount of power,” she said. “Don’t worry, there’ll be enough for the planet’s revenge.”

***

Four identical black Cadillac limousines drew up outside the big old converted warehouse in Darklake City’s Thurnby district. Mellanie stepped out of the first one, her expensive Fomar pumps just missing the soggy mass of leaves and paper that clogged the gutter. She’d chosen the most sober clothes from her own range to wear, a neat black jacket with slim white lines marking out a square pattern. Matching pants and a cream blouse finished off the image. This way she had a whole Paula Myo authority figure thing going for her. It felt funny coming back here as a take-no-shit professional troubleshooter, backed up by six very tough wetwired CST security operatives.

There was nobody about on the street, so they all trooped over to the door. Nothing had changed; the purple Wayside Production plaque was still on the wall outside, the couches in the tiny reception area were still snowing flakes of chrome on the floor, the scent of ozone and disinfectant hanging in the air. Mellanie went straight through reception into the narrow corridors that separated the stages. Up above her, the ancient solar collector roof creaked incessantly. Voices from one of the stages echoed around the cavernous overhead space. A stagehand came around a corner, pulling a trolley with a circular bed balanced precariously on top. He stared in astonishment at Mellanie and her escort.

“Where’s Tiger Pansy?” Mellanie asked.

“Huh?”

“Tiger Pansy, where is she?”

His hand waved limply back down the corridor. “Dressing room, I think.”

“Thank you.” Mellanie marched past him. She hadn’t actually made it as far as the dressing room before. It wasn’t hard to find, a big open area lined with lockers on one side, makeup tables along the other. The far end was a jumble of clothes racks. Several girls dressed in feathers and gold-crusted Hindu sarongs were sitting around waiting for their turn with the makeup lady, a large elderly woman in a black mourning dress. One of the girls was having her OCtattoos tuned by a sensorium technician; she was very young, an easy forty centimeters taller than Mellanie, thin bordering on malnourished, with lustrous black skin. She had a nervous yet resigned expression on her face as she watched the technician sticking modifier patches over the OCtattoos that webbed her thighs and genitalia. Something must have registered as she caught sight of Mellanie. The technician looked up from his sophisticated handheld array. Across the dressing room, the babble of conversation cut off.

“Tiger Pansy?” Mellanie called.

Someone stood up in the middle of the girls waiting to be made up. Mellanie barely recognized her; the peroxide blond hair was now orange verging on tangerine, and seemed to be all straw, standing up as if it’d been electrocuted. Reprofiling had taken the chubbiness out of her cheeks, but the thick crust of skin it’d left produced deep creases as her jaw worked away at her gum. Even before the makeup session, she still had way too much mascara around her eyes. The turquoise and topaz feathers around her chest were under a lot of strain holding her vast breasts up.

“Oh, hi, Mellanie,” she squeaked. “Watcha doin’ back here?”

“Came to see you.”

“Yeah?” Tiger Pansy giggled, a high-pitched sound drilling through Mellanie’s eardrums. “You wanna interview me? Jaycee won’t like that.”

“I’m here to offer you a job. And nobody cares what Jaycee likes, least of all me.”

“Oh, really?” a man’s voice asked.

Mellanie turned to face him. Like his studio, Jaycee hadn’t changed either, head still shaved, black clothes with the crow’s-foot wrinkles that only cheap cloth produced. “Get lost,” Mellanie said curtly.