“I ask, because Vic may be right. This is very easy. Why has the Starflyer left the gateway open to Half Way?”

“You think it’s going to ambush us? We’re ready for that. This is what I do, plan combat scenarios. I know you don’t like the idea, but have some faith in me, Investigator; you wouldn’t be chasing me unless I was good.” Even as he said it, he checked his virtual vision grid. The maser cannons were being taken out one at a time, slumping over to the ground as their mountings turned sluggish. They were only a hundred meters from the gateway now, bumping along the single track that led to Half Way. It was discomfortingly easy, he had to admit.

“Remember Valtare Rigin?” Paula asked.

Better than you realize. Adam still got chilly when he thought how close they’d been that day on Venice Coast, and she’d never seen him. “Owner of the Nystol gallery on Venice Coast, the one Bruce targeted.”

“Yes. We didn’t release the information at the time, obviously, but our forensic team found that Rigin’s memorycell had been removed postmortem.”

“Yeah. So?”

“Tarlo took the head of the Agent on Illuminatus, complete with memorycell. Do you understand, Elvin? The Starflyer is building up a very intimate database on your activities. Now I don’t know how many more of your contacts it has captured and subjected to download. But it knows who you use, who you want, what equipment you’re buying. Tell me this: if it has all that, is there any way it can deduce what you’re doing today, now?”

Adam hated the question. He knew what he would like to answer, no, no way, but the stakes were too high for that kind of pride now. “I don’t know. I never tell the Agent what the operations are, especially last time. I just needed people with combat experience.”

“Let’s hope that’s not enough.”

“Wait a minute,” Rob said. “You mean that thing knows my name?”

“Yes,” Paula said.

“Oh, shit.”

“We’re ready,” Rosamund said.

The last maser cannon had been eliminated. They were right in front of the gateway to Half Way. Mild ruby light shone through the milky opaque pressure curtain force field. Nothing was visible through it.

“Send the drone through,” Adam said.

The little winged bot zipped through the force field. Its camera showed a landscape of naked rock beneath a dark fuchsia sky. A single set of rails ran from the gateway into the head of a deep valley, dipping down toward the calm sea.

“Nothing,” Rosamund reported. No electromagnetic activity, no thermal spots. They’re not there.

“Take us through,” Adam ordered. “And send the drone out over Shackleton; let’s see if there are any planes left.”

Vic watched the last Volvo truck disappear through the red pressure curtain. He’d jogged away from the Guardians as they knocked out the maser cannon; the big T-shaped weapons had keeled over to lie smoldering on the scorched ground amid the still-burning wrecks that the zone killer had taken out. It was like being back on Illuminatus, walking through the aftermath of Treetops.

He knew their easy passage was all wrong. The local network had crashed thanks to Edmund, but the hardened security links should have been resistant to the disruptor software. Tarlo would have retained fire control. If he’d wanted, he could have engaged the Guardians. The maser cannon were old, but they could have probably taken out a couple of the Volvos. It didn’t make a lot of sense, unless Tarlo wanted the Guardians to get through to Half Way. Why?

Vic reached the geodesic hall containing the force field generator. His sensors couldn’t detect any personal force fields or weapons power packs. There was an infrared source lying just inside the door, human-sized. He went in.

The corpse sprawled on the enzyme-bonded concrete only had half of its head left. An ion pulse had blown the face off and incinerated most of the rest. Vic was pretty sure it was Edmund Li. It certainly wasn’t Tarlo. Of course, there was no way of knowing just how many Starflyer agents there were left on this side of the gateway. He switched his suit sensors to active scan, and swept around the dark hall. The two shots that had disabled the generator were easy to detect, the casing was still hot where they’d hit. There was no sign of anyone else in there.

A huge explosion outside made Vic crouch down instinctively as his force field strengthened. As soon as he went back out through the door he saw a giant gout of flame and black oily smoke rising up from the long building that housed the Half Way wormhole generator. The gateway at the front of it was now nothing more than a concave semicircle packed with complex machinery. There was no red luminescence, no alien starlight diffused by the pressure curtain. Another explosion ripped out from the generator building, sending debris flying for hundreds of meters. Flames took hold inside, licking around the huge holes blown in the roof and walls.

Vic started jogging toward the dead gateway, heedless of the exposure. His sensors scanned around constantly, searching for any motion, any hint of human activity.

Someone was walking toward him, stepping unhurriedly over the burned earth in front of the gateway, making no attempt to conceal themself. Vic didn’t need confirmation, he knew who it would be, but his visual sensors zoomed in anyway.

He stopped ten meters short of Tarlo. The Starflyer agent wasn’t using any of his wetwiring, his inserts were inert, power cells switched to inactive mode. He simply stood there in a glossy suit of semiorganic fabric refracting a moiré shimmer; his blond hair swept back and held in place with a small black leather band.

“Vic, right?” he asked the hulking armor suit. “Gotta be Vic.”

Vic switched on the suit’s external audio circuit. “Yeah, it’s me.”

“Cool. How’s Gwyneth?”

“Does it matter to you?”

“Part of me, man, yeah.”

“She’ll be okay. Why did you do it?”

Tarlo’s handsome face gave a sympathetic grin. “It’s what I had to do. Man, that Paula Myo, what a ball-buster. I always knew she’d be the one who blew me.”

“Who am I talking to?”

“Both of us, I guess. My part is over, so it doesn’t care anymore. It’s just waiting for you to kill me.”

“You failed, though. The Guardians got through.”

“The Guardians got through. I succeeded.”

“It was a trap.”

“What do you think?”

“I think I’ll take you back for a memory read.”

“Man, it’s too late for that; Qatux has gone through with the rest of them.”

“How did you know—” Vic’s suit sensors showed one of Tarlo’s inserts powering up. He fired his ion rifle, which blew Tarlo’s body in half.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

All the trees in the forest were identical, elegantly rotund, and rich with red-gold leaves that reminded Ozzie of New England in the fall. This, though, was high summer, with a bright sun high overhead, and warm dry air gusting through the branches. Ozzie had stripped down to his T-shirt and a pair of badly worn shorts; not that it stopped him sweating hard from the effort of carrying his pack. Orion was wearing cutoff pants and no shirt; his expression martyred as he lumbered on in the grinding heat of the afternoon. Tochee seemed unaffected, its colorful fronds flapping loosely as it slid along.

Ozzie was pretty sure he knew where they were, though his newfound pathsense wasn’t quite as precise as a satnav function. He’d started to pick up on a few signs in the last half hour. This path was now quite neat, the kind of track that you’d get when someone took care of it, rather than just a route that people and animals walked at random. There were no dead branches lying across the way, and remarkably few twigs. Several boggy puddles had been filled with gravel so travelers didn’t have to detour. Then he even saw where branches had been cut on trees close to the path; they were long healed over now, just knobbly warts in the sepia bark. All the things a government land management agency would do to keep the path open for walkers.