“You mean Ozzie’s a Guardian? I don’t believe it.”

“Then ask him yourself.”

“Oh…” This time she did stomp her foot.

“If he says yes, you might like to consider our request. He does know who put the barrier around the Dyson Pair.”

“How the hell could I even get to Cressat? Let alone break in to his cell? Nigel would be very suspicious if I asked to see Ozzie.”

“Ozzie came back with two companions: a teenage boy, and a previously unknown species of alien. The Sheldon Dynasty has just placed a request with Lady Georgina for a sweet young girl to travel to Cressat where she is to seduce a boy who is sexually inexperienced. The money for this contract was paid to Lady Georgina from the Dynasty’s main security division account. That is extremely unusual. We do not believe it to be a coincidence.”

“Who’s Lady Georgina?”

“A very high-class madame on Augusta. She provides first-life girls to the rich and famous.”

“Urrgh. And you want me to pretend to be that girl?”

“Yes. Lady Georgina has already assigned the contract to Vanora Kingsley, one of her newest recruits. Kingsley will assume the identity of a junior Sheldon taking her vacation on Cressat. We can substitute you for her, but we must be quick. Kingsley is scheduled to be collected at New Costa station one hundred forty minutes from now. If you take a maglev express to Augusta immediately, you can just get to the station in time.”

A taxi pulled up next to Mellanie and opened its door. She looked at it and sighed; the sensible thing to do would be to walk away, but it would be exciting to infiltrate Cressat, and get through to Ozzie. Her virtual hand touched Hoshe’s icon. “Something’s come up. I’m going back to Darklake City.”

“But…the arrest team’s already in the elevator.”

“Good luck, Hoshe, I’ll call you when I get home.”

“I thought you wanted this.”

“I do. And I’m really sorry, but this is more important.”

“What is?”

“I’ll call you later, promise.” Mellanie stepped into the taxi, which immediately pulled out into the traffic. “What’s happening to the Kingsley girl?” she asked the SI. “Do I have to bundle her into a car or something? I don’t think I’d be much good at that kind of thing.”

“We feel Jaycee would disagree, but no. A security professional has been contracted to perform the extraction operation.”

“You’re not going to hurt her, are you?”

“Absolutely not. She will be taken to a safe house, where she will be kept under confinement for the duration.”

“Okay. So what does this boy look like, then? I need to know that at least.” A file slid into her virtual vision. When she opened it she was looking at a teenage lad with wild ginger hair and a smile that was half snarl. “Well, don’t expect me to sleep with him,” she said hurriedly. “Does he even know how to use cutlery?”

“What’s wrong with him? Our female aspects concur that he is cute-looking.”

She reviewed the image again. “Maybe. I mean, physically. But you can just see the attitude problem there. He’s gotta be a behavioral nightmare.”

“Your area of excellence.”

“Ha fucking ha.”

“Mellanie, you may have to perform the contract’s primary requirement. We hope you understand.”

“I’ve done enough whoring, I think.”

“We are sure the moment of sexual consummation can be delayed long enough for you to assess the situation and try to contact Ozzie. The requirement we were actually referring to is the contract’s personality stipulation. It is a strong one. That is why Lady Georgina selected Kingsley.”

“What stipulation?”

“That the girl be sweet.”

“Hey! I can do sweet, all right? Don’t give me that crap.”

“Very well, Mellanie. If you say so.”

***

Once again, Wilson Kime waited to set foot on a new world. He stood in front of the gateway as dawn rose above Half Way, flooding the barren rock island with red light and intense blue-white flashes. In the generator building behind the gateway, power was starting to feed in from the stormrider.

He tried not to feel too smug about it, but with his knowledge of astroengineering and orbital mechanics, the technical types in Adam’s team had automatically deferred to him. It had taken him twenty minutes at the console in the generator building, mapping out the stormrider’s primary systems and guidance programs, before he sent up the first batch of instructions. His virtual vision produced a basic flight profile display, with a long curving white line designating the stormrider’s course as it flew around its perpetual loop. Within ten minutes of his instructions being accepted by the onboard array a new purple line appeared, short and blunt, showing the diversion he’d charted back into the plasma current. The massive machine had crept along it for nearly an hour as the plasma concentration increased around it.

Forty million kilometers above his head, the gigantic blades were spinning again as the stormrider slid back into the gale of charged particles. Wilson’s virtual vision display showed him the vast yet surprisingly fragile machine’s velocity increase as it was blown irretrievably in toward the neutron star. “It’s falling like Icarus now,” he said as Oscar walked over to stand beside him. “Wings spread wide, and way too close to the sun.”

“You’re taking a few liberties there,” Oscar said. “But I do like the imagery.”

“How’s Qatux coming on? Is he going to manage the wormhole?” Wilson checked the stormrider’s status in his virtual vision; so far everything was holding steady as its power output built rapidly.

“Your guess is as good as mine. I worked in the exploration division, remember? That makes me very familiar with the kind of large arrays you need to manipulate exotic matter. There’s a limit to what flesh and blood can achieve, even very smart alien flesh and blood. Our Raiel might just be claiming this to influence our emotional state.”

“MorningLightMountain controls all its wormholes by direct neural routines.”

“And that’s another thing: did anyone back at your supersecret revolutionary council actually verify this Bose motile creature was the genuine article?”

“Stop being such a paranoid grump.”

“First rule of being a lawyer, don’t ask the witness a question when you know you don’t like the answer.”

“Well, here comes the answer. Qatux has finished the power-up sequence.”

Ayub had parked the Volvo containing the Raiel close to the generator building’s door. The big alien had then been linked to the generator’s controlling array via thick bundles of fiber-optic cable that it had attached to the heavy tips of the flaccid flesh stems behind its tentacles. It was an arrangement that reminded Wilson of hot-wiring a car.

He started his level breathing exercise as his heart rate sped up, glad that Tiger Pansy wasn’t around to sense his anxiety. The wormhole opened as smoothly as an iris exposed to the night.

“It’s through to somewhere,” Adam declared.

“Matthew, send a sneekbot through,” Alic said.

One of the little bots scampered through the pressure curtain. Wilson hooked himself onto its feed, and saw a darkened landscape unfold. There was damp ground below the artificial rodent’s feet, ragged blades of grass snagging at its sleek body, arching fronds of tall plants waved in the distance, darker patches of trees. It hurried ten meters away from the wormhole, then raised itself up on its hind legs and scanned around. There were no heat sources within range, no electromagnetic emission points, no visible spectrum light; the only detectable motion was a persistent wind that was heavy with moisture, the tail end of rain.

“It certainly hasn’t come out in the city,” Adam said.

“Could be a city park,” Rosamund said.

“Doubtful, there’s no node carrier signal registering,” Johansson said. “Even dear old Armstrong City has a complete net coverage.”