“So were you always after me? Was I some sort of target?”

“No. Opportunism again. Great thing.”

“And Fassin?”

“Useful guy to know. Never much use for real spy stuff, but worth keeping in touch with. Led me to you, so it was worth it. Probably dead now, but you never know. Still disappeared in Nasq.”

“What’s happening? In the system, I mean. The war has started, hasn’t it? They won’t tell me anything, and the screen only accesses library stuff.”

“Oh, the war’s started all right.”

“And?”

Liss shook her head, whistled. “Woucha. Some of those ships you built? Taking a terrible pasting. All very unequal. All that stuff about fighting to the last ship? Bullshit, in the end. Space war’s almost over. Hierchon’s disappeared.”

“Is it all just military? Any cities or habs being targeted?” Sal held her gaze for a moment, then looked down. “I have a lot of people there, Liss.”

“Yeah, you’re only human, Saluus, I know. No need to act.”

He looked up sharply at her, but met an unforgiving gaze. She was still dressed in her slim esuit, coloured a pastel blue today to match her eyes. The thick helm-collar round her neck formed an odd-looking ruff, making her small head, dark hair gathered tightly back, look as though it was on a plate. “Borquille’s the only bit of ground been taken over so far,” she told him, relenting. “That got messy. No particularly newsworthy atrocities yet though.”

He sighed and sat back in the little seat by the screen. “Why are you — the Beyonders — cooperating with these… these guys?”

“Keeps you people out of our hair.”

“Us people? The Mercatoria?”

“Of course the fucking Mercatoria.”

“Is that really it?”

“The more other stuff you bastards have to deal with, the less free time you have for killing us. Really a very simple equation, Sal.”

“We attack you because you attack us.”

Liss slumped in her seat, legs slightly splayed. She rolled her eyes. “Oh, learn, man,” she breathed. She shook her head, sat up again. “No, Saluus,” she said. “You attack us because we won’t sign up for your precious fucking Mercatoria. Can’t even let us live in peace in case we’re seen as a good example. You target our habs and lifeships, you slaughter us in our millions. We attack your military and infrastructure. And you call us the terrorists.” She shook her head, stood. “Fuck you, Sal,” she said gently. “Fuck you for your arrogance and easy selfishness. Fuck you for being smart but not bothering to think.” She turned to go.

Sal jumped to his feet, nearly colliding with the transparent membrane. “Did you ever feel anything for me?” he blurted.

Liss stopped, turned. “Apart from contempt?” She smiled when he looked away then, biting his lip. She shook her head while he couldn’t see. “You could be fun to be with, Sal,” she said, hoping this didn’t sound too patronising. Or maybe that it did.

She left before he could think of anything else to say.

* * *

Hab 4409 and everybody in it was under sentence of death. So they’d been told. It was hard to believe. Anyway, it might not happen.

People reacted differently. Some had rioted and been dealt with either uncompromisingly or savagely, depending on whether you believed the civil authorities or not, some retreated to inebria of various types, some just stayed with those they loved or discovered they would not mind spending their last hours with those they merely liked, and a lot of people — more than Thay would have expected — gathered together in the great park on the far side of the habitat’s inner wall from the plaza outside the Diegesian’s palace. They all stood, and all held hands, great lines and knots of people, people in circles holding hands in the centre, joined to long strings of others in straggling lines. From above, Thay thought, they must look like a strange image of a human brain, all clumped brain cells and branching dendrons.

Thay Hohuel looked up, trying to see past the clusters of pods graped all along the hab’s long axis, looking for any sign of the Diegesian’s palace and the square outside where she and the others had gone to protest all those years ago.

She had come here, she realised, to die. She had not thought it would be quite so soon, that was all. She had never forgotten the others, had tried her best to keep in touch with them even when they didn’t seem to want to have to recall the old days and their old selves. She’d tried not to be too pushy about it, but she’d probably been seen by them as a pain, as a pester. But what you’d been meant something, even if you’d repudiated it, didn’t it? So she’d always thought, and still did.

So she’d been, she supposed, a nuisance, insisting on reminding the others of herself, and through herself of their earlier selves, and, of course, of poor, dead K, who both united them and kept them apart from each other. Mome, Sonj, Fassin and herself: they’d have met up again, wouldn’t they? They’d have had some sort of reunion, it would only have been natural. Well, maybe, if the ghost of K that they each carried with them hadn’t forever soured the memories of their time together.

Never mind, she was having her own reunion, with the hab and her old self and those memories. When she felt that she was just a year or two from the deserved rest of death, she’d been determined to come back here, where her real self had been formed, in early adulthood. The coming war had made her all the more fixed in her purpose; if they were really all as under threat as people said, if all cities and towns and ships and habs and institutions and everything else were regarded as allowable targets by the invaders, then she would face death where it might mean something, somehow. In this habitat, this hollow log of blown asteroidal rock, this rotating frame of reference, she would have come full circle, ready to cease existing back at the place that had made her who she was.

She had been many different things in her life, switched career half a dozen times, always finding new things to excite and interest her. She had had many lovers, two husbands, two children, all long since gone their own ways, and while coming here to die had made her feel a little selfish, she thought it would also be doing a favour to all those she loved or had loved. Who among them would really want to see her fade away?

They might say they’d want to be there at the end, but it wouldn’t be true, not really.

So she’d come here, to the old Happy Hab — not as happy, not as boisterous or as bohemian as it used to be, sadly — to die. Except she’d thought it would be alone, and peacefully, and in a year or two, not with everybody else in the place, violently, just a handful of months after she’d returned.

The Hierchon Ormilla was in exile on Nasqueron. The new top dog, this Archimandrite Luseferous guy, wanted the Hierchon to surrender. The Hierchon was refusing to cooperate. Archimandrite Luseferous didn’t want to antagonise the Dwellers so he couldn’t just attack or invade Nasqueron as well — amazingly, it seemed that the Dwellers, chaotic eccentrics and technological illiterates that they were supposed to be, were well able to defend themselves — so there was a stand-off. The Luseferous person couldn’t go in, and Ormilla wouldn’t come out.

Now the Archimandrite was threatening to destroy a city or a habitat every day until the Hierchon did surrender properly and gave himself up to the occupying forces. And if he didn’t give in after a couple of days, it would become a city or a habitat every hour.

There were rumours that Afynseise, a small coastal city in Poroforo, Sepekte, had been destroyed the day before, though with an information blackout covering the habitat for the past three days, it was impossible to be sure.

Hab 4409 had eighty thousand or so inhabitants, making it a relatively small space habitat. It was second on the list of hostage population centres, and the midnight deadline was now only minutes away. Still no word from Ormilla after a defiant communiqué earlier that afternoon. A Starveling warship had been stationed near the habitat for the past two days, since the Archimandrite’s ultimatum had been issued. Nothing and nobody had been allowed to leave — or approach — the hab in that time. A few craft had tried to leave, and been destroyed. No requests to evacuate children, the infirm or the collaborating civil authorities had been listened to. It had even been announced that anybody in a spacesuit or small craft who might survive the hab’s initial destruction would be targeted in the debris and destroyed.