There.

  Senses she could not have named registered the presence seconds before the white conning-tower broke through grey waves with a rush of foam. Water poured from the submarine’s upper hull, as a protuberance grew from the smartceramic shell.

  Within two minutes, the slender extrusion reached to form a gangplank from sub to jetty. Then a hatch sighed open on the hull, and a slender grey-haired man climbed into sight.

  He noticed Ro and nodded, then turned his attention to crossing the narrow walkway without falling into the cold waters. When he reached the jetty’s worn planks - they were almost silver with age - a relieved smile twisted his narrow face.

  They watched as the sub retracted its walkway and sank beneath the waves.

  Then they shook hands.

  ‘How do you do, Monsignor Grayling.’

  ‘You can call me Father’ - still holding her hand - ‘if you really must. But I’d rather you called me Ed.’

  ‘All right.’ Ro released her grip. ‘But I thought your name was Edwin.’

  ‘Only Ma called me that. And Mike, when he wanted to wind me up.’

  ‘Yeah. Gramps had a wicked sense of humour.’

  ‘And the best ikkyo I’ve ever seen, besides your mother’s. Have you followed the tradition?’

  ‘Kind of Ro shrugged. ‘There’s more to fighting than twisting wrists.’

  The monsignor looked as though he was going to protest, then reconsidered.

  Just as well.

  Jesuits were not known as God’s Soldiers because of fighting ability, though some were warriors. This one, if he had trained in aikido, no longer had the look of one who practised daily.

  Still, he was a friend of the family.

  ‘Come on.’ Ro tapped her infostrand to summon a taxi. ‘I’ll buy you dinner.’

  Soft rain began to slide downwards.

  ‘There’s a storm coming.’

  ‘Yes, there is.’ Ro gave a tiny smile.

  A real one.

  She knew the double meaning was intentional.

  And I intend my young Pilots to survive it.

  The aircab never came. Shrugging, they decided to walk instead of hunting through EveryWare for another service.

  ‘This used to be a go-ahead place,’ said Grayling. ‘Full of impatience and energy.’

  ‘Really? It reminds me a lot of Rome. Kind of friendly and sleepy, you know? Incompetent, but not malicious.’

  ‘Cities change. So do nations.’

  By now they were in a long dark street where steam rose from gratings as it had for four centuries: more from tradition than necessity.

  ‘Very atmospheric,’ said Ro.

  ‘Special effects.’ Grayling winked at her. ‘For the tourists.’

  They passed a row of brownstone houses, then came to a restaurant set below ground level whose entranceway shone with inviting holos. A giant disembodied hand pointed a commanding finger down the steps.

  Enticing aromas of pizza reminded Ro more than ever of the Italian Confederation.

  ‘What do you think, Ed?’

  ‘Suits me. I’m vegetarian, but this place should be fine.’

  As they descended, Ro caught sight of a tiny smartbat high overhead, recalled to its eyrie in the face of the gathering storm.

  Scanning us?

  Farther down the street, slow-morphing bioarchitecture buildings were smoothing out their curves and reinforcing their buttresses, ready for the gales and heavier rain to hit.

  ‘Buonasera.’ An obsequious waiter smiled as they passed through the door. ‘A table for-a two, is it, lady and gentleman?’

  ‘Ciao.’ Ro raised an eyebrow at the waiter’s laboured accent. ‘Mio amico è vegetariano.’ And, pointing at the holo menu nearby: ‘Scusi, cosa ci sarebbe per lui?’

  The man froze, his smile becoming a rictus of embarrassment.

  ‘I’m-a sorry,’ he said. ‘It is my wife who eez Italian. I just pick up-a the accent, see?’

  Grayling sighed.

  ‘The food smells wonderful. I’d love to eat here.’

  The waiter almost fell over in a relieved bow.

  ‘Yes, sir. This way, please.’

  Ro followed along, murmuring, ‘Very smooth, padre.’

  She hoped his compassion extended to some two thousand children with obsidian eyes who, according to some fundamentalists whose EveryWare forums were such a colourful delight, held Satan’s hot fire where human beings kept their souls.

  Three hours later, Ro was alone in her small hotel room, remembering the final sentences of her conversation with Monsignor Edwin Grayling, SJ, Ph.D.

  ‘There are superiors I must consult within the order. I will do anything I can.’

  ‘And the matter compilers?’

  ‘Livermore security is tight, but I have my privileges.’

  ‘But no promises.’

  ‘Exactly right. You do have my blessing.’

  Ro closed her eyes. She was putting her trust and hope in an ordained member of a faith in which she did not believe, all for the children’s sake.

  ‘So you think mu-space-born have souls, at least.’

  ‘Everyone’s a child of God, or we ‘re all in trouble.’

  Rousing herself, Ro tapped the infostrand wrapped bracelet-wise around her wrist, placed a realtime call to Sister Francis Xavier. It was 5 a.m. in Switzerland, but if the nun was not already up and about, Ro would be surprised.

  Nothing.

  There was no reply, not even a netAgent proxy to take a message.

  ‘Shit.’

  She tapped the strand again, told it to access the convent house AI. A pale orange holo of two hands spread, palms up, appeared above her strand. No go. The AI was blocked: offline from EveryWare, or crashed.

  Dirk and Kian would be asleep. No point in calling them.

  Shaking her head, she rose to her feet, took a turn around the small hotel room, then grabbed her coat and left.

  The holosign was a green-white-gold extravaganza denoting an ironic lack of originality: Paddy’s Bar. At least Ro hoped it was irony.

  Inside, the regulars were on stools at the counter, staring at the mag-hockey game in the HV above them. Ro took a table in a rear booth and used her infostrand to order coffee.

  ‘Be right with ya,’ called the barman.

  Ro raised a hand and nodded.

  Most of the booths were empty. The one Ro could see from her seat contained a middle-aged couple with expensive clothes and coiffed hair and bodies that looked slender but soft: style over substance.

  ‘Here y’are, doll.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Shall I leave ya a menu?’ He had a hardcopy folder in his hand.

  ‘I’m not hungry, but I’ll take a look.’

  There was a half-hearted cheer from the barstools. In the HV display, the arena’s crowd barriers were lowering and spectators were streaming onto the polished metal court.

  With a shiver, the image changed to a newsNet channel. There was a menu, with directional choice so that anyone who wanted could request a separate image with holo audio beamed at them.

  Ro took the International News section, then Central Europe, wondering how often those choices were made in Paddy’s Bar.

  ‘Hey!’ One of the beer drinkers waved a glass.

  ‘What’s that?’ said another.

  ‘Awright, boys. Just a glitch.’ The barman called to Ro: ‘Miss? The HV’s on the blink. There’s no private view-vectors. If you change channels, everybody sees the same ...’

  His voice trailed off as Ro launched to her feet.

  ‘Miss? Is everything—?’

  In the image, crowds were demonstrating on the Bahnhofstrasse, in peaceful Zurich where Christmas choirs had sung. Then the viewpoint shifted to a hospital ward, and the battered face of a bandaged boy maybe twelve years old lying half-conscious on a pillow.

  One of his eyes was partly open. Beneath the bruised lid, the eye glittered black.

  Jean-Pierre!

  His name was Jean-Pierre Delahante and he was one of the two hundred or so children at Dirk’s and Kian’s school. Ro blinked slowly, momentarily aware of the contact lenses she wore so casually.

  In the image, the boy’s skin held a greenish cast, and the eerie lighting lent his obsidian eye a reptilian look which bore no relation to the way he looked in life ... not in his normal healthy condition.

  Ignoring the barroom crowd, Ro used her infostrand to call the boys.

  ‘What the hell happened?’

  ‘Mom…We weren‘t sure you‘d be—’

  ‘—still up. He’s going to be OK.’

  It was her-ears-only audio, and the drawn but alert faces of both boys were lased directly into her eyes.

  ‘Willya lookit that?’ came the barman’s voice.

  Ro shook her head.

  ‘It’s young Annette,’ said Kian. ‘A friend of Jean-Pierre’s.’

  ‘From town.’ Dirk swallowed. ‘She’s got some skeletal deformity, a twisted spine they can’t cure. The other kids—’

  ‘—don’t leave her alone. And Jean-Pierre saw them bullying her.’

  Ro let out a breath.

  ‘How many of them?’

  ‘A dozen, or more. Bigger boys.’

  Kian’s voice deepened in half-controlled rage. ‘Made sure there was no-one else around to see.’

  ‘I’ll talk to you again in a few minutes.’

  Ro shut down the comms.

  ‘Devil spawn,’ the big-haired woman was saying in the other booth. ‘Don’t belong with human kids, I’ll tell ya that.’

  ‘I hear ya.’ Her husband scowled at the HV. ‘Should round ‘em up, and investigate whether they got mortal souls. And if they don’t—’

  ‘They don’t.’

  ‘Well, Mary-Ellen, you just could be right.’

  At the bar counter, the native NYers talked differently but the sentiment was the same.

  ‘—Riker’s Island, and lose the key.’

  ‘Dowse da doity little bastards wit’ gas, and light ‘em up.’

  Ro used her strand to transfer payment for the untouched coffee. Slipping from the booth, she passed the midwestern couple without a word and headed for the door.

  ‘Hey now, miss. Is there a problem at all?’

  Her aikido-trained mother had striven for the way of peace. But for Ro, blending with an enemy’s attack was just a way of getting close enough to reach their eyeballs.

  ‘If the coffee’s not warm enough, I can—’

  Golden sparks glimmered, half-visible through her grey contacts.

  ‘Devil spawn? Is that what you think?’

  Potential building.

  Now.

  There was a flat bang, and a cloud of dense, yellow-tinged grey smoke billowed from above the bar.

  ‘The HV set just—’

  Then Ro was on the street and the bar’s door was shut behind her.

  Stars were visible in the sky, even with Manhattan’s bright lights, and the air felt fresh after the storm. Sidewalks, washed clean, glistened with clear puddles.

  I’ll show you a storm, if that’s what you want.

  Her boots splashed through puddles as she walked.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  12

  NULAPEIRON AD 3423

  In the antechamber, servitors stood in ranks on the polished floor at solemn attention, in stone-cold silence. The doorshimmer leading to Corduven’s chamber sparkled at Tom’s approach but did not evaporate. He stood there, story crystal clenched in fist, hard enough to hurt.

  Corduven—

  Inside, his friend lay dying, not yet dead.

  Tom stared at nothing, seeing Corduven as he had been last night, sunken and emaciated. It was like Father: wasting away, becoming a wizened skeletal figure that wheezed and breathed fitfully, with those long quiet gaps that made you ask Was that the final one? and then the painful surprise of another indrawn, ragged breath ... until the last, and silence.

  For a long time Tom stood there, until frosty brilliance slid down the doorshimmer and Sylvana stepped through. She looked regal, incredibly beautiful, and for a moment Tom felt unworthy even to be in her presence. Her shining blue gaze fastened on him; then she gathered up her ivory robe and walked past him without a word.

  The priestess, in her purple death-cape, strode into the chamber. Tom followed her as far as the archway, then stopped, regarding the grey-white corpse-thing in the bed. The dead body was no longer Corduven, but a composite of minerals whose structure was already breaking down, a decaying organic sculpture that bore little relation to the man who had been Tom’s friend.

  Jay, too stunned to weep, knelt at the bedside, clasping Corduven’s dead hand. Behind Jay, Lady V’Delikona stood, straight and unbowed even in the presence of death.

  Tom remembered, as a new Palace servitor, walking into Corduven’s suite to pick up a faulty smartsatin garment, and the astounded joy on Corduven’s face when he revealed a tricon cast in white metal, a joke intended for Sylvana, and found that a common-born servitor like Tom understood the pun: an antinomy cast in antimony. They had laughed together, friends from the first.

  Why didn‘t I stay until the end?

  Was it because Jay deserved his private grief, or because Tom had been afraid to stay? There would never be another opportunity to talk to Corduven.

  ‘Tom?’ It was Lady V’Delikona. ‘Walk with me.’

  She leaned more heavily on his arm than he expected; a show of frailty and therefore of trust: she would never publicly reveal a weakness. They walked through ebon corridors in grieving silence, then came to a halt at the edge of the Great Courts.

  A low moaning passed through the Courts, and the hairs rose on Tom’s neck.

  ‘What... ?’

  ‘The Palace knows,’ said Lady V’Delikona.

  The moan grew stronger, began to ululate, as morphmarble walls vibrated to sing their wordless grief, to mourn the passing of Corduven d’Ovraison from the world.

  There was a guest apartment waiting for Tom, and a retinue of servitors ready to perform his bidding; but he waved them away, back to their dorms. Alone in luxury, he felt more poverty-stricken than he ever had as a child.

  I wasn‘t poor. I had the future, though I didn’t know it.

  There was a couch, a kind of chaise longue, and Tom eased himself back on it, lay down and stared at the ceiling, wondering what Elva was doing now. She had not known Corduven well, but she would be saddened by his death.

  Tom remembered a phrase his mother used, too tired to sleep, which had never made sense. Now, exhausted and enervated, he thought he might never sleep again ...

  Thinking that, Tom slipped into a dream. Yet it was a fitful thing, featuring a flensed figure writhing in a vivisection field on a distant hellworld. Soon, he snapped awake, breathing hard, his skin drenched with sweat that was already beginning to cool, greasy and unhealthy

  Tom rose from the couch, stripped down to his trews, and in the darkened lounge began to practise his phi2dao fighting forms, striving against unseen opponents, faster and faster as he whirled through kicks, stabbed fingertips into imaginary eyeballs, thrust and snapped and wrenched and threw and locked and strangled, fighting over and over against the deadliest enemy of all, the one that could never be defeated, only held back for a time: the relentless demons lurking in his mind.

  Then he stopped, exhausted and panting, and queried the house system for the time. He had been practising for two solid hours.

  Tom tugged off his trews, found a glob of cleangel in the bath chamber and slapped it against his bare chest. Then he walked back into the lounge while the cleansing gel spread across his body, exfoliating and disinfecting. He waved open a wardrobe, found a sleeping-robe. By the time he had taken hold of the robe, the gel had already finished its work and was sliding down his body to the floor. He stepped out of the puddle, and pulled on the light robe.

  The gel crawled back towards the bath chamber, while Tom found a refreshments cabinet and drank indigoberry-flavoured electrolyte replacement fluid straight from a flagon. Then he headed for the nearest bed - there were at least four bedchambers in the suite - and lay down.