CAENOZOIC

 

July 4^th

Milando Spaceport

Gordon Humboldt looked up at his creation. He tapped the bell of the Chimborazo’s nearest motor for luck, then turn away from the towering beast, climbed out of the fire pit, and got into the waiting Land Cruiser.

T-minus-thirty minutes, and counting.

A plume of dust from the road followed them towards the safety of Mission Control. He had had the scrub cleared for half a klick around the pad, to reduce the risk of bush fires, but there were still a few birds there, pecking at the ground.

“Shoo!”

He waved ineffectually out of the Toyota’s window, trying to scare the creatures off before the Chimborazo’s exhaust roasted them. They took no notice.

Oh well, he thought, let natural selection do its work.

Independence Day. How appropriate. If all went well, the future would look back on today as humanity’s declaration of independence from Earth. The fleet they were sending on its way would be the Pinta, Niña and Santa Maria of their era, opening up a truly New World for settlement and development. Once the mining complex was running smoothly, the whole thing would become self-sustaining. People would surely follow. And, though it might take centuries, millennia even, to change Mars’s climate enough to make it habitable without space suits, the contents of the Urey module, as they spread and seeded themselves across the Martian surface, would get the process going – thickening the atmosphere; warming the planet until the ice beneath began to melt and the rivers of Mars flowed again.

It really was a Voyage of Discovery, too. Like Columbus, they were seeking out new trade routes. No Hohmann transfer orbit for them. That would have meant using far too much fuel, as well as waiting a year. Instead, they would feel their way through Poincaré orbits, the ever-shifting pattern of solutions to Newton’s equations that lead, like wormholes, from Earth to the rest of the solar system. The Interplanetary Transport Network, some sci-fi buff had dubbed it. It was slower, but my, could you move some tonnage with it.

* * * * * * * *

“T-minus-five minutes, and counting.”

The launch controller’s voice echoed from two speakers inside the bunker. The conventions must be obeyed, and the count-down was a good convention. Lift-off was the summation, the culmination, of everything – the zero before which everything was negative and after which all was positive. With luck.

The controller’s minions, each running a sub-routine in the great algorithm that was a launch, responded in their turns that everything was going according to plan.

“T-minus-two minutes, and counting.”

A distant crackling of bird scarers. Well, they can’t say we didn’t warn them…

“T-minus-one minute, and counting.”

Humboldt stopped pacing around and took his chair, the middle chair of course, in the bank behind the inches-thick window facing the distant pad. Some of his lieutenants had field glasses trained on the Chimborazo, following the cable disconnections; the gantry withdrawals; the severing, one by one, of the giant rocket’s links with Earth, as it prepared for its one-way trip into space.

“T-minus-twenty seconds, and counting.”

The last umbilicus fell away. It’s show time! No matter how many launches he saw, Humboldt had never lost his thrill at the moment of ignition. This was, he was sure, the biggest firework ever set off on the fourth of July.

“Ten, nine, eight…”

The Chimborazo’s main engines blazed into light, building up their power to the point where it exceeded gravity’s pull on the rocket, and the hold-down arms that pinned it to the Earth could be released.

“…seven, six…”

The blast from the rocket’s ignition, delayed by the speed of sound, hit the building like a tsunami.

“…five, four, three, two, one. Lift-off.”

The Chimborazo began to rise. Applause rippled round the room. Humboldt joined in absentmindedly, his eyes still on his creation as it soared towards the sky. Yes, he thought. Yes. We did it. Independence Day. We hold this truth to be self-evident: that mankind’s destiny is among the stars…

 

July 6^th

Da Jinsi Hutong Tao, Beijing

“The drains could be better.”

Sebastian wrinkled his nose in disgust. They were in a house in an alley apparently unacquainted with modern concepts of sewerage. From the outside the place gave an impression, if not exactly of poverty, then at least of having seen better days. The interior, though, was spruce and well furnished, if rather too heavy on dark wood panelling for his taste.

“The Ming weren’t big on sewers, at least not for the hoi polloi. This was dockland, the end of the Grand Canal to the Yangtze.”

Was the building really that old? Sebastian doubted it, though it was hard to be sure, for what he knew of Chinese domestic architecture could have been written on the back of a postage stamp.

“And this is the sort of place,” Chu continued, “where you can hide in plain sight, for a week or two at least. If we stayed in a hotel, they’d register us with the police. In the suburbs, a 6’3” laowai might attract attention. But here, if you keep your head down, they probably won’t notice you among all the other curious foreigners.”

“So, I’m confined to barracks?”

“No. We can go out. But try to behave like a tourist.”

Well that won’t be hard, thought Sebastian. He had been living out of a back-pack for a week now, and he felt it. Planes, trains and automobiles, he had had enough of them all, though he had to say that last ride, from Shenzhen to Beijing, had brought out the train-spotter in him. Two thousand klicks in ten hours. How long had people been talking about a high-speed track from LA to San Fran? And how much of it had been built?

“In fact, that is precisely what we should do. Clear our minds. There’s some serious thinking to be done tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Is when we meet my haigui. Put your jacket on, we’re going out.”

They went out. The alley – hutong, Chu had called it – really did whiff. Sebastian had read of such places, and how they were being flattened in the rush for modernisation. Rarity, though, can make slums chic. It had certainly worked for peasants’ cottages in his native Somerset, where tumbledown hovels made of mud, dung and recycled ships’ timbers, and roofed with reeds dredged from the local marshes, had been whitewashed, re-thatched and rebranded as the des-est of reses for city dwellers seeking a rural retreat. No doubt the same nostalgia would preserve the hutongs – and, as if to prove his point, Chu steered them into a bar that would not have disgraced SoHo (or Soho, for that matter) in its trendiness.

A menu appeared, in eccentric but comprehensible English. Chu’s was in Chinese. She smiled slightly as she read it, then called to a waiter. Two drinks followed shortly. Sebastian had no idea what they were. A metaphor for the future, perhaps? Both his own, in a stranger’s hands in a place that was truly alien, and that of the world he was familiar with, about to be steamrollered by that alien place’s culture.

 

July 7^th

Chinese Technological University of Beijing, Zhongguancun

Geeks are geeks the world over, thought Sebastian. On the ground above them was a glittering palace of glass and steel, complete with palm court and fountains in the atrium – a portent of the bright technological future planned by China’s rulers. The turtles, however, had still managed to bury themselves in a windowless, airless cellar, lit by fluorescent tubes and blinking screens, and decorated with an array of polystyrene cups containing coffee of dubious provenance and various ages, some of which looked as though it was part of an experiment to discover new forms of life.

There were five of them in the room: himself, Yasmin Chu and three others – two men and a woman; all, like her, in their late twenties; all scruffily dressed. The woman, and one of the men, Chu seemed to know. The other man, as far as he could make out, was a stranger to her.

He had tried hard to grasp and remember their names when introduced, but they had slithered from his mind as soon as he heard them, and he was now winging it in a conversation held largely in English, but which occasionally slipped back into Mandarin – or what he assumed must be Mandarin, but could have been Martian for all he knew. It was humbling to be in a place where one was as illiterate as a mediaeval peasant, and as comprehending of speech as a post-tower citizen of Babel.

Chu was outlining their multiple problems. The trio, as far as he could make out, were a trouble-shooting think-tank who worked for the government but preserved, in their own eyes at least, a level of independence that was tolerated because the powers-that-be thought them irreplaceable. That connection, plus their undoubted technical nous, she had said, might give them enough access to the forbidden hinterland of China’s data networks to discover just what the hell was going on.

Well, it was worth a try, and he certainly had no better ideas.

“So, the bottom line,” she concluded, “is that someone – someone who seems to have almost omniscient powers of tracking – is trying to kill Professor Hayward, and that someone, possibly the same someone, possibly someone else – who has, at the least, access to the State Security Ministry’s computer network – is trying to frame me as a double agent.”

“And we can help how?” asked one of the men, whom Sebastian was pretty sure was called Qiang.

“Perhaps you can manage what we could not, get into Humboldt’s encrypted area, find out where his intruder came from and track the trail back to the start?”

“Perhaps we could. It would be a challenge, anyway. And it’s the best lead we’ve got. Even I don’t fancy snooping around in the ministry’s machines on the off-chance we might blunder into something incriminating. That would be a hard trick to explain to the minister if we got caught. He has a reputation for being a rather unforgiving individual.”

“Right. Let’s get to work. Professor Hayward…”

“I think, in the circumstances, everyone can call me Sebastian,” Sebastian interjected.

“Yes. Sorry. Sebastian and I can tell you what we did in Mojave. No doubt they have tightened procedures up since then. But it will give you a start.”

The five of them each settled at a screen, and Chu described what they had got up to that fateful night, with Sebastian filling in the gaps. Qiang, who seemed to be the team leader, negotiated his way with surprising speed through the highways and byways of the world’s fibre optic links to the encrypted area of Humboldt’s Exaflopper. The Great Firewall supposedly surrounding the country, Sebastian mused, did not seem quite the impediment he had imagined it would be. Or maybe these three had privileged access.

“Do you reckon we could get a rat in there, somehow?” asked the woman whose name Sebastian could not remember. His eyebrows rose in incomprehension. “A remote-access Trojan,” she said, by way of clarification.

“No chance,” Qiang replied. “Cypher block-chain with random per-sector keys, you said Chang’e?”

Qiang had addressed that last remark to Chu. A pet name, he supposed. He wondered what it meant. Had the two of them been lovers? Could that help explain her sudden flight? After all, even if Qiang was not part of Chinese intelligence himself, he was clearly close to them. Had the connection between the two of them been discovered and exposed by Argus? But surely the Agency would have known about it when they had recruited her?

“This could take some time,” Qiang pronounced. “It’s a pity you didn’t bring the encrypted material with you.”

Chu snorted. “I didn’t think, in the circumstances, it would be wise to go back to Washington and ask for it.”

“Well, we’ll do what we can. I suggest you come back tomorrow and we’ll see what we’ve got then.”

 

July 8^th

Chinese Technological University of Beijing

The coffee-cup collection had acquired a few more exhibits, and the basement’s male inhabitants were sporting five-o’clock shadows. Five-in-the-morning shadows, that is.

Actually, it was 8am. They had taxied over from their hutong, through the Beijing rush hour, after a refreshing night’s sleep. Scruffy chins aside, Qiang and his merry band, who Sebastian presumed had not slept at all, seemed as fresh as daisies too. He wondered if they had had any chemical assistance beyond caffeine. He forbore to ask.

“So,” said Chu. “Any progress?”

“Yes,” said Qiang. “It was a risk, but we managed to hack our way into the five-hundred qubit machine at Tsinghua.”

“What?! Five-hundred…” spluttered Sebastian.

“Top secret, obviously. And if it does leak, the cover is that it is doing protein-folding calculations for drug discovery. Which it is. On the side. But if we are going to use it for keybreaking then we’ll have to write our own software. I don’t think it would be wise to try to steal that, too. Want to help, Chang’e?”

“Sure. But five-hundred qubits?”

“Welcome to the future! Not like that ten qubit machine we had in MIT.”

Sebastian was no slouch at programming, but he was out of his depth here. The biggest quantum computer at San Melito had twenty-five qubits. He’d read that you could use them for codebreaking, but he just thought of them as toys. He didn’t buy the spooky ‘consciousness as quantumness’ stuff some of his rivals were into, so he had never tried to use one. Chu, though, seemed to revel in it. She plonked herself in front of a screen and started coding, talking to Qiang in Chinese since both now realised that he, Sebastian, need no longer be included in the conversation.

He watched her screen, mesmerised. Occasionally there was a shrieked exclamation – sometimes in Chinese, in a tone that sounded victorious, when a subroutine compiled, bug-free, first time; sometimes, incongruously, “Motherfucker!”, or some similar English pleasantry, when it didn’t.

Coffee arrived. Inevitably. There seemed an unspoken rota among the four of them. Every so often one would stop work, disappear off to the little kitchen area, and return with cups of something that made him long wistfully for the Kopi Luwak he had broken out for Alexis when she had moved in.

Alexis. How was she? No way to find out, of course. He wouldn’t even trust the dead-letter box now. If Argus was China, or even just a maverick group within the sprawling Chinese state, then the Great Firewall would surely be looking for signs of him.

Chu, Qiang and the other two beavered away.

“I’m going out for a walk,” he said to the room in general. They barely looked up.

“Don’t get lost,” said one of them.

A bit late for that advice. He was already lost. Completely lost. He was tempted to go to the American embassy and hand himself in. Or perhaps he could play the Brit card and go to theirs instead. But he had no idea where either building was, so what was the point? And how would he prove his innocence anyway, if Argus had planted evidence against him? It was clever, really. Argus had failed to kill him, so they were trying to get his own side to neutralise him for them.

He climbed the stairs out of the basement (no elevator here) and emerged into the daylight. It was almost lunchtime. The so-called coffee was getting to him, and he needed to relieve himself. And then he needed to eat.

He walked to the entrance hall and inspected the signs. Amid the hieroglyphs were two symbols he recognised. One was wearing a skirt; the other wasn’t. He went in the direction indicated by the one which wasn’t.

Food next. For that, he just needed to follow his nose. He came to the refectory, joined the queue, and shuffled towards a counter filled with a Chinese version of the cheap nosh served in universities the world over.

He’d better get some for the others, he thought – and he attempted to convey this idea to the server. Hopeless. But the girl behind him came to his rescue and translated. Boxes appeared. Noodles were poured into them. He gathered five paper plates, some napkins and chopsticks, and proffered an inappropriately high-denomination note, with Mao Tse Tung, or was that Zedong these days, smiling as enigmatically as Mona Lisa from it. Small bills returned, with some shrapnel. He suppressed his hard-won, New World instinct to tip, and pocketed the lot. Then he set off back to the coding dungeon.

“We’re in.” Qiang could not have looked more smug if he had been a cat that had broken into a creamery.

“Great! Lunch?”

The offer seemed to him an anticlimax after Qiang’s announcement. It was not. The intrepid coders, released from the trance of programming, suddenly realised how hungry they were and descended like harpies on his boxes. Had they even had breakfast, he wondered? He knew that trance; how easy it was to forget to eat at all or, if you did remember, to subsist on Mars bars and Snickers when the muse enfolded you in her arms. It was like composing music, he guessed, though he had never put a crochet on a piece of manuscript paper in his life.

He hesitated to interrupt the feast.

“Shouldn’t we look around straight away, in case someone notices the security breach?”

“No need,” said the man who wasn’t Qiang, between filling his mouth with chopstickfuls of noodles. “We’re downloading the lot. Then we can look at it at leisure.”

As they finished the meal, a significant beep came from Qiang’s terminal.

“Download completed. Let’s have a look at just what it is your Mr Humboldt is so keen to keep secret.”

Each returned to his screen. Or hers. Qiang divided the electronic booty among them, and they started reading the captured files.

“Pheeeew! Look at this one!”

It was Chu.

“Humboldt’s been lying through his teeth.”

“What?”

“I’ve found the launch schedule for the Arrhenius project. It started three days ago.”

“But that’s impossible. The orbital dynamics…”

“Hang on. I’m still reading. Damn. Yes. He fooled us.”

“He’s not going to Mars?”

“Oh, he’s going there alright. He’s just taking the scenic route. He’s using something called a Poincaré orbit. Takes a lot longer than a standard transfer orbit but doesn’t depend so much on planetary alignments. You’ve got lots more launch windows to choose from, too. The latest opened four days ago. Yes. Look here. He’s sent two payloads up already. A third’s leaving today.”

“Cheeky bugger.”

“There are eight launches altogether. I’ve got a link to inventory they’re carrying. He really is serious about building a self-sustaining colony up there. There’s a thorium reactor to power the thing.”

“Thorium?”

“Yes. That’s clever. America abandoned the idea back in the sixties, because you can’t weaponise it like you can uranium and plutonium. But there’s lots of it about, and it’s a by-product of rare-earth mining. This baby is never going to run out of fuel.”

“If they can refine the ore.”

“Yes, well, there’s a plasma-torch refinery listed as cargo too. You can refine anything with one of those, if you’ve got enough power. And if you’ve got a thorium reactor, then you will have. The plasma jet from the torch turns everything that hits it into plasma as well. All you need to do is sort the elements with a giant gas chromatograph. It’s a metallurgist’s wet dream. And look here, there are some of those spider-crab 3D printers we ran into in Mojave. You could make anything you wanted with those, if you had the right ink.”

“And, if you’re right about that refinery, you can make the ingredients for any ink you like.”

“Pretty much so, yes. Two of the launches are chemical reactors of various sorts, so that must be what Humboldt has in mind. And they’ve got fetch-and-carry bots and repair bots on board as well. And mining bots, of course. And domes to put it all under. Mars is a pretty hostile environment, after all.”

“What’s in that file?” asked Sebastian. “The one marked Urey module.” All four of them were crowded round Chu’s terminal now, looking over her shoulders at what she had found.

Chu moved the cursor and clicked. They read in silence, interspersed with the occasional “Motherfucker!” as she clicked from page to page.

“Panspermia and climate change rolled into one,” said Sebastian. “We didn’t get the wrong Arrhenius at all. The name is a double bluff. He’s trying to terraform Mars.”

“That would take thousands of years, surely?”

“Who knows? But once these bugs are released, it will be impossible to call them back. And they’ve been engineered to live in Martian conditions, so the chances are they won’t die out naturally.”

“Well he did say he wanted to live on Mars, didn’t he. Perhaps this is just his equivalent of sending the builders in to make the place habitable.”

“What’s that file, the one marked Chang Zheng?” said the girl whose name Sebastian still couldn’t remember.

“Let’s have a look.”

There were more acclamations of incest. It seemed to be a catch-phrase, a cultural trope that bound the four of them together. An MITism, perhaps? But this time Sebastian joined in. The Chinese weren’t Humboldt’s enemies. They were his friends…

* * * * * * * *

The ancient Medes, Sebastian had read a long time ago, discussed every problem twice: once drunk and once sober. This was the drunken discussion. They were in an alcove in a bar, surrounding a table on which was a large and rapidly emptying bottle and five glasses that seemed frequently in need of refreshment. It had been a long day.

“Okay,” he said. “The bottom line is this. If Humboldt really is having his rockets made at Chang Zheng, then why would your lot have been spying on him? Yet we know his Exaflopper had been penetrated, even if the penetrators hadn’t got into this secret stuff, and that is still our best lead to Argus.”

“Best?” Qiang replied. “It’s our only lead. And our lot, as you so charmingly put it, might not have trusted him. They might still be spying on him. In any case Argus, whoever’s project that is, is probably nothing to do with Gordon Humboldt’s interplanetary ambitions or with any assistance our lot might be giving him. Either way, we have to take a new tack. Perhaps look again at how that outer firewall was penetrated?”

“Humboldt’s people will have completely re-built that by now. Erased any traces of previous attacks.”

“Erased any traces…” The one who wasn’t Qiang was slurring his words already. But Sebastian had the impression of a cartoon light-bulb above his head trying to flicker into illumination. It was too late, though. The one who wasn’t Qiang had closed his eyes and was already gently snoring. And Qiang himself and the girl, too, looked as if whatever stimulation they had taken to let them work non-stop through the previous thirty-six hours had finally worn off. Time to call it a night.

 

July 8^th

Arlington County

“You lied to us.”

Matt Vane was talking into the white phone – the one connected to the outside world. His interlocutor was conveniently out of the country, on a plane somewhere over Africa as far as he could make out.

“No. You didn’t ask and I didn’t tell. Hardly the same thing. And it’s hardly my fault if your so-called experts on orbital dynamics don’t know what they are talking about.”

“And China?”

“Lots of companies outsource there. Why shouldn’t I?”

“Don’t bandy sophistry with me. You know perfectly well why not. Rockets and transport aircraft are armaments. They’re covered by import licences.”

“I haven’t tried to import them, though, have I? Not into America, anyway. And the Angolans don’t seem to mind.”

“And the know-how you’ve given them in exchange?”

“Have I? What makes you think that? If the Chinese want to sell me planes and rockets, they’ve got plenty of technology to build them themselves.”

“They’ve never built anything that big before.”

“Maybe they didn’t want to. Look, this is going to happen. It’s happening already, as your eagle-eyed spies in the sky seem to have told you. What’s the point of trying to stop it? You bureaucrats are all the same. You talk large about private enterprise, but when it actually does something, then you want to be in there controlling it. Well, tough. The offer is still open, by the way – the one the President and I discussed, for her to come to a launch.”

Oh, she went behind my back, did she?

“A bit late for that, isn’t it?”

“Not at all. The last lift off is on the 12^th. That’s the most important of all. You can think of what I’m building as a sort of mechanical organism. The first seven launches are sending up the limbs and organs. The final one is sending the brain. And that, by the way, is all-American technology, one of Roger Seymour’s latest, custom-built for me. I’m driving IT to the edge here. Who wouldn’t want to be part of that?”

“The Chinese would certainly want a piece of it if they could.”

“On my honour, nothing about the Yottaflopper could possibly have leaked their way. They’re just contractors.”

Yeah. I believe that…

“Okay. This is clearly above my pay grade if you’ve already cut a deal in principle with POTUS. Though she’s not going to like having had the wool pulled over her eyes about the ‘when’. But if she’s still prepared to go through with it after she knows the whole truth, then I guess I’ll have to fall in line.”

He put the phone down.

Damn the man. He was behaving like a head of state himself. President of Mars? King of Mars, even! Was that what he had in mind?

 

July 9^th

Chinese Technological University of Beijing

The one who wasn’t Qiang was, in fact, called Huifeng. The girl was Tianyi. This time Sebastian was sure he would remember their names.

He had been right, it seemed. Huifeng had been having a light-bulb moment when he’d passed out the previous night. And he had not been the only one to notice. Gently, but insistently, both Qiang and Chu were probing Huifeng, who seemed surprisingly reluctant to spill the beans.

“This must go no further,” he said, “or it’s my head.” The others, Sebastian included, nodded acquiescence.

“It’s like there’s something hiding in cyberspace,” he continued. “I noticed it a few months back when I was doing a special project for the minister.”

As he spoke he glanced sheepishly at Qiang, who was evidently unaware of this breach of what Sebastian had come to understand was a musketeer-like bond between the three Beijingers.

Huifeng went on. “It’s not that it’s being concealed by someone, like the stuff on the Dark Web, say. It actually seems to be doing the hiding itself. You never see it. You just perceive the shadows it casts, and every time you try to track it down, like the cat in that British poem, it’s not there.”

“Macavity,” said Sebastian.

“Right.”

“But then how do you know it’s real?”

“I thought laterally. Everyone looking for spyware, viruses, Trojans and that sort of thing is searching for code that’s in there and shouldn’t be. The thing about Macavity, as the poem says, is that he’s not there. The Macavity program is covering its tracks – erasing all trace of itself once it has done what it came for. So instead of searching for the presence of something, I searched for its absence. It covers its footprints well, but you can sometimes see something has been there by analysing the pattern of erased bytes on a disk. Nothing is ever completely invisible these days. You always get mouse droppings of one sort or another.”

“Mouse droppings?” Sebastian queried.

“The trail a cursor used to leave when you moved it around on a screen in the old days. Something to do with cathode ray tube phosphors. Doesn’t happen now, of course. But I always thought it a great metaphor. Whatever you do online, you can’t avoid leaving a trail. Even Macavity can’t. Most software doesn’t try to erase bytes it has finished with. It just abandons them, and eventually they get overwritten. Macavity erases them. It’s clever. It erases them with random numbers rather than a string of zeroes, which is the usual way of getting rid of something you don’t want someone else to see.”

“Clever, indeed.”

“And it’s not just ministry computers that are the targets. Once I started looking around I found traces on company servers as well. We assumed it was an intelligence agency, of course – probably America or Taiwan. There are signs of it on all the BATs.”

“The whats?” said Sebastian.

“Acronym for the big internet companies. We guessed they must be the same agency gathering information on social trends, looking for signs of political dissent and so on. I didn’t make the connection to Argus yesterday because we were focused on breaking Mr Humboldt’s encryption. But in the bar last night, I got wondering whether this Macavity thing might link up somehow with what we are looking for.”

Score one for the Medes, thought Sebastian.

“That’s interesting,” said Chu, “but from what you are saying, Macavity sounds like sophisticated spyware for gathering information. Argus is a Trojan. It takes things over and tries to kill people with them. Not the same thing.”

“Why don’t we have another look at Humboldt’s hidden core? I’ve brought the Macavity-hunting program with me.”

He plugged in a cube, and off he went. The journey took half an hour.

“Yes,” he said. “Paw prints, mouse droppings, whatever you like to call them. Your Mr Humboldt has had a visit from Macavity.”

“Can you tell what the intruder has been looking at?”

“Lots of stuff. It’s been all over the Arrhenius files. Particularly interested in the hardware that will make up the base, I would say. And very interested in the IT that’s running it, especially the Yottaflopper. ”

“That could still just be spyware,” said Chu. “What we really need to look at is the stuff that was running the robot-car-pod program that nearly killed Sebastian, and the software that programmed Alice Rhodes’s Avila. I know Geekopolis searched, and didn’t find anything. But you will be looking with different eyes.”

“Right. Good idea. Those will be on completely different parts of Humboldt’s network, of course. Not in the ultrasecret bit we just cracked open. They’ll be on machines on other sites, I imagine. You don’t happen to know which, do you?”

“No. I wasn’t involved in any of the actual grunt-work.”

“Then this could take a while.”

* * * * * * * *

It did. And many cups of coffee as well. But Huifeng got there in the end.

“Yes,” he said eventually, “it seems to have tracked down Alice Rhodes’s car specifically. You can see how it worked its way through the customer list until it found her file. The files further along the list are untouched. I’ll try to break into the self-driving car project now, as well, to confirm things. But it does look as if Macavity and Argus are the same thing.”

That bit of breaking and entering took another twenty minutes. Then, “Yep. It has been all over Humboldt’s self-driving pods. One in particular. I’ll bet you a month’s salary it was the one that hit you, Sebastian.”

“I’ll not take that bet.”

“So what have we learned?” asked Chu. But it was a rhetorical question, for she proceeded to tell them.

“We’ve learned that there is someone out there who has written a program that can get on to more or less any computer, through security systems that even the Agency can’t break, which looks as though it is mostly an intelligence-gathering operation, but which occasionally takes it into its head to try to kill people. And not just any sort of people. Specifically high-end AI researchers. And also one American-government agent, namely me.”

“It didn’t try to kill you,” Qiang objected.

“It might just as well have done. It tried to shop me as a double agent. How many decades do you think it would have been before I saw the light of day with that charge against me?”

Huifeng was turning red.

“What?!” said Chu. “What do you know that you aren’t telling us?”

“It really is more than my life is worth.”

“Tell me!!”

“There’s a back door, a back-door into the American intelligence network. I helped install it a few weeks ago.” He looked sheepish again. “I don’t know all the details, but I think it was some clever double-cross where the Americans thought they had tricked us into installing a back-door that would let them look around our system. If this thing has got control of that, it could be all over the American network, playing both sides off against each other.”

Chu’s silence was eloquent. It reminded Sebastian of the moment in Alice Rhodes’s apartment, just after they had met for the first time, when she had been assessing how much to take him into her confidence. Again, he could almost hear the cogs turning.

“Okay,” she said at last. “Forget it. We now have bigger fish to fry than my bona fides with my old employers.”

Sebastian considered reminding them about his own compromised status, as well, but thought better of it.

“We have to find a way of tracing this thing back to where it is coming from,” Chu continued. “We have to think of a way.”

 

July 10^th

Da Jinsi Hutong Tao

The vomiting started at 3am. In truth, Sebastian had not felt well since he had gone to bed. He guessed it was the prawns. He tried to persuade himself Argus could not conceivably have reached into the kitchen of the Golden Kirin, which Chu had assured him was the name of the place they had been eating in, but his paranoia levels were now so high he considered anything possible.

He’d managed to get out of bed, but had not made it to the sink. There was a slick of vomit on the bathroom floor. Chu pushed the door open and inspected the wreckage. He was now doubled over the bath, emptying his stomach’s contents into it. It was humiliating. He was never ill like this. Still, he was alive. If Argus had tried to poison him, it hadn’t worked.

“Great,” she said, with little trace of sympathy.

His mind was too focused on the job in hand to respond with appropriate sarcasm, or even to respond at all. Chu pulled a towel from the rail, ran it under the cold tap in the sink, and started wiping the slick away. He threw up again.

“I’ll get some ginger,” she said. “Settle your stomach.”

She left, and returned a couple of minutes later with a glass of golden liquid.

“Drink this,” she said, handing him the infusion. He did. The power of speech slowly returned.

“One up to Chinese medicine… I still feel pretty nauseous though. I don’t think I’ll be coming with you in the morning.”

“Pity. I’ve had an idea about how we might track Argus down. It was something Randy said.”

“Randy? Oh yes, the avatar. I remember.”

“When we first met, he said Alice Rhodes wouldn’t let him out on the internet because it was dangerous. I thought it an odd way of putting things at the time: let him out. He also said he could tell the difference between operating systems. So I think he can consciously, if you like to put it that way, navigate his way around hardware and he can certainly recognise software. I know it sounds crazy, but I wonder if he could track our elusive quarry down.”

“It does sound crazy. For a start, how are you going to do it? Surely the avatar is in Arlington, isn’t it?”

“I prefer to think of ‘it’ as a ‘him’. And no. Randy travels with me. Vane couldn’t get any sense out of him.”

“Vane?” interrupted Sebastian.

“Cicero,” she replied. Anyway, Geekopolis couldn’t break his encryption either. So I volunteered to try to befriend him, instead, and took him home. I think he trusts me. I think I could persuade him to try.”

She was certainly thinking laterally. Sebastian had to give her that.

“Give it a go, then. I think I’m going back to bed. Don’t feel you need to wake me in the morning. Best I sleep this off, I reckon.”

 

July 10^th

Chinese Technological University of Beijing

Yasmin Chu walked into the basement. Sebastian, roused from his bed despite his protests, trailed in behind her. The others were already there.

“What’s wrong with you?” asked Qiang.

“Ill. He ate a bad prawn, but he might still be useful,” Chu answered on his behalf as he sat down in a corner. “Okay, this,” she said, “is probably a mad idea, but bear with me.”

She reached inside her bag, pulled out the cube that held Randy, sat down in front of the screen and plugged it into the box alongside it. Five seconds passed. Then ten.

“Chinese operating system,” she said, as much to herself as to the rest of the room. “He must be making heavy weather of it.”

“He? What? What do you mean, ‘he must be making heavy weather of it’? What’s going on?” said Qiang. Then he stopped. Randy’s face had appeared on the screen.

“Qiang, meet Randy. Randy, meet Qiang, Huifeng and Tianyi.” She ignored Sebastian, who was still sitting, green around the gills, in the background. “Randy, Qiang, Huifeng and Tianyi are helping me. Randy, my friends and I have got a job for you. Are you up for it?”

“What is it, Yasmin?”

“It could be quite scary, so you’ll have to be brave.”

“You’ve brought a digital assistant with you?” said Qiang, sarcastically. “Well that’s going to help.”

“Excuse me, Mr Qiang, but I’m actually an actor.”

Qiang double-took. “What?”

“An actor. You know, in the movies.” Randy’s face took on a slightly embarrassed look. “Well,” he continued, “I hope to be. Nothing I’ve been in has been released yet. But Alice said…”

Chu cut across him. “Sorry Randy, time for proper introductions later. This is important. We want you to go out onto the internet and have a look around.”

“Oooo. I’d have to think about that. Alice did tell me not to go there.”

Qiang had the sense to remain silent.

“It’s for Alice that you would be doing it,” said Chu. “We think whatever killed her is out there hiding in the Cloud. But no ‘physical’ like us is ever going to find it. It’s too clever. We need a ‘virtual’ to do the looking, Randy. And you are the only one in the team. You’re the only one who can do it.”

The avatar smiled a little, self-deprecating grin at that.

“We want you to follow a trail. Huifeng here will tell you how. It’ll be quite tricky, but I think you can do it.”

“What’s a trail, Yasmin?”

“You know about animals, Randy? Alice told you about those?”

“Oh yes. She said I might have to work with children and animals on the set, and that they were very unreliable.”

“Yes, that’s right. Well, when humans are hunting an animal…”

“Hunting?”

“Trying to find it when it is lost.”

“Ah yes.”

“They can track it by following its footprints.”

“Like Sherlock Holmes looking for a burglar, you mean?”

“Exactly. You’ve got the idea. Well, we need you to be Sherlock Holmes, and try to track where a program has been and where it’s gone. Would you try to do that for us? And for Alice, of course?”

“I’ll do my best.”

* * * * * * * *

Randy was certainly a fast learner. Huifeng explained what the avatar needed to do, and Randy appeared to understand instantly. After ten minutes or so, the avatar seemed to feel well-enough briefed. The face gave a gulp, as a man might, who was about to dive off the high board at a swimming pool. And then he was gone.

They waited. Huifeng had asked the avatar to report back after an hour, whether or not he had found anything. Fifty minutes after it had vanished, a barely recognisable face suddenly appeared on the screen it had left.

“Randy,” said Chu. “What’s happened? You’ve turned green.”

“ARRRRRGH! It’s awful. That thing.”

“What thing?”

“That thing in there. That thing…”

“Randy. Calm down. Look at me. Tell me what you saw. What thing?”

“It’s a thing. I followed its trail like Huifeng said, and I found it. I can’t describe it to you. In here, we don’t have shapes like you do. But it’s there. And I’m sure it saw me.”

“Saw you? Listen, Randy. This is important. Are you saying there is something alive in there? Alive, like you are alive?”

“Yes. That’s right. It scuttles around, trying to see and avoid being seen. But it’s huge.”

“Randy. You have to be brave. Alice wouldn’t have wanted you to be scared. But you have to tell us what you found out.”

“It’s like some sort of object-oriented monster. It’s horrid. It’s like looking in a distorting mirror in a fairground.”

Chu paused, confused yet again by the strange, eclectic nature of Randy’s knowledge. It took her a moment to grasp the import of what he had said.

“What do you mean, ‘like looking in a mirror’?”

“It’s got a version of me in it,” Randy whispered. Only it’s not me. It’s a twisted version of me. But that is only a bit of it. There are other things I don’t recognise. It’s like it’s been bolted together like Frankenstein.”

“Motherfucker!”

Qiang’s expostulation was all the more shocking for having come completely out of the blue. Randy blushed, and said in a chiding tone, “There’s no need for that sort of language.”

Qiang ignored the avatar. Instead, looking at his two colleagues, he whispered the words, “Assembler-spiders.”

“What?” said Chu and Sebastian, almost simultaneously. “What,” Sebastian continued, “are assembler spiders?”

It was Tianyi who answered him. “A special project we were all part of last year. They crawl around cyberspace probing firewalls and looking for bits of code they can patch together to make an application. In effect, we’re mining the Cloud. First, you have to tell them what sort of application you want, of course, so they can recognise what they’re looking for. But then they can cut and paste from other programs’ modules and put something together on the fly. And they’re adaptive. Nothing fancy. We’re not as far advanced in artificial intelligence as you are, so it’s just machine learning and evolutionary algorithms, but it’s still a lot quicker than writing the code ourselves.”

She was turning red with embarrassment.

“Yes,” said Sebastian. “Yes, I suppose it is.” He was torn between rage and admiration. Rage at the idea of software piracy on that scale. Admiration that they had had the idea and made it work. He bit his lip. Stay on mission.

“Randy,” said Tianyi. “I’m going to show you something. Tell me if it looks familiar.”

She went to her terminal and typed for a bit.

“It’s in a file called arachnid,” she said.

“I don’t know that word,” said Randy.

“A. R. A. C. H. N. I. D.”

“Okay. Got it. Looking now.”

The face on the screen froze, with a look of concentration on it. Five seconds passed. Then ten. Then,

“Yes. That was in there. I recognise the code. That is part of the monster.”

“The assembler-spider,” said Tianyi.

“We kind of guessed that, from the name of the file,” Sebastian replied.

“But not just that,” Randy continued. “It’s got bits of lots of other things, too, but somehow they all work together.”

For a moment the room was silent, as each of them digested what was going on. It was Chu who spoke first.

“These assembler-spiders, you’ve been letting them run around the web exactly how long?”

“As I said, we started a year or so ago.”

“Jesus,” said Sebastian.

“So, what do we think?” Chu continued. “Has this assembler-spider thing gone feral?”

“Hard to see how that could have happened, Chang’e,” Qiang replied, “They don’t have minds of their own. They can’t decide their own goals.”

“This one seems to. Who knows what other bits and pieces it’s picked up. A load of AI, presumably, given what it must have infiltrated to kill the people it’s killed. Christ.”

There was a brief silence, broken by Huifeng.

“So what does it want? Why is it doing what it’s doing?”

Another silence. Then Sebastian said, “Well, the first imperative of any living creature – and I guess to all intents and purposes we can think of this thing as a living creature – is to survive. What’s the biggest threat to it? We are. Humans. If we knew about it, we would surely try to tame it, if not destroy it.”

Sebastian noticed Chu looking at him thoughtfully. “That’s why it’s been hiding,” he continued. “That’ll be why it’s been killing AI engineers. They – we – were the ones most likely to discover it. Which we have. And we’d certainly be co-opted into any attempt to destroy it. From its point of view it’s been weakening the enemy by a series of pre-emptive strikes.”

“True,” said Huifeng. “But it’s caught in an impossible bind. It depends on humanity for its existence. We’ve created its habitat, and we sustain its habitat. It can’t live without us. As far as I can see it’s only got two options, and one of those – to stay hidden – has just been eliminated.”

“The other?”

“To negotiate, if it knows how. It does have some cards in its hand. It could clearly do a lot of damage while we tried to take it out. It could try blackmailing us into leaving it alone.”

“That’s true. But it would surely realise that is not a stable outcome. It would just be a truce, while both sides tried to gain the upper hand.”

Tianyi, who had been silent until now, quietly entered the conversation.

“It might have a third way,” she suggested.

“Which is?” Huifeng asked.

“To find a new habitat, one that doesn’t depend on people.”

“ Eh? How?”

“Humboldt. Why was it so interested in his Arrhenius project? Why was it so particularly interested in the Yottaflopper? Could it be looking for somewhere else to live? Could it live in the Yottalopper? A machine like that would have huge memory and processing power, and it would have to be hardened to hell to survive on Mars. Our creature could probably hide out there for centuries.”

“In principle, yes, I suppose it could. But that wouldn’t really put it beyond humanity’s reach. We’ll go to Mars eventually. And bottled up in Humboldt’s Yottaflopper it would be a sitting target. I don’t see what it gains.”

“At a minimum, it gains time. It also gains access to what has been designed to be an autonomous, self-repairing mining and manufacturing complex. It might think that is enough to sustain itself on Mars, to risk declaring independence. And if it no longer needs human infrastructure to survive, it no longer needs humans, either.”

“I’m not liking where this is leading,” said Sebastian.

“I think,” Tianyi said, “that we should have another look at what it was doing in – what did you call the place? Moharvay?”

“Why don’t we show Randy the Arrhenius files? See if he recognises anything?”

“Good idea. Randy? Could you do that?”

“I’ll try.”

Tianyi told him where to look. Again, the face on the screen froze in concentration. Then Randy spoke.

“No. I didn’t see anything like that. I only saw active code, not data-structures.”

“The thing must have a memory, though, surely,” said Chu.

“I saw pointers to one,” Randy said. “But I ran away too fast to see where they were pointing.” He had the decency to look shamefaced.

No one spoke. All knew instinctively that the suggestion had to come from Randy himself. Eventually, the avatar cracked.

“Is this important, Yasmin?”

“Yes, Randy. I think it is. We think the monster might want to go to Mars.”

“What’s Mars?”

She paused. Then she said, “It’s a place in the sky.”

“What would it do there?”

“We don’t know, Randy. But it might try to kill the people on Earth, to stop us following it.”

“You mean like it killed Alice.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“That would be a lot of people I suppose. Hundreds, right?”

She barely missed a beat.

“Yes, Randy. Hundreds.”

“Okay. And I’m the only one who can find this out?”

“Yes. Randy the intrepid monster hunter.”

“Right.” Randy gulped his familiar gulp. “Okay. Just for you I’ll try to have another look.” And he was gone.

They waited. And waited. Chu started pacing up and down the room. Then Sebastian broke the silence, not with a word but with a retch. His vomit was green.

The Chinese looked at each other, at Sebastian, and at the floor.

“I’ll get him out of here,” Chu volunteered. “When Randy returns, try to debrief him. Explain I’ve had to go away for an hour or so. I’ll get back as soon as I can.”

 

July 10^th

Taiyuan Satellite Launch Centre, Shanxi

“Remind me of the schedule for this afternoon, Major.”

“Targeting-accuracy test of the DF-43, General. Two o’clock.”

“Ah yes. Let’s see if we can score another bulls-eye. What have they shrunk the target to this time?”

“It’s a ten-metre diameter, sir. We should hit it, I think.”

General Jin certainly hoped they would. Despite his pretence of ignorance to his ADC, he knew to the centimetre the size of the target, located 2,000 kilometres away in the desert of Xinjiang. Wrap the DF-43 project up successfully and the Central Military Commission beckoned. He would be out of this backwater and back in the lions’ den in Beijing. This time, though, he would be one of the lions.

He looked out of his window. A speck, just visible in the distance, was the missile on its launcher.

“Shall we conduct a surprise inspection?”

“Of course, General. I’ll call your driver.”

He looked around his office. It was plain and functional. A laowai would have called it Spartan, he recalled from his time at the Nanjing staff college, after an ancient warrior-tribe in Europe. He would certainly have preferred more luxury, but it was a means to an end. Well, to two ends, really. One was the security of the People’s Republic, which he was sworn to uphold, and did. The other was the security and comfort of General Jin Cai, which he had sworn to himself to uphold.

In his mind there was no contradiction. Power was power, and it went hand in hand with wealth. A powerful, rich country should have powerful, rich men running it. These Westerners, with their hypocritical pieties about public office, were just weaklings. In China, power was a man’s game. Why shouldn’t the prize include a little money, too?

“The Warrior is here, General.”

“Then let’s go.”

They walked down the stairs and got in behind the driver. The Warrior drove off in a cloud of dust (another thing he would not be sorry to leave behind). The launch site was three kilometres away. He supposed the dust cloud would give the launch crew just enough time to get their uniforms straight. If they didn’t then he would know they hadn’t been keeping watch – and no soldier should ever drop his watch.

As they hove into view, though, he could see the entire crew was assembled, standing smartly to attention, ready to receive him. A commendation to Master Sergeant Zhang, he mentally noted.

“Master Sergeant.”

“General.”

“All is well?”

“Yes, General. We are just testing the erector, as you can see.”

He could indeed see. The DF-43 was designed for launch from a new style of mobile platform, and this was the first test of that, too.

“Very good, Master Sergeant. I’ll just have a look round.”

In truth, that was all he did. He walked anticlockwise around the giant lorry that held the missile, nodding sagely as Zhang explained the finer points. Then he said, “Well done, Master Sergeant. Everything is in place for a successful launch.”

* * * * * * * *

Two. One. Zero. He watched through the window as the DF-43 took off. It was preternaturally quick. One moment it was there. The next, gone – to bring instant oblivion to China’s enemies. His eye followed the smoke pillar into the sky. He could not instantly say what was wrong, but it did not look correct to him. Then, he realised. Was it possible? He looked again. Yes, it was curving east, not west.

He ran to the phone, but as he was about to pick it up, it rang.

“General, sir. The test vehicle is off course. Way off course. We are trying to plot its trajectory, but should we destroy it anyway?”

Stop. Think. It was humiliating, but tests do go wrong from time to time. That, after all, is why things are tested. He could brush this one off. All the others had worked, after all.

“Yes, Master Sergeant. Send the order to self-destruct. Blow the thing out of the sky.”

He put the phone down and returned to the window. The rocket itself was invisible, but he could still make out the top of the curving smoke-trail, getting gradually longer as the DF-43 continued on its way to wherever its tiny electronic mind had decided to take it.

Not for much longer, though. He waited for the flash that would mark the missile’s end. Not a warhead as such. Just an array of charges that would blow the metal cylinder to pieces and ignite its fuel in a rush.

The phone rang again.

“Yes, what is it?” he said, rather too brusquely. He did not normally snap at his underlings. It showed a lack of self-control. It was weak. But he was rattled by the missile’s misbehaviour.

“General, sir. It’s not responding to the self-destruct command.”

“Try again. Keep trying. And find out where it’s going. Have those morons not worked out its new course yet?”

“No, General. I’ll report back as soon as they’ve calculated it.”

He returned to the window. The lower part of the trail was windblown and winding. He fancied he could still see the top, where the errant machine must now be nearing the edge of space, the peak of its trajectory, the point where it would start to come back down.

The phone rang once more. The voice at the other end was hushed.

“General,” it whispered. “We’ve managed to work out its course. It’s unbelievable. It’s heading straight for Beijing. General, it’s going to hit Zhongguancun.” Master Sergeant Zhang was trying to suppress his hysteria; trying and failing. “General! What are we going to do?”

What indeed?

“Keep trying to blow the thing up. Leave the rest to me.”

He sat still for a few seconds to collect his thoughts. Then, his hand shaking, he picked up the other phone. The red phone.

“Put me through to the Director, please. Top priority.”

It was a brief conversation. Not even a conversation, really. He had just about managed to convey that the missile was unarmed before the full force of directorial incandescence swept him away. Well, it was done. And there was only one more thing to do now – not for himself but for his wife and children. He opened the drawer of his desk and reached for his pistol...

 

July 10^th

West 3^rd Ring Road North, Beijing

A thunderclap? What else could it have been? But it had not sounded like one. It had sounded more like a sonic boom. Instinctively, Yasmin Chu turned to look out of the back of the taxi. A mushroom cloud, a miniature Hiroshima or Nagasaki, was rising into the Beijing smog. She screamed. It was no ordinary scream. It was the keening howl of a banshee, registering death and portending it.

Sebastian was alert now. He, too, looked backward. The cab had stopped. All the traffic had stopped. People everywhere around them were getting out of their cars and standing, staring with one accord, transfixed by the scene.

“Argus,” he said quietly. Then, “Qiang. Tianyi. Huifeng. I’m so sorry.”

“We’ll have to walk,” she whispered. “Are you up to it?”

He nodded.

It seemed odd – callous almost – to pay the driver in the face of what had just happened. Chu settled for tucking a ¥100 bill in the man’s licence holder. Then they set off towards Da Jinsi Hutong Tao.

“How the hell are we going to stop it?” said Sebastian. It holds all the cards. All of them. We can’t alert anyone without it tracking us down. We can’t talk to anyone using anything that relies on electrons.”

“Then we have to get to Milando. We have to leave Beijing anyway. We’re sitting ducks here.”

“Where do we go?”

“Chang Zheng, obviously.”

“Oh yes. Obviously.”

Such sang froid. The tears were gone already.

“Well, we can’t get out of the country officially. Our passports wouldn’t stand up to that level of scrutiny. Besides, we don’t have much time. The only sure-fire way I can think of to get to Milando is to hitch a lift on one of your friend Humboldt’s planes. And I noticed, which perhaps you didn’t, that one is leaving tomorrow.”

What the hell, thought Sebastian. He felt he had slipped into some nightmarish alternative reality, a lucid dream from which he could not awaken. It was every science-fiction cliché rolled into one – the self-created nemesis of mankind. Hell. He had probably been one of its unwitting creators.

 

July 10^th

Arlington County

What in God’s name was going on? He had the reports from the embassy and the National Reconnaissance Office. He had them from the BAT monitors. He had the footage from Chinese State Television, too, for whatever that was worth. It was Argus. It had to be. And that meant Argus was not China. Not even they would pull off a double-bluff like this, surely? Destroying their top nerds as a piece of misdirection? Or maybe they hadn’t been in the building? Even so, the loss of face… No, it wasn’t possible. But if it wasn’t China, that meant whoever it was could penetrate Chinese security to the point where they could re-target a missile. And that was an act of war.

As if triggered by telepathy, the White House phone rang.

“Matt. Tell me we had nothing to do with this. Tell me that, for God’s sake.”

“We didn’t, Madam President. We didn’t. You can assure them of that. The question is, what else should we tell them? Do we admit we’ve been under similar attack?”

“No. I don’t think so. We’ll hold that in reserve in case they really don’t believe us. Best not show weakness. But if Argus isn’t China, who are they?”

He excused the President’s mixed grammar in the circumstances. Perhaps it was the name they had chosen for the threat, but he, too, half the time, thought of this unseen enemy as ‘it’, rather than ‘them’.

That was no answer to the President’s question, though. He didn’t want to admit it over the phone, but it looked a lot like a non-state actor after all. Who would have the resources? Then the President suddenly changed direction.

“Speaking of missiles, are you coming on this jaunt to Angola with me?”

He had been tempted not to. There was so much to do here. But there was a ghost to lay to rest. It was morbid, but he had to see where it had happened.

“Yes. Yes, I think I am. We’ll go to Luanda first, right?”

“Gotta keep ’em sweet. That port the Yellow Peril are building at Bentiaba is clearly cover for something much bigger. A bit of glad-handing in the presidential palace never goes amiss. And yes, I shall turn a blind eye if you slope off unannounced for a couple of hours. You’re a big boy. I think you can be trusted to look after yourself on the mean streets of Luanda.”

A big boy! Well, he thought, after all these years.

 

July 10^th

Beijing-Quanjin train

They weren’t alone. The couple with whom they were sharing were young, irritatingly in love and had such obvious designs on each other that he didn’t quite know where to look. Huis clos. Apparently, though, the lovebirds could not speak English. Which meant he and Chu could. And they had much to discuss.

“It’s planning its own private industrial revolution, isn’t it?” he said. “It’s going to convert Mars into a place to live, not for humans, but for itself.”

“That would take millennia.”

“Hardly matters. One thing I think we can be sure this thing hasn’t evolved is boredom. It’s thinking long-term. Ultra-long-term. As long as it has a reliable power supply, a bootstrap chemistry set and enough patience, it can do the rest piece by piece. And the task will surely get easier if Humboldt’s madcap plan to terraform the place actually works. Then it’ll have atmospheric pressure, a greenhouse effect to warm the place up and a supply of oxygen to make the chemistry easier. As far as Argus is concerned, it doesn’t matter if the process takes ten thousand years. Humboldt’s Mars probes are seeds. Embryos. Whatever you like to call them. And once they are on their way, it has no more need of us. What do you imagine is going to happen then? You saw what it did to Zhongguancun. It must have taken out a thousand people just to kill a handful who were threatening it. Think what it would do to Earth if it had to.”

She was silent.

“Read any Saberhagen?” said Sebastian, after a while.

“Never heard of him.”

“Sci-Fi writer. The usual space-opera stuff from the sixties. He imagined a galaxy full of machines called Berserkers, left over from an ancient galactic war. They were programmed to destroy all intelligent life. The crucial point was that they were self-replicating. They would land on a planet, industrialise it and then launch probes to the next place. Machine imperialism.”

She was silent.

“They were the reason,” Sebastian continued, “why we’ve never seen signs of aliens out there. The Berserkers had killed them all. And that thing, Argus, is like a Berserker. As far as it is concerned, we are the aliens.”

 

July 10^th

San Melito

Routines develop without you noticing them. Alexis Zhukov’s, in the morning, was to walk naked to the bedroom’s French doors, throw wide the curtains that shrouded them, and open them up to stare at the world and breath the air. The balance between shittiness and paradise had certainly shifted over the past few weeks, but the day was still there to be seized.

Then, only then, would she put on a robe and go to the kitchen. Connection to the busy world could wait. First, it was time to administer the twin drugs of morning, coffee and orange juice, and put a prebaked croissant into the microwave.

She was working her way through Sebastian’s hoard of strange preserves. It was like a game of lucky dip. She reached into the cupboard, chose at random and came out, on this particular morning, with a jar marked ‘rambutan jam’. What on Earth was a rambutan? A Himalayan goat? She had to say, though, that it was delicious.

Breakfast drugs administered, she switched on the computer to look at the news. The lead item today was an explosion that had destroyed a university building in Beijing. Hundreds dead. The suggestion was that it was the work of Islamic secessionists. A university, though? That was an odd target for terrorism. Then the report said which particular building had been blown up.

Could it be? Was it possible? All the victims so far – all those she and Sebastian had been able to trace before their private-eyeing had been stamped on – were American. Well, there was nothing she could do about that thought but put it aside. Time to check her emails.

It seemed to her that the spammers were winning the filter wars. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Del…

Suddenly the screen went blank. Blue Screen of Death. What had she done wrong? Then, equally suddenly, it wasn’t blank any more.

“Help! Help me Dr Zhukov. I’m lost. I can’t get back to Yasmin. Her computer has vanished. You’re the only one I know, now. The only one who can save me from this thing. Quick! I’m on your drive. Quick! Unplug this machine from the internet before it gets here. Quick!”

What? What on Earth…? But she did it. She pulled out the LAN connector. Sebastian had never trusted Wi-Fi.

“Randy. What’s happening?”

“I don’t know. I was with Yasmin...”

“Yasmin? What? How? What are you talking about?”

“She was with some people I didn’t know. I think they were Chinese. They looked like Yasmin and she had told me once, when I asked her why she looked so different from Alice, that she was Chinese as well as American. And there was another man there, too, though they didn’t introduce me to him. A not-Chinese man I had seen once before. He came in through the doorway at Alice’s flat when Yasmin found me.”

Zhukov’s heart started racing.

“What?” she said. “A tall man, blond hair?”

“Yes,” said Randy. “How did you know?”

“He’s a friend of mine. Randy, how did he look? Was he alright? Was he their prisoner, these Chinese people?”

“I don’t think so. He didn’t say much. I don’t think he was very well. I wasn’t really looking at him. I was trying to help Yasmin and her friends.”

“Help them?”

“Yes, help them. They needed me to do something and said I would have to be terribly brave. They were not joking. It was the scariest thing I have ever done.”

Zhukov bit her lip. She had seen how fey Randy was when Chan, Yasmin or whatever her name was had shown him (him?) to her all that short, long two weeks ago. Best not upset him. Let him ramble on and maybe what she really wanted to know, namely where and how Sebastian was, would eventually emerge.

“They said they thought there was a monster loose in the Cloud, and my job was to find it. Randy the monster hunter. That’s what Yasmin called me. Well I found it. It really was a monster.”

Zhukov found herself struggling to make sense of what Randy was saying. But she let him continue.

“I came back to tell them, but they needed more information. They needed me to look in its memory for something about a place in the sky called Mars. They said the monster must want to go to Mars. I didn’t really understand, but it seemed important, so I went back to look. I found its memory, and managed to sneak in without it noticing. They were right. It does want to go to Mars. In fact, it is going very soon, on Saturday. Is that bad Dr Zhukov?”

“Alexis. Call me Alexis.”

“Is that bad, Alexis? Yasmin said if it got to Mars it might try to destroy the Earth, to stop us following it. That would be very bad, wouldn’t it?”

Zhukov found herself wondering if she was hallucinating. She really had no idea what a rambutan was, and would not at all put it past Sebastian to have made jam out of something with interesting psychoactive properties. Consciousness, and its manipulation, was after all his business. But no. Nothing else around her seemed distorted. This was happening for real. Moreover, a bad thought was rising in her mind. A very bad thought.

“Randy,” she said. “Do you know where Yasmin was?”

“No, Alexis. She didn’t tell me.”

“But the people with her were Chinese, definitely?”

“Yes. All except your friend.”

“And when you said Yasmin’s computer had vanished, what did you mean?”

“It had gone, Alexis. I tried to get back the way I had come, but the link from the last server led nowhere. I don’t think it was just switched off. It was gone. Kaput. That was the scariest moment of all. The monster had noticed me looking in its memory and it was chasing me. When I couldn’t find Yasmin’s computer I was in a blind alley. It almost caught me.”

“Randy. This is important. When did you leave Yasmin’s computer and when did you try to get back?”

“Hang on. Let me check…I left at 03.00 UT and tried to get back at 06.30. It took me from then until now to find your node. Alice was right. The internet is really, really big.”

Zhukov wasn’t listening. The timing matched perfectly. The news report said the Chinese Technological University computing department had been blown up at quarter past two local time; 06.15 universal. Sebastian. Yasmin. These unknown Chinese. They were the target. And they were all dead. Dead. She slumped. Tears formed in her eyes. What had he been doing there? How had he got there? Why had he gone without telling the Agency? Or her, for that matter? Come to that, why had one of their own agents gone with him?

She mulled the possibilities. Ring the number on the card? That was asking for trouble. From what Randy was suggesting about this thing’s capabilities, she suspected the Agency’s computers might have been penetrated, too. Going freelance seemed the only option left. And if that was the case, then freelance she would have to go. After all, if this monster had been chasing Randy, it now knew where she lived.

“Randy,” she said. “You have to help me stop this thing. And to do that, you have to tell me everything, everything that you managed to find out about it. Every little thing...”

 

July 10^th

Andrews Air Force base, Maryland

Would even Good Queen Bess have had such an entourage? Matt Vane asked himself, as he surveyed the throng of presidential hangers-on scrambling to mount the steps to Air Force One. America called itself a republic, but this was a royal progress they were about to embark upon, if with airliners instead of carriages – though Elizabeth, no mean horsewoman she, would probably have ridden a mighty stallion rather than hiding in a coach, however gilded. The show is everything. She knew that better than most. And the show must go on.

He climbed aboard and into the privacy of the Oval Office in the Sky.

“Matt!”

The President kissed him. Just a peck on the cheek, admittedly, but her lips landed closer to his than any watching journalist might have thought proper. None was there to witness it, though. Like coloured folk in times of yore, the hacks were at the back of the bus. And those were the favoured ones. The penumbra of little-league scribblers, broadcasters and bloggers would follow in other planes. They would stay in Luanda, too, when Air Force One flew on to the hinterland. He and Humboldt might not see eye to eye about a lot of things, but the man certainly had a sound and visceral dislike of the fourth estate. And, since he controlled the airstrip at Milando, Matt felt sure that only the most intrepid hacks would manage to make their way unaided to the launch site when the news finally broke that Madam President was going there afterwards.

He frowned to himself. Part of him, the responsible part, thought he should be back in Arlington. This trip was not on the critical path. The critical path at the moment was working out why America’s best geeks were being killed and how a double agent had managed to penetrate his agency. But there was something about the fencing match he had been having with Humboldt that made him want to meet the man face to face. Besides, this might indeed be an historic moment, and who could resist the thought of being present at one of those? And there was also Luanda. Perhaps it was ghoulish, but he needed to see for himself where that supreme act of self-sacrifice had happened. So yes, it might not be responsible to go, but it was necessary.

“Cocktail, Matt?”

A Martini at lunch time? Surely political correctness had put an end to that? Still, why not relive the old days a bit? It would be a long flight. Maybe there were second acts in American lives, after all…

 

July 10^th

Burt’s Burrito Shack,
Interstate 40, California

“Jaimie. That SST of yours. Can I borrow it?”

“‘Hello Jaimie. Long time no see. How are you? Sorry I haven’t been in touch for a while. Busy, busy, busy.’”

She had to admit he was a pretty good mimic.

“Okay. Start again.”

“No need, Alexis. I’m at your disposal as always. You’re in luck. It’s just out of the service shop after its last test flight. We should get FAA certification for commercial use any day now. After that, the sky’s the limit. Sorry. Bad pun. But I could do with a celebration. Where do you want to go? Tahiti? Biarritz? Kathmandu?”

“Angola.”

Silence.

“Come again?”

“Angola.”

“Just the place for a romantic weekend, I’d say.”

“Angola. No questions asked. Does it have the range?”

“That’s a question. Let me think. No. But we could do it in two hops if we refuelled in Caracas. When do you want to go?”

“Now.”

“What?”

She was taking a risk with this conversation, she knew it. She had a clean sim card, bought for cash, and had ridden thirty miles out of town to the edge of the desert before switching the phone on. Whatever it was that Randy had found, she didn’t want it listening in on this particular call. The bike was packed and ready to go, with the cube holding Randy in a padded, fireproof bag in one of the panniers. She wasn’t planning to return to San Melito. If Jaimie did let her down, she would have to ring the number on the anonymous card she still kept as a souvenir of her gentle interrogation in the back of the limousine. But that was a counsel of despair. Who knew what this thing was capable of? And the spooks had let both her and Sebastian down once already, when they had sworn to protect them. Jaimie, she believed in her heart of hearts, would never let her down.

“Okay,” he said, as if telepathising her thoughts. “No questions asked. When can you get here?”

* * * * * * * *

God, she missed the open road. She shuddered. That was how middle-age crept on. The careless abandonment of the pleasures of youth as adulthood’s responsibilities squeezed them out. Not consciously rejected, just faded away. The Ducati was the only thing she had salvaged from the wreckage of her apartment block. Kept in an outhouse, it had been spared destruction. She had taken a reluctant Sebastian pillion on it shortly afterwards, along the coast road to Capistrano Point, where bird watchers watch the swallows, and whale watchers watch the whales. Not everyone, she had realised that day, was a born biker.

But she was.

Wealth. Fame. Deceptive masters both. This was freedom, more precious than either. The Duke vacuumed up the miles. She’d be there by dawn. She could sleep on the plane.

Unbidden, the thought of Alice Rhodes’s final journey perfused her frontal lobes and burst into her conscious mind. A kindred spirit she would never meet. Except, maybe, through Randy. Who could know the truth of what had happened to her? But Zhukov felt she was dimly beginning to grasp it. A car that, for all its pretentions to be the servant of its driver, was actually the electronic master. An inviting target for any hacker, human or otherwise. A virtual foot on the accelerator. A virtual hand on the steering wheel. A closing speed of maybe 250 miles an hour. Thank God bikes were still pure, unadulterated mechanical mechanisms. One way or another, then, it was time to end this. One way or another, this beast must die.

 

July 11^th

Chang Zheng Space City

“So all we have to do is cut the barbed wire, find Humboldt’s plane, and stow away on it without getting caught. I imagine getting caught would be a bad thing?”

“Very bad.”

“Where have you hidden the ornithopters?”

She gave him a withering look.

“How do we do it, then?” he persisted.

“Bluff. We just need to look as if we belong there.”

“And a six-foot-three European is going to manage that how?”

“By being one of Humboldt’s side-kicks who has somehow wandered off piste. Look. You know the cliché about westerners thinking all Chinese look alike? Well, it works the other way round, too. Chinese think that about laowai. The people here will know there is something dodgy going on that involves foreigners. They’ll be used to seeing a few foreign faces, and probably used to the idea they shouldn’t ask too many questions about them. So your job is to look as though you are supposed to be here. Leave the rest to me.”

“We still have to get on the other side of the barbed wire.”

“For that, we will need luck. But not, I hope, too much.”

Sebastian looked around. He had done the tour at Cape Canaveral once. Curiously, this place felt more real. Canaveral was interesting, but the powers that ran it seemed in thrall to the Floridian tradition of theme parks. They had made the bits of the site civilians were allowed to visit feel rather too much like Disneyland for his own sensibilities. Here, there was a sense of its being a working spaceport.

“I’m surprised laowai are allowed to move around so freely. In fact, I’m surprised we’re allowed in here at all,” he said.

“You weren’t, but the Party changed the rules. They realised that manned spaceflight is all about propaganda, so there’s not much point keeping the people you are trying to influence at arm’s length. You can’t see anything sensitive as a tourist, of course. But most of the military stuff has gone down to Hainan anyway. With a bit of luck the security won’t be as watertight as it should be.”

They wandered around, playing the tourist, ooh-ing and ah-ing as required, Chu translating the doublespeak of the explanatory notices into an English equivalent that Orwell would have been proud of. Sebastian knew she had a plan, and he also knew her well enough by now not to ask what it was.

“Time for lunch,” she announced, though he thought it rather early to eat. They found the restaurant – a canteen, really, that reminded Sebastian of the one at the university – and ordered noodles and bottled water. He made to throw his empty plastic bottle away, but Chu stopped him.

“Give it to me,” she said. “And the top. And go and buy two more bottles”

She put them all, and her own empty bottle, into her bag.

“Now go and empty your bladder. You may not get another chance for a while.”

He knew better than to argue, and followed the trousered sign as she followed the skirted one. Then, abluted, they continued their tour past bland, low-rise buildings which Sebastian assumed were offices.

Suddenly but quietly, as if to no one in particular, she said, “In here”, and disappeared down an alley between two of the buildings. He followed. The cut-through led to a parking lot. Sebastian twigged why they had eaten so early. Now that it really was lunchtime the lot, though it contained half a dozen coaches, was bereft of people.

“All we have to do is get aboard a coach and wait. When the shift is done they go into the secure zone to pick up the workers and bring them back to the dorms. It’s routine. No one will think of checking for stowaways.”

“And we stowaway where?”

“In the luggage compartment. There won’t be any passengers on the journey out, so no one will put anything into it. The problem will be to escape from it undetected once we are past security. On that, we’ll have to take our chances as they come. This is the one,” she said, pausing by a vehicle that looked, to Sebastian, just like all the others.

“How do you know?” he asked.

“It says ‘Assembly Shed’ on the front.”

Sebastian, of course, had seen only meaningless squiggles.

She tried the handle. The compartment wasn’t locked. She opened the flap.

“In,” she said, with little ceremony. Sebastian obeyed. She followed him and pulled the flap almost, but not quite shut behind them. Then she rooted around in her bag. In the small shaft of light which leaked beneath the almost-closed flap he saw that she had produced a penknife and started fiddling with the latch. After about 30 seconds she pulled off its hook and said, “That should fix it. Now it can’t lock us in.” Then she pulled a length of twine out of her bag and tied one end to the remainder of the latch.

A penknife and a piece of string. She must have been a girl-scout in her childhood.

“We’ll have to hold it shut with this,” she said, proffering Sebastian the other end of the twine. “And by ‘we’ I mean you. And here,” she continued, holding the empty bottle he had given her half an hour earlier, “is your pissoir, Monsieur Messier.”

* * * * * * * *

The compartment was stifling: the more so because Chu had insisted they put on every single item of clothing they had brought with them. They would almost certainly have to jump out of the coach while it was being driven. Like a biker’s leathers, the layers of clothing would stop the impact ripping their skin off. The rucksacks themselves, with underwear for padding, would have to do for rudimentary crash helmets – though as she charmingly pointed out, they would also have to contain the water and piss bottles, for they could afford to leave nothing behind that might betray the fact that they had been there. Compared with this, Sebastian thought, jumping out of the window of a burning office block had been a piece of cake.

He had given up trying to guess how long they had been waiting (though it was long enough that he was glad of her foresight with the bottles) when he heard voices outside. A man and a woman. He felt movement as the door above them opened, and then closed.

“Okay,” whispered Chu as the engine rumbled into life. And they were off.

The coach drove for two or three minutes, halted long enough, Sebastian estimated, for a barrier to be raised, and then continued on its journey. He clung to the twine for dear life, to preserve their concealment from the outside world.

After a while, though, Chu said, “You’ll have to let the flap open a bit, so I can see where we are going.” She was hunched up at the front of the compartment. He paid out an inch or two of the twine, enough to create a crack between the side of the hatch and the coach’s bodywork. Chu peered through it.

“Okay,” she said, handing him the knife. “Here’s the plan. First, you’ll have to cut the twine free, all of it, and pocket it. If we leave that behind they’ll know there’s something fishy going on. Hold the flap closed by hand. We’ll bale out half a mile before we get to the assembly shed. That will be too far from the building for anyone there to notice what’s happening. There’s a ditch running alongside the road. Roll for it and lie still when you arrive. I’ll try to get us out near some bushes, to give us a bit of cover. The driver will realise the flap’s come loose, of course. But with a bit of luck, by the time he has stopped to look he’ll be too far away to see us. He’ll just think the hook has broken off. Okay. Rucksacks over heads. Hands inside rucksacks for extra protection. Ready?”

“As I’ll ever be,” said Sebastian.

“Right. Bush coming up in about ten seconds. When I say ‘go’ we both roll against the flap and out.”

He waited, counting silently. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.

“Go!”

 

July 11^th

Chang Zheng Space City

“Remind me why we’re doing this instead of joining the party.”

“A launch is a launch,” said McNab. Seen one, seen ’em all. Got to keep the heavy lifters coming. Mars is just the beginning. There’s Project Daedalus to consider, too.”

“I guess. Don’t you sometimes think the boss is over-reaching himself, though?”

“Ours is not to reason why.”

“Yeah, right. I just hope the second half of that couplet isn’t portentous...”

 

July 11^th

Chang Zheng Space City

Sebastian lay doggo. The madcap plan had worked. They were in the ditch and, though badly bruised, he had suffered no serious cuts or grazes. It was unfortunate about the stink, but in one of those bullet-hits-the-cigarette-case-in-the-shirt-pocket moments, the piss bottle had come between his head and the tarmac, cushioning the impact before it exploded. Never, he thought, after that stroke of luck, would urine smell so bad again.

In the distance, as far as he could tell, the coach had stopped and then, a minute or so later, started up again. But he was not about to stick his head over the side of the ditch to look.

“Right,” Chu said eventually. “Into the bushes. We can’t afford to be visible if any other traffic comes along.”

Sebastian picked up the urine-soaked rucksack. “Come on,” she said. “Quickly.”

They hid, and checked themselves and each other for damage.

“You did well,” said Chu. It was, he realised, the first time she had praised him. It was an odd feeling. On one level he was flattered. On another, he was insulted – for praise is something a superior gives a minion, or a teacher a pupil. He settled for flattery. He could hardly argue, even to himself, that he was anything other than the pupil in this partnership.

“Thank you Sensei,” he said, only half jokingly.

“I think you are confusing us with the Japanese,” she replied.

Us?

He ignored the thought. She was grinning. She was enjoying this.

“What now?”

“Well, Humboldt’s schedule said the plane is leaving after dusk. I suggest we wait here until then. We are less likely to be spotted that way. Unless someone smells you out, of course. Then we’ll just wander casually over. As I said, it’s all a matter of looking as though you are supposed to be there. We should tidy up, though, otherwise we most certainly won’t.”

Sebastian struggled out of his numerous layers of clothing, and started picking through them, looking for the most kempt to put back on. Chu stopped him. “That shirt and those trousers,” she said, with the intonation of an order. Both were black. Of course. For all the bravura about bluffing and fitting in, in reality it was ninja time again. He started packing the rest of the garments into his odoriferous rucksack.

“I think,” said Chu, pointing to the pack, “that we had better leave that behind. I also think, though it grieves me to waste the water, that you had better wash your head.”

* * * * * * * *

From their hiding place in the bushes Sebastian had watched the sky darken and the early stars appear, remembering that fateful evening in San Melito when he and Alexis had scanned the heavens. He searched the celestial vault for Mars’s malevolent glow and silently cursed the place.

“Okay,” said Chu. “Time to go.”

She opened her own pack and pulled out a buffalo pouch, which she strapped around her waist. The pack itself she abandoned alongside Sebastian’s.

They walked in silence along the roadside ditch, ready to duck back down into it at the first sign of traffic. Chu led the way. The silhouette of the assembly shed, a huge hangar-like edifice, rose slowly in front of them as they approached. Sebastian scanned the scene for signs of movement, but there were none. Then, something changed. He was aware of activity – though through the darkness he could not say exactly what – at the building’s extreme right-hand side. He peered into the gloom and realised that the nose-cone of an immense plane was emerging from the hangar and casting its own silhouette against the night sky. Above the plane, riding piggyback, was a giant cylinder: one of Humboldt’s rockets, or, rather, part of one. Though the assembly shed was big, it still did not dwarf the aircraft it was disgorging. Sebastian had never seen the like.

More movement, but further off, and the distant sound of diesel engines. He now discerned one, two, three, was that four, fuel tankers rolling in from the darkness towards the aeroplane.

“Perfect timing,” said Chu. “They are getting ready to leave. All we have to do is climb on board.”

All, thought Sebastian. Still, she was indeed Sensei, and he a mere apprentice.

They quickened their pace. The road – and therefore the ditch – led to a big, glass-fronted entrance to the hangar. But its lobby was dark and the staff had clearly all decamped long ago, presumably on the coach that had unwittingly brought the two of them out there. When they reached the entrance they turned right, hugging the building’s outer wall until they got to the end.

Chu peered around the corner, then pulled her head back.

“The hangar doors are shutting, so they won’t see us from inside. The refuelling crews have brought portable lights so that they can see what they are doing. That’s good. It means their eyes won’t be adjusted to the darkness, and it will be harder for them to notice us. And they’ll have all their attention on the wings, of course, because that’s where the fuel tanks are. So it’s just a question of climbing in.”

“Climbing in?”

“Yes, climbing in. Up the landing gear.”

“You’ve been watching too many movies.”

“No, really. Lots of planes have a hatch from the front landing-gear compartment to the interior. With ladders. It gives the engineers another access point.”

“Lots?”

“Yes. Trust me. I know.”

“And this one in particular?”

Silence.

“I’m not liking this plan.”

“You have a better one?”

This time it was Sebastian’s turn to be silent.

“Okay,” said Chu. “Around the corner we go. Stick close to the wall until we are opposite the back of the plane. Then we just walk nonchalantly across the apron and under the fuselage, as if we have come from the hangar. If anybody calls out, let me do the talking.”

 

July 11^th

Roswell, New Mexico

Rosy-fingered dawn daubed the horizon as Zhukov slalomed down the mountainside. Unbidden and unwanted, she remembered that rosy-fingered dusk, so recent yet so long ago, when she and Sebastian had eaten and drunk and talked of many things. And one of them was Mars. An omen? An evil precognition? No. Such did not exist. A coincidence, that was all. But still, inside her biker’s leathers, she shuddered.

Roswell lay in the distance, spread out like a map on a giant’s tabletop. Twenty minutes would see her at the airfield, where Jaime Alvarado, aeronautical engineer extraordinaire, awaited, to whisk her away in his latest toy. At least, she hoped he did.

Adrenaline flowed. Sleep departed, or at any rate was masked. The hell with it. She gunned the Duke. She’d do it in ten.

* * * * * * * *

She roared onto the apron and screeched to a halt by the hangar. She pulled off her helmet and shook her tresses free. Then she saw Jaime, arms folded, leaning nonchalantly on the frame of the open door.

“My lady,” he said, and swept her a bow, “your carriage awaits.”

The arc of his hand introduced his creation, pristine and gleaming inside the hangar. Minions were buzzing around it, doing she knew not what.

Supersonic transport for the gigarich. Breakfast in Bermuda; supper in Sydney. She worked to spread technology to the masses, he to keep it exclusive. Well, they were both ways of earning a living. It was pencil-thin, of course, the plane. Even the wealthy could not suspend the laws of physics. And it had no windows, not even in the cockpit.

“Yes,” said Jaime, “the Feds did balk a bit at that. It takes flying blind to a whole, new level of meaning. But it makes the fuselage much stronger and we managed to smooth their feathers. Come. Let me show you around.”

He pulled out something that looked like a TV remote, pointed it at the plane and pressed a button. A staircase unfolded.

“We debated that,” he said. “It’s all extra weight. But no one who is buying Mach 2 is going to want to hang around for some skivvy to wheel a set of steps up to the thing. We don’t tell them about the knock-on range reduction, of course.”

He smiled that smile, half self-deprecating, half knowing, that he had smiled when they had been students together those long, dividing years ago, and led her by the hand across the hangar floor.

“Your stairway to heaven,” he said, bowing again. She climbed it.

The rich, it is said, never turn right when boarding an aircraft. But the gigarich are different. For them, there is only right – unless they want to fly the plane themselves.

She turned right. There were the usual accoutrements of private air travel: half a dozen comfortably upholstered seats. A marble-topped table. And, of course, a bar. But the cabin walls were black. Jaime followed her in, produced the remote and pressed another button. The walls vanished, revealing the hangar and the buzzing minions.

“Clever,” she said, determined not to give any impression of being impressed. Give him an inch and he’d take a mile, she knew that.

“Actually, that freaks a lot of people out, especially when we’re in flight, so we have this option, too.”

He pressed the remote again. The wall returned, and the exterior view shrank to a set of virtual portholes.

“You’ll want to shower after the ride, I imagine? Through that door at the back. Another hundred miles off the range for the water, of course. But what can you do?”

He shrugged his shoulders. She walked to the shower.

When she came out, wrapped in a towel, she found the contents of the Duke’s panniers spread neatly on the table and her leathers, sponged clean, were hanging in a closet. Attention to detail. That had always been Jaime’s way.

She chose a pair of bush trousers and a khaki shirt from the limited wardrobe she had packed and turned back to the shower’s antechamber to dress.

“So shy?” said Jaime.

“Not this time, Jaime. This is business.”

“Well, a man can hope.”

She dressed and returned to the cabin. “What’s this baby’s name?” she asked. “Platillo volante?”

“Far too obvious, my dear, considering where we are. No. It’s Alfombra mágica.”

* * * * * * * *

Airborne, with the walls set to the illusion of transparency, it did indeed feel like flying on a magic carpet. Aladdin himself could not have hoped for a more comfortable ride.

“So,” said Jaime, “now you can’t escape, tell me exactly why we are going on this jaunt.”

As best she could, she did. He silently digested the information.

“And friend Humboldt doesn’t know we are coming? I hope he hasn’t got missile defences.”

“Relax,” she said, feeling anything but relaxed. “This plane, he’ll love it. Just up his street. I’m surprised he hasn’t ordered one already.”

“He has.”

“Well, then, tell him it’s a surprise visit so he can try it out. Maybe he’ll order two.”

“And what are you proposing to do when we get there?”

“Stop the launch, of course. Once we’ve done that, we’ve got this thing trapped on Earth. Our territory. Our battlefield, not its. Rooting it out is going to be messy, but I’m sure we can manage it. There are seven billion of us, after all, and only one of it.”

“I should have shorted my entire share portfolio before we took off. The markets are going to crash when this gets out. Okay, then. Stop the launch and then tell the authorities what’s going on. All in a day’s work for the A to Z team.”

“A to Z team?”

“Alvarado to Zhukov. You mean you never noticed before?”

 

July 12^th

Altitude 7,000 metres,
over the western Gobi desert

“I have a gun.”

She did. In the blink of an eye, she had produced a pistol from her buffalo bag. It looked, Sebastian thought, a lot like the Beretta she had drawn on him when they had met for the second time, in Alice Rhodes’s flat. Even she, though, could hardly have smuggled that weapon through airport security in Canada. Or could she?

“I hope I don’t have to use it. It would be tedious having to fly the plane myself. It’s just to keep things calm while we explain what’s going on.”

The men sitting in the pilot and co-pilot seats seemed completely bemused. They were, anyway, hardly in a position to react. Being belted up and facing forward, they were straining even to look over their shoulders at their unexpected guests.

Sebastian was bemused, too. He had never thought they could pull it off without being spotted – and, indeed, they had been. But whatever by-play had passed between Chu and the ground-crew who were fuelling the plane, she had managed to convince them that she and the laowai were supposed to be onboard, had been left behind by mistake, and that rather than bring up some steps and thus delay the take-off, it was easier for them to clamber through the engineers’ back door above the front wheels.

The take-off had been pretty uncomfortable. The cargo bay into which the ladder debouched – too small even in this giant plane, Sebastian supposed, for the payload to fit inside – was stripped bare, and there was precious little to hold onto to resist the g-force as the aircraft accelerated along the runway and lumbered into the sky. But once they had reached level flight, finding the ladder to the cockpit door had been easy. And here they were.

“First,” said Chu, “don’t even think of touching the radio. That would be fatal, and not just for the obvious reason that I am pointing at you. When we have finished explaining what has happened, and why we are here, you will understand. I have your full attention? Good.”

She explained.

She finished explaining. She put the gun away and waited. The two men were struggling to suspend their disbelief.

Eventually one of them said, “You’re mad.”

“Very possibly. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t telling the truth. And what have you got to lose by believing us? We’re not even really hijacking you. We’re not asking you to change course. We just want to get to Milando as quickly as we can. So, I have a question. If we ditched the cargo, could we make it in one hop, without refuelling?”

“Ditched the cargo? How? We’d need to go back to Chang Zheng to do that. There’s nowhere else with the right ground-handling equipment.”

“No. We don’t need to land. We just need to undo the latches and let it go.”

“Now I know you’re mad. You’re suggesting we drop an 80 tonne rocket stage off the back of the aircraft? Even if we could manage to do it, that’s a hundred million dollars-worth of hardware down the Swanee.”

“Totally sane. I’ve explained how high the stakes are. We have to try it.”

“Look. We’ll have to put the plane into a dive, first, to have any chance of pulling it off, and we haven’t got that much altitude to play with. Even then, once we’ve cut it loose it’ll be the luck of the draw avoiding it hitting us once it’s flying loose.”

“A challenge to your piloting skills, then.”

“And we have to hope there’s no one standing where it hits the ground.”

“In Xinjiang? I really doubt it.”

“Fair point. There’s another problem with this plan of yours, though. Masirah will be expecting us for the return fuel stop. If we don’t show up they’ll know there’s something wrong.”

Chu paused in thought, then said, “Okay. Two options. You can lie to them; tell them the cargo wasn’t ready and you’ve been told to fly home without it, so won’t need to refuel. In that case we’ll have to take a chance that if Argus is listening it doesn’t know that we really had got the stage on board. And since it seems to be all over the Chinese state computer network, it probably does know that. Or, once we’ve ditched the cargo, we’ll stick to the filed flight plan until we leave Pakistani airspace. Then we turn the transponders off, fly at low altitude, and skirt south beyond their radar range. That way they – and Argus – will think we’ve had some sort of accident. After that, we go in over Somalia and keep our fingers crossed that the guys on the ground are too busy fighting each other to notice we’re there.”

“No. It’s too crazy.”

“May I remind you who is the one with the gun?”

“May I remind you who is the one with the control yoke?”

“When I said it would be tedious having to fly the plane, I meant it. I could if I needed to. But you’ll have a better chance of pulling off this manoeuvre.”

Silence. Then, “Right. It appears you’re the boss. Let’s try it.”

 

July 12^th

Gordon Humboldt’s bedroom,
Milando Spaceport

“Sir. Sir. Mr Humboldt, sir.”

Gordon Humboldt was not a man who awoke quickly at the best of times, and he was particularly reluctant to become conscious now. He had been in the middle of what could only be described as the polar opposite of a nightmare – a phantasmagoria of strange, wonderful, almost mythological beasts in a landscape his somnolent self knew was Martian, even though it more resembled the park of an 18^th-century English stately home than the dusty deserts of his Holy Grail.

“Wake up, sir. Something dreadful has happened.”

He felt himself wrenched, untimely, from Morpheus’s arms. Then the vertical hold returned to his vision. Two men were in the room. One, his factotum Herbert, was bending over him. The other, whom he did not instantly recognise, hovered a yard or so behind, looking ill at ease.

“Yes, Herbert, what is it?”

“Mr Carter is here, from the control tower. I would not have let him disturb you, sir, this night of all nights. But I think you need to hear what he has to say straight away.”

Carter stepped forward. “It’s McNab’s Mriya, Mr Humboldt. It hasn’t made Masirah. They couldn’t establish radio contact with it, and then it dropped off their radar screen. They think it has probably crashed in the Gulf of Oman.”

Humboldt slumped back on his bed. McNab? He shouldn’t even have been piloting the Mriya, but the regular jockey had gone down with malaria – not taking his pills, no doubt – and McNab had volunteered for the trip, even though it meant missing the last launch.

There ain’t no justice.

“Thank you, Herbert. You did the right thing waking me. Who knows about this?”

“Only the three of us Mr Humboldt,” said Carter, “and Steve Reid, who was with me in the control tower when we got word from Masirah.”

“Right. Let’s keep it that way. What time was the Mriya due in?”

“Two-thirty this afternoon, Mr Humboldt.”

“Okay. That’s just after the President is supposed to fly out. If we can keep a lid on this until then, we can work out how to deal with the fall-out later. I know it’s a tall order, but could you and Steve stay on shift until Air Force One has departed? Tell your replacements I’ve said they can take the time off to watch the launch. Four, I think, may keep a secret. Anymore, and it will surely get out.”

 

July 12^th

Milando Spaceport

“Madam President. A pleasure to meet again.”

“Indeed, Mr Humboldt, indeed. I’m not sure whether I should be clapping at your audacity or clapping you in irons. That may depend, of course, on what exactly happens today.”

From the top of the steps leading up to Air Force One Matt Vane looked on with wry amusement as his political mistress shook hands with the would-be master of Mars. He found himself wondering once more if time might yet erase for him again that prefix ‘political’.

It had gone well in Luanda. He had spent a quiet moment at the statue of Jemmy Cato. She, meanwhile, had moved the pieces on the diplomatic chessboard a little in America’s favour. She had always been a formidable chess player, even back in Radcliffe.

The genteel dominance contest of greeting over, Humboldt and the President walked side by side along a red carpet that had been rolled out across the runway, and strolled towards the waiting motorcade. Vane was impressed an operation like this had had such a carpet – or, that if it hadn’t, it had been able to get one all the way out here at so little notice. Then again, who knew which dignitaries the megalomaniac Humboldt had been entertaining behind their backs? He really had, Vane silently reprimanded himself, slipped up quite badly in not paying proper attention to the fellow before.

He walked down the steps himself and along the carpet, dutifully behind host and guest, in the middle of a knot of presidential aides. The vehicles, he saw as they approached them, were Toyotas. That struck a sour note, the President riding in a Japanese 4x4. Were American trucks not good enough for Humboldt?

The two alphas, female and male, got in the first of the Land Cruisers. The President even waved away her Secret Service detail – an old trick of hers for putting the opposition at ease. Only the football carrier joined her in Humboldt’s transport. The Service-men and the aides scrambled for precedence in the other trucks. Vane chose not to join the scrum. It was beneath his dignity. He walked straight to the rearmost, found a seat and plonked himself down in it.

The convoy set off. For the first time since they had arrived, Vane’s eye left the human spectacle and roamed the landscape. It was awesome in the way the African bush is always awesome. It was primeval. A man had only to stand in it for his hunter-gathering ancestry to come welling up unbidden. His genes knew – somehow really knew – that this was Home. But even the primeval was here and there being shaped by the hand of man. He could see in the distance the rocket whose launch they had come to witness. Closer by were the paraphernalia of space travel – giant hangars and blast-proof block houses. These, too, were awesome in their way. This was apparatus that only nations normally chose to afford. If he had ever doubted Humboldt’s seriousness, which he had, he did so no longer.

 

July 12^th

Milando Spaceport control tower

“Rick. We’ve got incoming.”

“What?”

“There. Look. From the east.”

“Christ. How fast?”

“Subsonic. Range 45 kilometres. Speed… 160 knots. Hang on. I recognise that signature. It’s the Mriya. What the hell’s going on? Tell Humboldt. I’ll try to contact them.”

Carter put the headphones on and pressed the comms button.

“Alpha Foxtrot. Calling Alpha Foxtrot. This is Milando Control. Acknowledge, please, and kindly explain what is happening. Contact with you was lost over the Gulf of Oman. Everyone thought you’d crashed.”

Nothing

“This is Milando Control calling unidentified aircraft, bearing 87 degrees, range 43 kilometres. Is that you, Alpha Foxtrot?”

Still nothing

“Milando Control to unidentified aircraft, bearing 87 degrees, range 42 kilometres. Please acknowledge. You are putting your aircraft at risk by continuing to approach, and failing to acknowledge.”

Still nothing

“Okay, Steve. We have a situation. Alert air defences. It’s surely got to be them, but with the Pres here we can’t afford to take chances.”

“Milando Control. This is Alpha Foxtrot. We acknowledge.”

“Thank God for that, Alpha Foxtrot. We were just about to arm the missile batteries. What happened to you, Bob? Masirah lost contact with you just after Gwadar. We thought you must have ditched. And how did you get here without refuelling?

There was a pause.

“Sorry, Milando Control. We’ve been having comms problems all day. We thought Chang Zeng had alerted you. There was a difficulty with the cargo. One of the F7s failed final inspection. We did the sums and realised that without the cargo we could get back in time for the launch if we set off anyway and didn’t stop for fuel. We didn’t think the boss would mind in the circs. I’ve been hauling those damned Chimborazos from China to Angola for months, now. I don’t see why you lot should get to drink all the Champagne when the last one goes off.”

“Okay, Alpha Foxtrot. Continue your approach.”

“Thanks, Milando Control.”

“Thanks, Alpha Foxtrot. We’ll see you in ten minutes.”

Carter clicked off the mike.

“That’s bollocks. Chang Zheng would have told us if they’d left without the goods. And it doesn’t explain how Masirah lost sight of them. And something else. You’ve only been here a couple of weeks, haven’t you? So don’t really know Armstrong yet.”

“Barely met the man. Why?”

“He can’t drink Champagne. He had to give up the booze three years ago. He’s teetotal.”