As the scout ship threaded its way towards Lykis Integer, Anneke Longshadow thought about what she had uncovered on the dreadnought. It was undoubtedly an M-Class Destroyer, but it was a hulk, derelict, drifting in space for a thousand years, and looters had gutted it before that. Anneke had found nothing to suggest that the ship could be recommissioned as anything but a symbol of its once formidable power. For now, despite the efforts of the newly established crew, it seemed an empty shell. But Anneke did not doubt the power of symbols, espe cially in the hands of Nathaniel Brown.

Indeed, one purpose would be in appeasing the diehards and critics within the Majoris Corporata. She suspected that the mole had promised them enormous power if they supported him unconditionally and that power had to lie in what the lost coordinates would unearth. And lo and behold, a dreadnought turns up.Just when the mole needed it.

Almost as if it had been put there on purpose. Anneke arrived on Lykis early one morning. She had barely docked when Jake appeared, hurrying her, under armed escort, out a side entrance. He sped her through Immigration under the alias of Amira Kodis, with special envoy status and immunity.

In a secure safe house, Anneke demanded to know what was going on.

‘Quesada has issued a fatwa against you,’ said Jake, dropping tiredly into a chair. ‘We should have expected this.’

‘Guess I just lost my invisibility.’

‘Let’s hope that’s all you lose.’

‘Any way to reverse it?’

‘I’m looking into it. A fiduciary gift might help. Even Brown can’t pervert the normal course of “business”. His shareholders would be up in arms.’

‘That’s a lot of money.’

Jake shrugged that off. ‘RIM has slush funds for such things. You think it’s the first time somebody issued a fatwa against a RIM agent? Hell, at one time it was a nice source of income for the Companies. That’s not what worries me.’

‘Brown has a stranglehold on the Majoris Corporata.’

‘And now he’s got himself a dreadnought.’ Anneke nodded. ‘Buying back the kill-rights might not work, shareholders or not.’

‘It’s worth a try though. Until then, you should stay here.’

‘Who else knows about this place?’

‘Nobody. Just my team, all of whom are here and will stay here, and me.’

‘Brown has ways,Jake.’

‘I know.’

‘I’m not staying cooped up in a safe house.’

‘Anneke -’

‘How do you know that isn’t exactly what he wants?’

Jake slumped, ever so slightly. ‘I don’t. But neither do you.’ He sighed and changed the subject. ‘Tell me about the ship.’

Anneke filled him in on her excursion aboard the dreadnought. She left out the details involving the Envoy’s frenzied attack - that was just ‘collateral action’ and not germane to the core mission - and focused on her assessments of the dreadnought’s capability. She passed Jake a datt wafer file of the downloads she’d been able to score. They would need more detailed analysis.

‘So it’s your opinion that the craft cannot be restored to its original design specs?’

‘Not unless there is a new factor I’m not aware of But I don’t like it. I don’t like it one little bit.’

‘It does seem coincidental,’ agreedJake.

‘Too coincidental, if you ask me.’

Jake shrugged. ‘Coincidences happen, Anneke. You know what the RIM mystics say: The Universe moves in mysterious ways.’

‘So what now?’

‘You lay low. I’ll try to reverse the fatwa. If not, we’ll get you off planet.’

‘I’m not running away,Jake.’

‘Nobody said you were.’

‘I need to put a team together.’ Anneke did not sound happy at this prospect. In the past, she had always operated alone.

Jake stared at her. ‘Since when did you become a team player?’

Anneke smiled. ‘Since I became a big fat target.’

Anneke looked around the underground complex. It was three hundred metres beneath the bottommost levels of Lykis Integer’s subsurface suburbs, that great crammed underbelly that covered most of the planet. Fat Fraddo showed her around.

‘Built it during my paranoid phase,’ said Fat Fraddo, waving a jewelled hand around.

‘Reinforced two-metre thick walls, electrified inner superconductor leaf, in-built deflector dampener fields, self-sensing internal sweepers, diagnostic cores, and every hi-tech anti-listening, anti-locating and anti-gizmatron money can buy. No expense spared. Got me nine escape routes, too. Full spectrum monitoring comm system. And it’ll take a one-hundred kiloton detonation with almost total conduction dampening.’

‘So my teeth stay in my head, right?’

‘Right. So this is what you want, girl?’ Fat Fraddo, all two-hundred-and-forty kilograms of him, eyed her oddly, like she was a six-year-old asking for a rocket launcher. Long ago, Anneke had saved Fraddo’s life. He had never forgotten.

‘This is exactly what I want.’ Anneke’s eyes gleamed. If she had known Black’s own underground complex was a mere ten kilometres away she might have thought twice, but given the level of concealment each bunker system possessed, the two might as well have been on different planets. Indeed, they would have more easily detected each other if they had been.

‘Heard you a fatwaan.’

Anneke nodded and grinned. ‘You tempted, Fraddo?’

‘Girl, you own my kill-rights. Just say the word and I’ll introduce Mr Brown to his own personal everlastin’ nightmare.’

Anneke put a hand on Fraddo’s arm. ‘Stay away from Brown, Fraddo. You’re the nicest bad guy I know. Brown’s something else. A psychopath for starters.’

Fraddo harrumphed. ‘Anything you say, Anneke.’

‘So how about joining my team?’

Fraddo stared at her for a moment then burst out laughing. His huge shoulders shook and his belly rippled like jelly. ‘Now where’s the percentage in that?’

Fraddo turned to go then swung back. ‘Hey, you heard the news, girl?’

‘What news?’

‘You should get out more.’ Fraddo frowned.

‘On second thoughts, you shouldn’t get out more.’ Anneke rolled her eyes, gesturing for Fraddo to spill it. ‘General Rocheford has been put out to space dock. Ill health they say.’

Anneke’s eyes narrowed.

‘And that ole electoral college of High Command? Well, they gone and voted. And guess what? Major General Oderon ‘’Asshole” Rench got the ticket. Looks like you got yourself a new boss, sweetie.’

Fat Fraddo waddled off to his especially enlarged drop tube. Anneke stared after him, horrified.

A shadow moved among the shadows. Neither of the moons of Lykis was up yet and thick clouds obscured even the stars. It was as dark as night could be and the rooftops of the Draco Quarter were locked in blackness.

But nothing seemed to deter, or slow, the shadow.

The figure moved with sure-footed grace across slanting roofs, over ventilation housings, and through standard Mark IV deflector fields, the type sold in every chainstore.

You always got what you paid for, Anneke reflected.

Then flinched as she remembered the fatwa against her. The mole was paying a lot to have her liquidated.

The irony was that Brown himself was the target of a fatwa and had been for a year now. The Myoto Company, which Brown had ex-communicated from the Cartel (overtly) and from the Majons Corporata (covertly) had issued the kill order. Protected by his position within Quesada, the full brunt of the fatwa diminished. But it was still there, a thorn - though a small one - in Brown’s side.

Anneke hoped to enlarge that thorn. Or create a new one of her own.

She moved deeper into the Draco Quarter, that surface section of Lykis colonised by wealthy criminal elements, whose wealth made the quarter a no-go area for ordinary cops and, to some extent, for RIM operatives.

The Draco Quarter was also where Fat Fraddo had his primary headquarters and where each of the major Companies and Clans had ‘embassies’

- front organisations that liaised with the criminal underworld and in which the Companies and Clans owned substantial (but usually untraceable) stocks and shares. It often paid to have good connections with the criminal world. Criminals were, by definition, expendable. And they did not have to be ‘claimed’ when things went wrong. In such a situation, they were cut loose. Abandoned. Denied.

Of course, one had to pay hefty premiums for professional deniability.

Anneke came to a sharply sloping roof and cat- footed across it. That’s when she stumbled.

A moment’s glitch was all it took. She lost her balance on the dew-slick surface and started to slide. The slide became a wild skid towards the yawning edge of the roof and a drop of twenty floors.

Anneke threw herself down, lying full length on the rooftop. Her mind shifted into overdrive. She had two options. She could activate a sticky grappling field that would slow her slide and even stop it, but which would set off every sensor alarm within three hundred metres.

Or she could fall.

She decided on the latter. A 3-D memory tattoo of the Draco Quarter told her what was below the roof edge. It whipped towards her as she picked up speed. She reviewed it in her mind’s eye, the whole process taking less time than a blink.

A courtyard, seven metres wide, then another building, sixteen floors high. A fall of fifteen metres. Barely doable. She calculated swiftly and realised she needed more speed, not less.

She twisted round, sliding headfirst. Then, with every instinct crying out for her to stop her slide, she started paddling, pushing herself down the sloping surface faster and faster.

Suddenly she shot out into space.

And fell.

She did a half forward roll which her momentum completed, so her feet pointed to the ground. The roof of the opposite building, happily sloping in the other direction and ending in a rooftop garden, rushed up at her as she arced across the gap, dropping like a stone. The chill night air rushed past her.

She had to do this just right, first time.

The angle of the other roof was in her favour. Forty degrees. That would lessen the impact. Her Normanskian muscles, which turned her powerful legs into equally powerful shock absorbers, had to do the rest.

Hit. Roll. Slide.

That was what it would have to - Ooooomph!

The impact smashed the air from her lungs, making her gasp as pain shocked through her limbs. Then she was rolling, relaxing into a slide, which ended in a tree as she fell into the rooftop garden.

Then all was still. Anneke blinked, her senses reeling, compensating, and calculating. She took three quick deep breaths, the body mnemonic for shutdown.

Her pulse subsided and her breathing returned to normal. Then it spiked again when a voice, below her, said, ‘Can you get my kitten while you’re up there?’

Anneke peered down. A little girl was staring up at her with a tear-stained face. Anneke looked about, finally spotting the kitten scrunched tightly into a fork, terrified at the large intruder.

Anneke dropped out of the tree and handed the girl her kitten, which immediately buried itself, trembling, into her woolly top.

‘She’s such a bad girl!’

‘Somehow, I don’t think she’ll do a lot of tree climbing after this,’ Anneke said, then added under her breath, ‘me neither, if it comes to that.’

‘What were you doing in my tree?’ asked the girl.

‘I . . . er . . .’ Anneke sighed. Kids and their questions. She decided to tell the truth. ‘I fell off that building over there.’ She pointed.

‘What were you doing up there?’ Just ... getting some fresh air.’

‘You shouldn’t be in the tree.’

‘Sweetie, you are so right. I have to go now. You take care of your kitten, okay?’

‘I will. Her name’s Curly.’

Anneke scratched Curly under the chin, then, using her memory tattoo to guide her, climbed onto the adjacent rooftop and continued on her way. A few minutes later she was within sight of her destination.

This was the headquarters of the Ekud ‘embassy’, a front for the Ekud K’dar, a ruthless criminal ‘family’. Just as many freedom fighter organisations in the past had political arms that sought changes through the political system, so many crime families had bifurcated into a crime group and affiliated Clan. Ekud was one of these. The Clan existed in the public eye and did business as normal. It represented the legit and semi-legit interests of the founding family, the Ekud K’dar.

But the Clan also offered ‘embassy space’ and ‘relations’ to any who would pay. Companies such as Imperial Standard, who preferred others to do their dirty work for them.

Anneke penetrated the building’s rooftop defences with little difficulty, partly because few would willingly step inside the lion’s den, and the bulk of their protective systems were designed to stop people - and information - getting out.

Nor were they any match for cutting-edge RIM technology. Or for Anneke Longshadow.

The fact that Fat Fraddo had a mole in the building and a complete readout of its defences, had nothing to do with it, Anneke assured herself. That just made it easier and cleaner.

When Royce Bodanis woke up he found himself staring at a reeker - a nasty weapon with a nastier reputation.

He sat up slowly, keeping his hands where the beautiful woman holding the reeker could see them.

‘It’s been some time since girls sneaked into my bedroom at night,’ he said, conversationally. Anneke smiled, lowering the reeker slightly.

‘How can I help you?’ Bodanis asked.

‘Maybe I can help you.’

‘Ah. Altruism. That usually costs more.’

‘You can afford it, trust me.’

‘I don’t suppose you’d tell me your name?’

‘Anneke Longshadow.’

Bodanis started, and then stared at her more closely. Slowly, he nodded. ‘Indeed, I recognise you now. The deceased Ms Longshadow, back from the grave. An upset in certain circles.’

‘Every ointment has its fly.’

‘Indeed. So what can I do for such a beautiful fly?’

‘I hear you are no friend to Nathaniel Brown.’ Bodanis made a face. ‘Mr Brown and I have our differences.’

‘Mr Brown has an M-Class Destroyer.’

Bodanis’ eyes widened. ‘A dreadnought? He has found the -?’ He stopped.

‘No, he has not found the lost coordinates. Not yet, at any rate, and not for a while, I would guess. But he has found a derelict dreadnought adrift in space.’ She told him of the vessel’s condition and what she had found on board.

Bodanis sat back, appraising her. ‘And why tell me all of this, Ms Longshadow? Are we friends now?’

‘We all need friends.’

‘Indeed we do. But still I ask why?’

‘Mr Brown will seek to use the destroyer as more than a mere pawn in his chess game. He will undoubtedly wish to inflate its ... value.’

‘Is it to be the stick or the carrot?’

‘Perhaps both. But its power is as a symbol, as the manifest ghost of a long dead empire. It may be of greater importance than any of us can imagine.’

Bodanis nodded with an inward look. ‘A relic of empire. No object in our history has ever been imbued with more superstition, more mystical significance, than the dreadnought.’

‘The ability to destroy an entire world is still part of our collective nightmare,’ murmured Anneke.

Bodanis nodded again and looked up at her. ‘I thank you for this information. Is there a price?’ Anneke shrugged. ‘Friendship.’

‘Then I am in your debt. So let me repay a small portion of it now.’

Anneke stiffened suddenly. Was the old man about to try something? Bodanis saw her sudden alertness and smiled. ‘Please. I like to believe I am a man of honour.’ He lowered his voice. ‘I understand you are a friend of one Fat Fraddo?’

Anneke looked at him in surprise.

Bodanis waved her reaction away. ‘We all have sources of information, Ms Longshadow. So let me tell you something. Even as we sit here, our mutual friend, Mr Brown, is attacking Fat Fraddo’s headquarters. It seems Mr Brown never forgets a slight. Nor does he wish for you to have so many .. . friends.’

Bodanis blinked. Anneke was gone. Never had he seen a human move so fast.