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When Mondrian arrived, the assault on the trapdoor spider’s lair had been in its preparatory stages. The spectators’ gallery was almost empty. There was one young woman wearing the blue worker’s uniform of a Pentecost colonist, and a tall, thin man with a full beard. He seemed more interested in the players themselves than in the quarry, the battlefield, or the simulacra.

The first close-up of the spider was daunting, even to one who never intended to play Adestis. It sat motionless at the bottom of its trap, holding in its front limbs the drained husk of a millipede. It was easy to imagine that the multiple eyes on its curved back were aware of the watchers, far above.

Mondrian stared down thoughtfully at the spider. Adestis led to real deaths, through pain and stress. If his arrangement with Skrynol for the Anabasis did not work out, and Dougal MacDougal became an impossible problem — could Adestis provide a convenient solution? How many times had it been used in the past, to get rid of a troublesome official?

Mondrian took that thought with him when he went back to Lotos Sheldrake and Godiva Lomberd. He sat down to evaluate its potential, and listened to the women’s conversation with half an ear. He had been there only a few minutes when the uproar began in the adjoining control room.

Godiva came instantly to her feet. “Luther! In there!” she cried, and dashed to the chamber door. By the time that Mondrian and Sheldrake had followed her inside she was at Luther Brachis’s side. She was supporting him and staring horrified at the scene around her.

Brachis was standing, white-faced but erect. His right forearm ended just beyond the wrist in a bloody stump. Mondrian glanced at the pools of blood and the bodies surrounding Brachis. They were beyond help. He went across to the other commander, lifted his arm, and checked the tourniquet. “No blood loss now. I don’t think much of that on the floor is yours. Take it easy. We’ll have you to the hospital in a few minutes.”

“Thanks. Sorry about the mess in here.” Brachis nodded at the wounded arm. “Injuries getting to be a bit of a habit, don’t you think?”

“It’ll grow back.”

“Yeah. Teach me not to bite my nails.” Brachis gave Godiva a death’s-head smile. “It’s all right, Goddy. Just me and Mondrian playing word games, to make sure I’m not going to pass out. Blood supply to the brain, you see.’

“Your arm — ”

“ — will be all right. Don’t worry about it. I’ll just have to sign my name left-handed for a while.”

MEMORANDUM FROM: Luther Brachis, Commander of Solar System Security.

TO: All security posts.

SUBJECT: Countermeasures for terrorist activities.

Effective immediately, the following special security measures will go into effect throughout the Inner System:

1) All travellers leaving Earth will be required to travel via Link Exit facilities. All other travel will be prohibited until further notice.

2) All travellers leaving Earth will be subjected to chromosome ID checks. ID’s will be compared with reference ID (attached). In the event of a correlation exceeding 0.95, the traveller must be detained for questioning by Central Security.

3) All off-Earth awakenings from storage facilities will be subject to direct supervision. Wakers will be subject to chromosome ID checks against reference ID. In the event of a correlation exceeding 0.95, the waker must be detained for questioning by Central Security.

4) Any traveller using Link facilities and whose appearance resembles the margrave of Fujitsu (image attached) must be detained for questioning by Central Security.

5) Any off-Earth disposition of assets from the estate of the Margrave of Fujitsu must be reported to Central Security.

Luther Brachis stared at the stump of his hand. The nubs of new fingers were already beginning to bulge under synthetic skin. He wiggled them experimentally.

“Itches like the plague.” He tapped the sheet in front of him with his left hand. “Think this will do it? I don’t think so. I’m willing to wager we don’t catch him.”

Mondrian shook his head. “No takers. Not if he was as smart as you seem to think. He must have planned this for years, ever since he created his first facsimile Artefact. The next one could look like anything.”

“I know. That’s why I’m worried.”

“You’ll be all right. Stay well-armed. You’ve got the training to handle any number of Margraves, one-handed or two.”

“You don’t understand.” Brachis placed his hand on the gun that sat on the table in front of him. “I’m not worried for myself, I’ll blow ’em away before they get near me. But suppose that bastard takes a shot at Godiva?”

Chapter 22

Dear Chan,

This is a letter that I never expected to write, a message I never dreamed I would send, especially (don’t misunderstand this) to you. But it’s our first night down on Travancore, and I’m flat out scared. Tonight I wish you and I were still down in the Gallimaufries, watching Bozzie preach self-denial while he gobbled down a dozen waffles with honey.

If we can’t be together, at least let me babble at you for a while. We — the team, I mean, they gave us a rotten name, Team Alpha, but I hope we’ll come up with something better for ourselves — anyway, my team, Team Alpha or whatever, we weren’t allowed to bring a Martin Link ship anywhere near Travancore. No matter what happens here, Commander Mondrian won’t risk the Morgan Construct having access to a Link again. So this message will be fired off to the ship, a million kilometers away, then through a Link back to Sol, then through the Censor’s office, and then, if everything works out right, you’ll get it before you leave Barchan. Good luck down there. The last word I had, you have the hottest Pursuit Team they’ve seen since training began. I hope so — and I hope you will never have to visit Travancore. Because if you do, it will mean that we have failed.

I said that we are “down on Travancore” but that’s more like a figure of speech than anything else. We don’t know where the true surface of the planet begins. No one does. We’re hanging in a sort of half-balloon tent with a flat, flexible base, about a hundred feet down from the topmost growths of vegetation. There’s another five-kilometers-plus of plant life underneath us.

Animal life, too. We saw the first signs of that on the low-altitude automated survey. The whole planet is riddled with holes, circular shafts about five meters across. They dive down from the top layers, and at first we thought they might be natural rain channels because it rains every day over most of Travancore. But now we’re not so sure. S’glya — she’s the Pipe-Rilla on our team — saw something Dig wriggling away down one of the tunnels when we were flying in. Scary. But I was mainly happy that it wasn’t the Morgan Construct, because we were a sitting target. I tried to hide my panicky feeling but of course it didn’t work. S’glya has this absolutely uncanny ability to read human feelings and she told the others.

They didn’t seem worried. It’s an unpleasant thought for me, the idea that soon we’ll be heading down one of those tunnels, but the Tinker feels quite different about that. It argues that the tunnels are a big boon to us, since without them it would take forever to explore the vertical forest on Travancore. Maybe it will take forever anyway. We’ll know, as soon as we get down to the interior.

Even before we made the final descent we decided that the training program had missed the point. We were sent to Dembricot for final training, because it’s a vegetation world like Travancore and everyone thought it would be good experience for this place.

Logical idea, but totally wrong. You must have seen the training films of Dembricot by now. Flat, water plains of plant growth, but they’re no more like Travancore than Barchan is. This planet is dense, tangled hillocks of jungle, boiling up in swirls and breakers like one of Earth’s seas in a bad storm.