Greg used his espersense to locate the mind he wanted; four metres from the wasp, slightly below. He pushed the wish into the insect's instinct-governed brain. A need to fly towards the man sitting at the desk. Wings blurred furiously.
"You just want the stinger changed?" Jools the Tool had asked Greg curiously that morning. He was a small man, dressed all in black. Round gold-rimmed glasses shielded his damp eyes with pink-tinted lenses. His chalk-white skin looked unhealthy, though Greg wrote it off as partly due to the time of day. The sun hadn't risen when he rang the pet shop's bell.
"Yeah," Greg said. "That's all."
"So how are you going to control it?"
"I'm a gland psychic."
Jools the Tool nodded a grudging acknowledgement, and led him past the cages of sleeping animals to his cubbyhole surgery at the rear of the shop.
The operation hadn't taken long. Greg stood behind the little Frankenstein surgeon, watching the microscope's flatscreen over his shoulder. It showed the wasp, magnified to thirty centimetres long, held down with silk binding sheaths. Micro-surgical instruments delicately amputated its stinger, and stitched in a wicked-looking hollow dagger to replace it. Blades and clamps danced with hypnotic agility around the yellow-and-black striped abdomen, responding to the waldo handles which Jools the Tool was caressing.
"I've primed it with a shot of AMRE7D," he told Greg as the artificial stinger was filled with a clear fluid. "It's a neurotoxin, one of the best. Once it's in the bloodstream, you've got a maximum of twenty seconds before death occurs."
The back of the man's head was distinguishable now, hair like a logjam, lunar mare of skin. Greg guided the wasp down to the nape of the neck, allowing the insect's own instincts to take over for the landing. When the warmth of the skin pressed against its legs, his mind shouted out the compulsion. The wasp thrust its composite stinger into the skin, expelling the AMRE7D in a single blast.
Clifford Jepson's hand swatted the wasp, his yell of surprise and pain rattling round the office.
Greg focused himself on the boiling thought currents. I want you to know something before you die, Jepson, his mind whispered. I want you to know why.
Clifford Jepson's muscles had locked rigid, maybe from terror, maybe from the neurotoxin. Greg looked out through bugged eyes, feeling throat muscles like iron bands, hands clawing at the chair's leather arms.
You were offered an honourable chance to end the madness over atomic structuring. You refused it because you thought you could squeeze more money from the deal. You were greedy, Jepson. And that greed killed my friend. It might have been your psycho-cyborg Reiger who pulled the trigger, but you loaded his program, you ran him. Now you're going to die because of it. I'm glad, and I hate you for that as well.
Greg cancelled the gland's secretion, and opened his eyes. He was sitting in the passenger seat of a navy-blue Lada Sokol, parked in the shade of a Japanese umbrella pine in a big open-air car park. Fifty metres in front of him, the ornate carved stone of the stately home which Globecast used as its European headquarters burned brightly in the mid-morning sun. A flock of white birds were flying through Kent's cloudless azure sky overhead.
"Did you close the deal?" Col Charnwood asked.
"Yeah."
"Good." Col Charnwood flicked the Lada Sokol into gear and drove carefully out of the car park.
Some time after midnight Charlotte pulled on a white silk robe and went out on to the balcony to enjoy the cool breeze that blew in from the Fens basin. It was so refreshing after the sweltering heat of the day. She let it ruffle her hair as she gazed up at the night sky. The alien solar sail was definitely smaller tonight. It had been crawling away from New London over the last few days, now it was low in the south-east, while the fuzzy patch of the asteroid's archipelago glowed above the western horizon.
According to the channel newscasts, light pressure from the Sun was constantly accelerating it. She hadn't known that light could exert pressure; apparently it could. A tiny pressure, but the sail's surface area was the size of a small country, making the overall force colossal. In another twenty days it would reach solar escape velocity; after that it could go wherever it chose in the galaxy. Several times since returning from New London, Charlotte had found herself thinking what it must be like having that much freedom. What a wonderful thing to be able to roam the universe at will, searching out wonders and horrors. And to voyage so majestically, sailing on a sunbeam.
She had never seen a star so gloriously radiant. It was probably bright enough to cast a shadow at night; but Peterborough's permanent light haze made it impossible to know for sure.
They had a good view of the city from their penthouse in the Castlewood condominium, especially the futureopolis of Prior's Fen Atoll. The day they moved in she spent hours on the balcony staring out at the mega-structures that seemed to float on the green-hued swamp.
She thought it strange that she had never visited Peterborough before; after all it was an incredible focal point for wealth. But after she arrived, she realized it ordered a different sort of money to the type she was used to. Peterborough's money was active money, it was finance consortium muscle, corporate power, political influence; the only gambling here was the venture capital backing industrial research lab. Nobody hoarded money in Peterborough, they worked it; the static, emasculated trusts which enabled her patrons to glide indulgently through life shrank from this city's vitality.
Prior's Fen epitomized the new culture, bold, purposeful architecture sticking two defiant fingers up to the dead past. The antithesis of Monaco.
It had been a long journey between the two cities and the physical distance was the least of the gulf she had bridged. But now she'd found it, she knew she wouldn't be leaving.
There were stockbrokers to see in the morning. A new chapter of life to begin.
Victor Tyo had brought Dmitri Baronski's private memory cores with him when he returned from the Prezda with her furniture and clothes and trinkets. "I figured you were the best person to sort through the bytes," he had told her. "The rest of Baronski's girls should be told where they stand. And somehow I don't think they'll be too keen on hearing it from me."
She'd given every piece of that clothing to a charity shop in Stanground, along with the cheaper jewellery. The other girls she had called one at a time, telling them the way it was now, arranging for them to pick up their cut from Dmitri's Zurich account. But the rest of the data, the finance and industry gossip the old man was supposed to squirt over to the Dolgoprudnensky, that was interesting. She could see some valuable deals opening up if the knowledge was exploited properly by Fabian's cargo agents.
The breeze was growing chilly now. She went back into the bedroom, sliding the glass door shut behind her. Fragments of the city's street lighting leaked round the edges of the curtains, giving the room's white furniture a phosphorescent hue.
Fabian was asleep, sprawled belly down across the double bed where she'd left him. She wondered if it was illegal for a guardian to sleep with her ward. More than likely. If only he wasn't so terribly young. But he was hers for three whole years, until he was eighteen. Nothing in her life had lasted three years before. And after three years, well… Dreams were part of Peterborough too.
She smiled down at him, and slipped the robe from her shoulders. He stirred as she slid on to the bed beside him.