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She stepped on to the station for the first time since the accident. The KGB had cleared the floor and walls. They'd been forced to lease a scrubber from a cleaning company that specialized in scouring spacecraft. It used high-pressure jets to liquefy the human remains, and then hoovered them up. There were four big tanks of the stuff now and there was a lot of debate about what to do with them. Ming suggested painting the tanks black and half embedding them in puff concrete. Line them up in Constitution Plaza, put up some plaques and you have an instant memorial.

Some wag of a pundit had suggested that since most politicians were slime, death had merely caused them to revert to their natural state. The Justice Ministry was probably raiding its databases right now, looking for a law to arrest him with Ming put her money on Seditious Abuse, five to ten with time off for good behaviour. Politicians had no sense of humour.

The scrubber had left melted-looking score marks on the floor, particularly bad to the rear of where the podium had been. Where the rented crowd had been standing the slime had been three centimetres thick. Event Horizon had lost three hundred of its best performers that day and was threatening to sue the Transit System for negligence.

Lambada was waiting by the Stunnel gateway. She had the left-hand access panel open. Colour coded bundles of fibre optics sprouted from the open panel and merged into a braided cable a handspan across at the base. The cable went into the back of a stack of portable monitors.

The gateway looked just as greasy as Ming remembered it and just as unpleasant. She made a point of keeping out of its line of sight. The drone hummed along behind her.

'You're going to love this,' repeated the Dogface drone.

'You just repeated yourself,' Ming told it.

'Who gives a shit?' said the drone.

'Piss off,' said Lambada and hit the drone with the live end of a power cable. The drone backed off two metres and hung about looking sullen.

Say what you like about Dogface, thought Ming, when he gives a drone a personality, it's got a personality.

'All right Lambada, what've you got?'

Lambada punched up a graph on one of her monitors. 'Spin rate,' she said. The graph line was curving gently upwards.

'Is it supposed to be doing that?'

'Not really,' said Lambada. 'It looks like an initiation curve but real slow.'

'But not from this end?'

'No way, there's no juice going in at our end - I checked.'

'Can the tunnel be initiated from the other end?'

Lambada shook her head. 'Has to be both ends at once, principle of interstitial synchronicity.'

'Are the Acturans doing it?'

'Not a word down the carrier wave since the "incident".'

'And it's twenty-six years each way for radio.'

Lambada put a different graph on the next monitor along. It was a scaled-up version of the first. 'See that?' she asked. 'That's a projection of the spin increase. Whoever's doing it is going to be ready to come through in fortty-eight hours.' 'If we let them,' said Ming.

'If we let them,' said Lambada. 'We're not going to do that, are we?'

'No way.'

'Good, because whatever's at the other end of that tunnel,' said Lambada, 'it isn't the Acturans,'

PART TWO

And Thucydides said: 'Consider the vast influence of accident in war before you are engaged in it. As it continues it generally becomes an affair of chances from which neither of us is exempt, and whose event we must risk in the dark.'

The Doctor considered this for a long moment as he watched the waves of the Aegean break against the Piraievs breakwater.

'Speak for yourself,' said the Doctor.

Conversations that never happened.

6: Red Queen

Sol Transit System

It had been created out of endless movement. It had a certain degree of self-knowledge, more when it was using quick-thought than when it was thinking slow. Slow-thought was more comforting; in slow-thought it had only the most basic awareness of human beings. Quick-thought gave it access to the total sum of human knowledge but much