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There were more police and emergency service teams working in clusters. The path of Zamina's flight across the concourse was marked by strings of black and yellow police tape. As she followed them she saw the burnt out shell of a police-drone smothered in foam. Beneath it the ersatz marble flooring had cracked and melted.

Zamina, thought Benny. Should have converted her when I had the chance, but the Doctor would have spotted it.

'These escalators are closed,' said a STS guard.

Benny peered over his shoulder. The escalators were frozen in place. More police and drones were working along them.

'I have to get to Olympus Mons,' she told the guard.

'You'll have to take the East Olympus Loop from Carver,' said the guard. 'Are you all right?'

'Sorry?'

'You're limping.'

'It's just a sprain,' said Benny. 'High G handball.'

'Carver station is just over there,' said the guard. 'Be careful with that ankle.'

Thanks,' said Benny.

She walked in the direction the guard had indicated, trying to stop her right leg from dragging. There was a washroom on the way and she ducked inside. She stared hard at her face in the mirrored wall above the washbasins. The right side of her face seemed slack looking. When she probed it with her fingertips it felt normal enough, the right eyelid drooping slightly. She carefully lifted the eyelid. The eye looked normal enough apart from the whites being a bit bloodshot.

Her nose was still painful to touch.

She opened the tap and splashed cold water on her face, blinking and widening her eyes until the drooping stopped. She took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. Trying to clear her mind with a mantra she'd picked up while digging on Proxima IV.

She didn't have time for distractions. She had a schedule to keep, people to see, power subsystems to sabotage.

Jacksonville

The computer that handled emergency services in the Olympus Mons administrative district was feeding contradictory reports into the Martian Police subsystem. Operators in the Olympus Mons West human response centre were jabbing HOSTILE ACTION icons as soon as they appeared on their screens Sixty-five per cent of responses indicated criminal activity, thirty-one per cent terrorism but four per cent were marked 'UNKNOWN'. Out on the concourse at Olympus Mons West a medical-drone ran a deep scan on a body and found significant variations from the human norm. As empirical sensor data the drone's report was given a weighted three per cent addition to the unknown total, pushing it past its five per cent response threshold.

Crossing the threshold activated a subroutine within the civil operating system that had lain dormant for twenty-five years In an EMP-shielded bunker under the military cantonment at Jacksonville a stand-alone mainframe with the code designation of JERUSALEM powered up. Acting on the long-forgotten assumption that the Martians had left 'stay behind' units in cryogenic storage, JERUSALEM put Jacksonville on a stage one alert.

JERUSALEM activated its surveillance net, calling in data from the chain of military satellites that should have been strung out in gee-stationary orbits. The satellites had long ago been decommissioned or switched over to the civil net. JERUSALEM, programmed by people who had just fought a long and bloody war, attributed the loss of the satellites to enemy action.

The alert was jacked up to stage two, with the possibility of a trans-orbital threat.

JERUSALEM had better luck with the static radar at the summit of Olympus Mons. It spotted a fast-moving trace from the south east, altitude five hundred metres. The target's transponder signal was absent from the IFF registry.

JERUSALEM cycled through its weapons options and found that all its ground-based energy weapons and close defence ordinance was disabled. There were surface-to-air missile sites still operational, an unfamiliar specification, but the front end instructions interfaced adequately with the computer's command structure. JERUSALEM assimilated the missile's