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By Root 1821 0

When he sent the disc to his daughter a month ago, suggesting she meet him here for dinner today, he wondered later if he had been wise. He might have been too busy while in Paris to keep the engagement, or the Organisation might have been onto him, in which case he would not have dared show himself. In the event, he was neither too busy nor in danger. Circumstances could not have worked out better. Everything was going according to plan, and today he had no other appointments or duties to fulfil. During the night, Sassoon had arranged the transportation and installation of the flux-tank; word was this morning that they had fully integrated the tank with the shipboard logic-matrix and the smallship was almost ready to test-run. As expected, Mirren and Leferve had leapt at the opportunity to push the 'ship; Elliott and Olafson had yet to be approached as back-ups, but it would be no major concern if for whatever reasons they, like Caspar Fekete, declined his offer.

On the wider front, he had heard from the Rim this morning that the resistance was going well. Cells of Enginemen on the Reach had targeted vital Danzig installations, power stations, dams, airports and military bases, and caused maximum damage with a minimum loss of life. Yesterday a suicide squad of Disciples had sabotaged the interface on the Reach, not only putting it out of action temporarily to staunch the military build-up, which was the intention, but wrecking the 'face to the extent that it would be inoperable for up to a month. Hennessy's Reach was effectively cut off, isolated.

Thoughts of the Danzig Organisation led him inevitably to consider his past. When he thought back to the time he had loyally served the Organisation, performing tasks well beyond the call of duty on the planets of the Rim and beyond, he was overcome with such a deep-rooted sense of guilt he wondered if even what he was doing now could atone for his misdeeds. Over the years he had tried to rationalise his guilt - but he found that the rationalisation of one's guilt was as futile a mental exercise as trying to empty one's head and think about nothing... He told himself that at the time he had believed in what the Organisation stood for, and that any action likely to further the cause was to be embraced as right. To this end he had embraced the undercover campaign of divide and rule, infiltrate and subvert, and brought about the closure of the few bigship Lines whose continued operation after the installation of the interfaces had been subsidised by socialist governments around the Rim. Only once had he resorted to actual terrorist tactics, which had resulted in the deaths of three Enginemen. At the time he had considered it a minor price to pay for the pacification of yet another planet.

He wondered if he really did believe, back in the years when he worked ceaselessly for the Danzig cause, in everything the Organisation stood for, or was his main concern himself, his own aggrandisement, his promotion within the Danzig corporate structure with all the attendant wealth, prestige and power that such promotion entailed? He suspected that, at the time, Hirst Hunter the high-flying troubleshooting executive would never have admitted to such failings as egotism: he would have quoted Danzig dogma and pointed to the successful regimes on newly-settled Danzig worlds. Only in retrospect could Hunter see that his younger, ambitious self had been blinded by power into seeing only what he wanted to see.

He was, in short, guilty, as guilty as hell. He would do his best now to atone for his sins, but that would never alter the fact that he had been a shallow, egotistical, power-crazy fool.

And the main casualty had been his daughter, Ella.

He glanced at his watch. It was almost six, the time he had suggested on the disc that they should meet. He ordered another brandy, less to savour its quality than to feel its effect. For ten years he had failed to contact his daughter - and for many years before that he had simply failed her, period - and now that the time was fast approaching when they