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‘Come and geddit!’

He stayed there, looking at her.

‘What is it?’ She caught sight of the screen. ‘Oh! the system’s back up. Wow!’

‘Yup,’ said Jordan. ‘A new release. Everything’ll change now.’

He remembered the last time the Black Planner had spoken to him:

do not be offended that she has not told you all she knows this is nothing personal it is because she is basically a good communist loyal daughter of the revolution and mother of the new republic though she would laugh if you said so to her face

He stood up.

‘Cat. There’s something I have to tell you.’

‘Yes?’

‘You are basically a good communist, loyal daughter of the revolution and mother of the new republic.’

She laughed. ‘Yes. I know that. So?’

‘So marry me.’

She considered him for a moment.

‘OK.’

‘I told you,’ the fetch said. Its voice glowed with artificial pride. ‘I’ve not been idle.’

Janis blinked herself away from appalled contemplation of what she had witnessed, what she had done.

‘You did this?’

‘In the…time when I was building my resistance’ – the smile, self-mocking now, came and went – ‘I found that I had recreated Dissembler. It is spreading now, rebooting the programs that used to run on it.’

She remembered the proliferating lights.

‘Does that include the Black Plan?’ she asked eagerly. ‘The AIS that Moh found?’

The head on the screen shook slowly, with a wilfully exact rendering of the play of shadows. ‘They’re gone. Lost beyond recovery.’ Then – as if to cheer and distract her – it added: ‘But I’ve found some interesting information in Donovan’s files. Do you want to see it?’

The selection that the fetch displayed included a complete chart of Donovan’s organization, right down to the names of its members and the locations of its cells. And fragmentary, cryptic records of his work on the Kohn case: his cooperation with the Stasis agents and with Mrs Lawson in Beulah City, and with Dr Van. Just as Van had described it to her and Moh, in a chain-smoking summary on the balcony of a wooden house in Wester Ross…Janis smiled to see the first scratches of suspicion that Van wasn’t cooperating.

There were no records from after the Dissembler disaster, but from the traces immediately before it Janis worked out what had happened, how close a call the world had had with Space Defense and how Mrs Lawson’s systems had held off Donovan’s until the last moment, when she changed her mind.

So it was her doing in the end, Janis thought. Her fists clenched. She remembered Jordan’s description of her: a dangerous, devious woman. More dangerous and devious than he’d ever imagined.

She thought for a moment of doing in Beulah City what they’d done in the rig: invading the systems, possessing the machinery, using it to kill the last person in the line of enemies that had killed Moh. And then she realized it would be wrong.

Simple as that. Donovan and the Man In Black were outlaws, scoundrels, scum, whereas this woman was – what was it Moh had said about the time when she’d been about to slaughter the fallen horseman? – ‘just a grunt like us, basically’.

Let the Republic deal with Lawson, as it would deal with everybody on the CLA’s membership list.

When Wills came in Janis was slumped over the gun, her face on her arms. All the screens in the office had been switched on. Janis had been crying.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

She looked up.

‘A new release,’ she said.

He looked at her, frowning. ‘Oh, yeah, that. It’s good news. I meant—’

‘It’s all right,’ Janis said.

‘Sure?’

‘Sure.’

Wills smiled, as though relieved she wasn’t going to go to pieces on him. ‘There’s some more good news,’ he said. ‘That bastard Donovan is dead. Blown out of the water!’

‘There’s more than Donovan blown out of the water,’ Janis said. ‘Somebody’s been hacking him for a change, and seems to want us all to know. Have a look at this!’

Wills looked at the charts.

‘Where did this come from?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ Janis said. ‘Come on. We got death to deliver.’

Deliver it they