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I looked around the table, my hand on the databoard of the real table tapping out an urgent message to the space movement people to stay behind. ‘Meeting’s adjourned. See you all tomorrow.’

‘What the fuck are you playing at, Wilde?’ Julie asked, when the charities and the businesses had left the scene. ‘We can’t take this lying down. It’ll be the end of Norlonto!’

Mike Davis and Juan Altimara nodded indignant agreement.

‘Oh ye of little faith,’ I said. ‘Of course it’ll be the end of Norlonto. I seem to recall that most of you were not too keen on the beginning of Norlonto.’

Juan, who’d arrived in Norlonto as a child refugee from Brazil’s brief biowar during the Amazonian Secession, looked at Mike and Julie. The fungal scar on his cheek twisted as he frowned.

‘I did not know this,’ he said.

Julie flushed, Mike fiddled with his bat switch: ‘Heat out the roof, now,’ he said uncomfortably. ‘Point is, like, Norlonto’s been a bastion of liberty for years, a successful experiment, and you want to let the statists march in without firing a shot!’

‘Excuse me, comrades,’ I said, ‘but who’s capitulating to statism here?’ I was rummaging around in the virtual depths of the table, illuminating likely routes for the incursion and checking them against the movements of insurance ratings, defence-agency deployments, militia strongpoints. ‘The way I see it, if the clients of the various defence agencies, if the communities and property-owners of this town want to make a deal with a nationalised defence industry, what business is it of ours? Isn’t that anarcho-capitalism in action?’

‘Capitalists selling out the anarchy, more like!’ said Julie.

‘As they have a right to do,’ Mike said. ‘Yeah, I have to agree with Jon here. Still, it means we’ve failed.’

Julie and Juan were both inspecting the enhanced map take shape. They looked up, looked at each other.

‘We don’t have to fail,’ Juan said. ‘The militia’s strong enough to hold off the Republic’s forces. We have time to rally the population. The Army can’t get away with a massacre in its own capital – even the Hanoverians held back from that.’

‘They’re getting away with murder in the countryside,’ I said. ‘You ever listen to any of the refugees?’

Julie gave this comment a flick of the hand. ‘If you believe the whining of those people the Republic’s a monstrous tyranny, which it obviously isn’t, so –’

‘So why are you so worried about having their troops on the streets?’

‘Because –’ Julie looked at me as if I was missing something so obvious she was having trouble believing she had to spell it out. ‘Because it’s our town, dammit! Our free city! We can’t let the state roll in after all this time. We should crack down on the camps ourselves, do it now, chase those mafias and renegade militias out and get rid of even that excuse for the Army coming in. If we move now we could do it tonight!’

I could see Mike taking heart at this suggestion, while my own heart sank. I wished Catherin Duvalier had picked a different day to get hitched. The argument went on.

A butterfly flew out of the infinite darkness around us and settled on the table, wings quivering.

‘Oh, shit,’ it said in Annette’s voice. ‘I hope I’ve got this damn’ thing working –’

‘We see you, Annette,’ I said. ‘What are you doing? How did you get here?’

I felt her hand, eerily invisible, brush the back of mine.

‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘I know I’m not supposed to be here, and I haven’t hacked in or anything. In real life I was sitting across a table from Jon, and I could see what he was saying, and I’ve come round beside him and piggybacked in on his link, and I’ve been circling around this conversation –’

‘This is a security risk!’ Juan said.

‘This is no security risk, this is my wife,’ I said. ‘She’s the one who keeps my physical location secure while I’m here, and always has done. So shut up, comrade, and let’s hear what she has to say. If that’s all right with everybody.’ I glared across the map-table and they all, eventually, nodded.

‘OK,’ Annette