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He sat back with a what-do-you-make-of-that? expression.

‘Probably one of Josh’s test protocols,’ Bernstein said, raising a laugh.

‘Could be,’ Logan said. ‘If you ever find anything about it, Moh, tell us. Please.’

Moh looked at the young cadre and the old cadres with some bitterness. ‘If I ever find anything – that’s a good one. We lost everything. The fucking Yanks took the house apart and took it away, after…after…’ He couldn’t go on. ‘And I’ve never known why. None of you bastards ever told us.’

The bright, bare room was silent. Everyone else had gone home or into the main part of the pub. Down to the hard core again.

‘I’m looking for some answers,’ Moh said.

The old woman reached out and laid a hand on his arm. ‘How could we tell you? You and your sister disappeared. And we don’t know, ourselves. The Party lost a lot of people in the Peace Process, but that was down to the Restoration forces, the Hanoverians. Hell, you know that. Josh and Marcia were the only ones the US/UN came after.’ She drew a deep breath and shuddered. ‘Mandatory summary execution, asset forfeiture – that was standard Yank practice at the time, for arms and drugs.’

‘But they weren’t—’ Moh began indignantly, then stopped. It was entirely possible that they were. Arms, anyway.

‘And black software,’ Bernstein said. ‘Makes sense, from what you’ve said.’

Moh felt a surge of relief and gratitude. Black software – yes. For the first time it did all make sense: it wasn’t just an arbitrary atrocity. But if that was the answer it raised further questions.

‘What kept him working on it right up to—?’

‘Not us,’ the old woman said. ‘I would have known if he was doing a job for the Party. He wasn’t.’

She sounded sincere, and Moh warmed to her warmth, but he didn’t trust her statement. As far as he was concerned, anybody who held a Party or a programme, a political project spanning centuries, as their highest value was perfectly capable of lying in their teeth. If you could die for something you could lie for it.

But he’d found part of the answer, something that connected his parents’ deaths with their lives. Some of his inward tension eased, some of his hostility to the Party relaxed.

Logan stayed on after Bernstein and the old comrades had gone away. He took Stone and Moh into the bar and stood them a few more rounds and told them what the Party was trying to do.

Moh listened, not seeing ghosts any more but seeing as if through the transplanted retinae of a dead man’s eyes. You never lost that vision. You saw the patterns recur: endless orbit, permanent revolution. The phylogeny of parties, the teratology of deformed workers’ states, the pathology of bureaucratic degeneration…Now the space movement was at it, running its little anarcho-capitalist enclaves here on Earth and coexisting with the Yanks everywhere else.

‘That’s where we come in,’ Logan said. ‘We need to build a fighting left wing of the space movement, turn it into something that’ll do more against the US/UN than sponsoring private rocketry and asteroid mining. And when I say “left wing” I don’t mean socialist, I mean militant. Because you don’t need me to tell you that any serious attempt to get out of this shit is gonna have to take on the state, and these days that ultimately means Space Defense.’

Stone frowned, struggling with the scale and audacity of what the tiny organization Logan spoke for was aiming at. ‘You mean,’ he said doubtfully, ‘you’re working in the space movement, to turn it into—’

‘The Space and Freedom Party!’ Kohn said gleefully.

He knew what was going on. The Party (the real Party, the hard core, the International) had always had two aspects. One, the one Kohn remembered from the days of the Republic, was public, in-your-face: the unfurled banner, the open Party, the infuriating newspaper. The other, the way of surviving bad times, was when its members became faces in the crowd, known only to each other.

Like the Star Fraction, Moh thought.

‘Well,