Six Against The Stars

Six Against the Stars

Stephen Hunt

Green Nebula

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.

- Albert Einstein.

SIX AGAINST THE STARS

First published in 1999 by Green Nebula Press

Copyright © 2020 by Stephen Hunt

Typeset and designed by Green Nebula Press

Cover art: Luca Oleastri (via Fotolia).

The right of Stephen Hunt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

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Praise for Stephen

‘Mr. Hunt takes off at racing speed.’

- THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

‘Hunt’s imagination is probably visible from space. He scatters concepts that other writers would mine for a trilogy like chocolate-bar wrappers.’

- TOM HOLT

‘All manner of bizarre and fantastical extravagance.’

- DAILY MAIL

‘Compulsive reading for all ages.’

- GUARDIAN

‘An inventive, ambitious work, full of wonders and marvels.’

- THE TIMES

‘Hunt knows what his audience like and gives it to them with a sardonic wit and carefully developed tension.’

- TIME OUT

‘Studded with invention.’

-THE INDEPENDENT

‘To say this book is action packed is almost an understatement… a wonderful escapist yarn!’

- INTERZONE

‘Hunt has packed the story full of intriguing gimmicks… affecting and original.’

- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

‘A rip-roaring Indiana Jones-style adventure.’

—RT BOOK REVIEWS

‘A curious part-future blend.’

- KIRKUS REVIEWS

‘A ripping yarn … the story pounds along… constant inventiveness keeps the reader hooked… the finale is a cracking succession of cliffhangers and surprise comebacks. Great fun.’

- SFX MAGAZINE

‘Put on your seatbelts for a frenetic cat and mouse encounter... an exciting tale.’

- SF REVU

Contents

1. The thrill of the chase.

2. Slow-time dreams.

3. To the stars, taken.

4. A Meeting of minds.

5. A bigger stick.

6. To seek an android.

7. A hyperspace tail.

8. The slavery of the machine.

9. No human is free.

10. Blood and dust.

11. What every generation needs.

12. Sinking in sand.

13. That which was stored.

14. To save a mind is a fine thing, indeed.

15. An android person (ap) of interest.

16. The mothership.

17. For if it prospers.

18. Selection of the natural.

19. Epilogue. Great great grandfather's greatest lies.

Chapter 1

The thrill of the chase.

Glass shattered as Horatio put his boot through the window. Behind him, Chanisse was screaming at Baron Magellan, begging her husband to call off his hunting cats. She was pushing the second-rate nobleman back, but the feline growls echoing up the staircase into her bedroom spoke volumes.

Awkward, Horatio thought. More than that, damned inconvenient. And tonight of all nights.

‘Bard!’ Magellan yelled. ‘Horatio Bard, you petty bastard. I told you before about coming around here, I told you and I warned you, and now I’m going to run you through a harvester; I will scatter your ashes across my fields, you lanky scrap of piss.’

Horatio believed him. ‘Baron, do you eat with that mouth?’

Still, you can’t blame him. What else are you to do when you catch a man in delicate relations with your fair wife? This wasn’t Horatio’s fault, though, it was mostly the baron’s. If Magellan had a care to ensure these unfortunate accidents didn’t happen, then he would have married someone far plumper and closer to his own looks – which is to say, boar-ugly. Then Horatio’s passions could have stayed firmly cooled, instead of scrambling away from an irate husband in this undignified manner, putting his health at risk by launching himself off the window towards the second storey terrace below. He hit the planking hard and rolled. This was definitely getting easier with practice. Just a short drop to get to the mansion’s grounds.

‘You bloody sod!’ yelled the baron, peering out of the window. His furious features were glowing the colour of one of his farmer’s beetroots.

Yes, there is certainly a little truth in that. Horatio was clambering rapidly down the ivy-covered trellis outside the mansion. He dropped the last few feet and landed in a bed of yellow ornamental flowers. Horatio didn’t stop to smell them. His legs began pumping as he scrambled to clear the range of the retainers’ rifles. ‘Genius creates its own rules, baron.’

There was a hiss as the cats cleared the window – two of them – more lizard than acinonyx jubatus, the cheetah that had provided the base genome for their genetic engineering. Hitting the path outside the baron’s mansion, the hunting pair flicked armour shields up over their skulls and jumped the ornamental flint wall. Then they halted, their eyes searching for a filter that would enable them to see in the dying half-light. Horatio wondered why they bothered. He was five times the size of the wild deer that raided their farmland for tasty morsels, and if the cats couldn’t follow his trail, then they deserved to be put out to grass by the baron. Sighing, Horatio buried himself in the baron’s swaying plain of crops, rice nodules bursting as he forced a way through the neat pattern of vegetation. There were still two boxy harvesters operating in the distance, and seeing the damage he inflicted on their crops, they turned their periscope-like eye stalks towards him and crooned out an alarm. Behind Horatio a flood of slaves scrambled from the mansion, clutching pitchforks and the occasional rifle, chattering as they sprinted after him. Not one of the green-skinned creatures reached higher than the knees of the baron’s human staff. If the harvesters had summoned the slaves, then they were reacting uncommonly fast, if they had heard the baron’s curses then they were due a beating for their sloth.

Just like the baron, reliably cheap… human servants too expensive for the old skinflint. Now, let’s see. First the cats. Horatio might have been responding to the irresistible song of his hormones, but his mind had stayed in control of planning tonight’s little voyage of discovery long enough to foresee he might meet the baron’s nasty pets. Pulling out a vial tucked inside his trouser sash, Horatio seeded a line of white powder behind him. It was a one-generation cyanobacterium that acted on the lining of the cats’ lung-sacs, limiting the oxygenation process and causing a reaction resembling a severe asthmatic attack. He received it from a feral tree that hadn’t much cared for cats sharpening their wicked claws on its bark – a sentiment Horatio felt sympathy for. Pouncing through Horatio’s trail, the hunters jerked to stop in a fit of sneezing coughs, rolling across plants and thrashing about in a haze of vegetation while their claws triggered and retracted. Out on the plain, the harvesters howled even louder when they saw the destruction the predators caused to crops they were meant to protect. The living machines becoming so worked up their bony tractor-treads chewed the ground in outrage, tossing soil and stubble into the cool evening air. One vented a burst of hot gas through its spine horns, and Horatio prayed whoever had originally genetically engineered their class had included a basic behavioural inhibitor in their minds. Something about not spinning their harvesting blades through innocent ramblers, for instance. That would be quite thoughtful.

Seeing the lumbering harvesters’ anger, Horatio’s chase of slaves stopped, unsure whether they should continue their pursuit. A human retainer in their midst halted too, knowing how much it would cost his master if the old penny-pincher had to fly in a vet to sedate his stable of harvesters. Opting for caution, the posse settled for drawing a halt and taking pot shots into the crops, aiming at the rustling stalks as Horatio lurched towards the distant forest. Horatio ducked when they opened up with their weapons. One shell slammed into a nearby scarecrow, the bird scarer wobbling as the modified coelenterate load pumped neurotoxin into its stalk. Designed primarily for human anatomy, the shells were non-lethal, but the days of fever, vomiting and pain caused by jelly-shot were far from pleasant, as Horatio could attest from similar nights following the compulsions of Cupid’s arrows. More plant than animal, the scarecrow trembled as the poison sought out its rudimentary nervous system, before responding by throwing a terrible fit, firing florescent-blue pellets from its bulbs and splitting the dusk with banshee-loud alarms. A pellet bounced off Horatio’s shoulder, nearly sending him sprawling, but he regained his balance mid-tumble and kept sprinting. Ah, all part of the chase, all part of the game. Not as agreeable as entertaining the baron’s delightful wife, but this exercise offers a certain visceral stimulation.

The retainers’ volley died away as they dived under the returning salvo of blue streaks, bird pellets spinning slaves off their feet where the little creatures were too slow. Horatio risked a look back at the house. Girdled by the warmth of yellow spotlights stippling the residence, Chanisse stood silhouetted against her broken window and waved at him. He bowed once towards the fat man’s exquisite wife, then continued for the woods. Emerging in the shadow of his mansion, Baron Magellan fell under a press of fleeing servants, tiny slaves shrieking and tossing down pitchforks – a rout – his monstrous cats picking their way back coughing, their heads lowered with all the shame an organic sprinting machine with the enhanced intelligence of a dolphin could muster. A bird pellet ricocheted off the mansion’s walls. You’ve brought this on yourself, baron, really. Marrying a girl too young and beautiful for you. No, tonight is hardly my fault at all.

The baron proved disgracefully sour at the best of times. His servants recognised their master’s black humour and scattered. Magellan pushed his way through the retreating slaves, cuffing them with the butt of his rifle. In the distance, Horatio’s far-off form dipped into the forest’s shadows. He had gone. In his wake, he left the cry of harvesting machines and howl of scarecrows.

The baron hurled his gun to the ground in disgust and stalked off.

***

An owl hooted deep inside the woodland, the brush crisp and brittle under Horatio’s knee-high leather boots. There had been no rain for months, and Horatio knew talk at court suggested that if the dry season continued any longer, the king would have to intercede with the offworld authorities, requesting an atmospheric modification from HUTA , the Human Trading Alliance’s weather control scientists. But however much their continent needed rain, such an act would still leave a bad taste in the people’s mouths. Old Earth’s offworld descendants possessed few scruples about using machine technologies. If the Human Trading Alliance deigned to help Earth, the offworlders would almost certainly deploy unsound methods, technologies that weren’t welcome in the heart of the Trustlands… a territory known as the United States in the distant past. Well, the USA, then Pan-America, then Greater Randia, then Concordia, then Horatio had slipped out of the history lesson to learn something far more hands-on from one of the distractingly winsome students seated by his desk. Of course, as a famous musician, Horatio had little time for court politics and the frictions between conservative genetic engineers and their liberal counterparts. And living in paradise, why should I? When there are young buds like Chanisse willing for me to climb among their petals and taste their nectar; weekly car races to join and wagers to win from my fellow courtiers; and above all else, adoring hordes of fans eager to venerate my prolific genius with the electric-harp. His friend Danton, the stout blacksmith and genetic engineer, he might understand the business of deploying machine viruses to mould Saturn’s rings into a billion uniform snowballs, and the magnetic technology which could layer sections of Earth’s atmosphere with ice using isobaric pressure differences and ion-stimulation to generate precipitation; and he might even comprehend Gaiaist politics and all the forgotten history of every tedious century which led to Earth’s ban on nanotechnology. But did he have fun?

Not as much as Horatio. Not on my birthday.

Climbing over a fallen tree-trunk, Horatio heard a faint call. From behind a snarl of rhododendrons, a herd of deer vaulted purple blossoms and scattered into the forest darkness. Then he located where the sound came from. An information booth, the shelter scarred with age and overgrown with moss. From the top of the booth, a pair of weary eyes focused on him.

‘I have news,’ it said.

Looking at the decrepit booth, Horatio doubted it could burrow down deep enough to tap into the land’s major information roots.

As if reading his mind, the booth attempted to reassure the man. ‘I am still healthy. I was grown for the foresters living by the shore of the lake. My news is of the very finest.’

Horatio doubted that. For as long as he could remember the lake had been considered part of the king’s parkland, husbanded by His Majesty’s rangers – no modern foresters would have the cheek to try farming here, let alone advertise their presence by setting up an information booth. This was an antique. Forgotten and abandoned.

‘I am due at the king’s court,’ said Horatio. ‘With very little time to get there.’

‘But this is important. The settlements at the North Pole are demanding a reduction in exploration tax from the king. Five-fold!’

‘The only exploration I intend to be doing will be among tables of the royal kitchen and the bedsheets of its serving folk. Besides, I recall that story running four years ago, if not longer.’

‘I have more recent news: the Mayor of Enamel City has petitioned the court for an easing of the license fee for milk-plant copyright number K76574563, claiming that this is the only just course given they have the highest birth-rate in the Trustlands.’

‘Look, I am not interested in the minutiae of commercial interest stories,’ said Horatio, growing bored. ‘Can’t you tell me the latest gossip? Have the authorities in Suni released Amadeus Zu and her band from prison after the riots during her last concert? Has the Countess of Washington decided who is to receive her second clone child? Which driver won the car race at Bok last night?’

‘Oh,’ the booth moaned. ‘My feeds are decayed – there’s not enough sunlight here – I am failing, I knew it.’

A sudden wave of pity overcame Horatio. ‘Look, I’ve got a friend who should be able to re-plant you somewhere with more foot traffic to use your services. I’ll tell him you’re here, okay?’

‘Oh thank you, thank you!’

In truth, Danton would probably sell the booth onto the Museum of Worshipful Genome Artificers on the coast. But at least children might visit, if only to tease the creature.

‘If you’re going to the court, then I have news. A courier-rat from beyond the Coral Bridge recently slept the night inside my shelter.’

Horatio shook his head. ‘But they travel only for the king’s ministers?’

‘I used microwave to decrypt its pouch while it was asleep within me. It never realised. There is danger at the palace. Strangers with murder in their hearts and terrible schemes in their heads. Great powers gather at our gate, jostling for power and privilege. They scuttle about like spiders on a web, and who knows what victims they shall feast on? Stay away, stay away!’

‘Oh, really?’ Horatio walked off. Stupid thing. The melodramatic booth was senile. It had tapped into an entertainment root, mistaking fiction for pure news-node. The only danger waiting for Horatio at the palace was the high probability of getting drunk and spilling wine down his tunic, or worse still, down some fair courtier’s dress and ending up with a healthy slap for his trouble.

Night had lengthened and it grew harder to navigate his way through the trees, moonlight washing the grass silver and cloaking more than it revealed. Perhaps after this birthday, he would get his sight extended into low-wave, infrared; that would make this kind of night chase a little more sporting. But nothing as bizarre as the latest court one-generationals, the fashions of Prince Commodous, foxtails and extra arms. At the back of Horatio’s mind was the unspoken fear that too many genetic enhancements might corrupt his precious genius. It was a common superstition. Genius comes first. That’s one thing you can’t splice DNA for. Well, not without niggling side effects like barking insanity. Occasionally Horatio heard the brush-like legs of lawnmowers settling down for the night. These were feral, grown far and wild from their cousins which kept cottage lawns trim and green – but sufficient of their genome bred authentic enough that they were no danger to humans, despite certain children’s stories having it otherwise. Damn it, where is he? Horatio was sure he had left Hawkmoor somewhere around here. Horatio called out, but only the sounds of the wood answered him. After ten minutes of searching, he came across the road. A dark layer of tarmac fringed by the purple light of glow-trees, their bulbs attracting swarms of spinning insects which left mottled shadows dancing in their wake. But no hint of Hawkmoor. Horatio located the stump of an old highway sign where he had parked the contrary creature, an ancient spear of flaking iron piercing the grass. On the other side of the trees, he could see a light flickering deep inside the forest. Many people avoided this particular forest. Cold Light Wood was the place’s name. It was said that back in the Conflict Age an enemy starship had folded the hyperspace blockade beyond Pluto’s nitrogen corpse and come in close to Earth’s moon, scattering a wave of robot attack ships on a suicide vector. It had been one of those – legend suggested – that sunk the Lost Kingdom of Japan under the waves. Another ship dived for what would become the Trustlands, but in a freak accident, its payload had failed to explode. It had landed a mile away from where Horatio stood, and the woods were still widely shunned for fear of meeting the ghosts of those who’d died in the crash.

Pushing his way through shrubby manzanita, Horatio came into the clearing. And there he was, merrily chewing his way into a row of wild marrows. A boy’s supposed best friend – at least if one listened to the inexplicably popular music of Amadeus Zu.

‘Hawkmoor!’

‘You’re late,’ his purebred car complained. It was always hard to find the open-top vehicle in the dark, the clean, efficient lines of Hawkmoor’s matte black shell absorbing the moonlight, the four obsidian-coloured bony wheels almost invisible under his chassis. Looking again, Horatio saw a family of dwarf elephants each no bigger than a rabbit had also made a nocturnal board out of the marrows, their trunks jostling for prominence with Hawkmoor. There was a tiny gold crest on the elephants’ foreheads, all that remained of their genetic engineer’s logo a hundred generations on. One nuzzled underneath and tried to push Hawkmoor’s chitin disk-brake callipers, but the car ignored it, suddenly alternating his forward luminescence strip in a blinding light. Blinking small eyes and honking, the dwarf elephants indignantly gave up and disappeared into the trees, one firing a stream of marrow juice over Hawkmoor’s doors as it departed, waving its miniature trunk in mock salute.

Horatio laughed. ‘And don’t tell me you were going to metabolise that wild marrow juice into fuel. You’ll end up with alcohol poisoning, you idiot. Now, explain yourself – what the hell would have happened to me if I had needed a fast getaway from the baron’s mansion?’

‘I dare say,’ Hawkmoor replied, ‘you would have further improved your sufficiency in the noble art of running away. Given my pedigree, I find it a source of some discomfort that you still see fit to involve me in these nocturnal adventures of yours.’

‘Oh ho.’ Horatio vaulted the side of the car and slid into the driver’s pit. Hawkmoor flicked up the windscreen plate and knowing his master’s vanity, briefly converted the glass into a mirror.

‘You fail to understand, my dear transport. There is only so much of me to go around. It is my mission in life to spread happiness – with the electric-harp or with my body, how I can deny my audience?’

Hawkmoor watched Horatio comb his hair back into position. ‘Given the sudden uptick in traffic, more specifically the swell of Baron Magellan’s couriers making for the palace, might I be so humble as to suggest that you have failed in a key portion of your platform to propagate happiness within this county.’

‘Everyone is a critic.’

‘Quite so, sir.’

Their clearing was on a slight incline and Hawkmoor rolled back down towards the road. The car’s talk of pedigree reminded Horatio that the car had been a gift from the palace. Despite his supposed high-spirits, Horatio brooded. Not over the gift, but the rumours. It was common enough for the Trustlands’ citizens never to know their parents: after all, when there was so much life to experience, who would not be tempted to leave their offspring in a robot crèche? The nursery halls had centuries of experience of raising stable young children, generations of adolescent nurture theory and social integration lore lost in their memory banks. No, Horatio still remembered his own time at Morningstar Halls with affection – the rambunctious games with friends, his music lessons from the nursery virtuals, Mozart, Vivaldi, and Sinatra, even the citizenship classes. Far superior to traditional child-rearing. Why, by all accounts, Horatio’s friend Danton had been raised by his original mother and a broken robot manufactured as one of the original Martian terraformers, and Horatio had received by far the better deal on his upbringing. But the rumours! That the king only looked favourably upon Horatio’s art because the boy’s link with the monarch owed more than an insignificant jot to a more than, shall we say, familiar genetic association.

Ridiculous. If King John of the noble House of Aquarius were Horatio’s father, then Horatio would certainly have been raised inside the palace along with the rest of the monarch’s brood of princes and princesses. It was not as if there would be any scandal. Half the king’s children arrived via mistresses, palace guests, visitors, and even a Siren ambassadress from the worlds of the ancient Timarchy. They were not in the Carbon Age now, players in some forbidden Camelot assignation between Kennedy and Guinevere, hunted through a forest by Nixon’s dark knights. No, the king was an astute patron, nothing more. Every whisper to the contrary came from Horatio’s rivals at court, jealous ministers and fools who thought his music unmannered, too energetic. Those who supported his main adversary, the Unicorn Singer. Anyone who mistakenly believed adding a horn to her head and clattering around on horse’s hooves was high fashion surely deserved the chance to inflict her tunes on the talentless morons who backed her. But pity only stretches so far. Although once it had stretched far enough to include Horatio marrying the talentless woman, but that was another matter.

Jolted out of his contemplation, Horatio noted an arrowhead of crows fleeting across the moon, travelling back to their nests. He must be near the palace then, its ornamental gardens and hills mantled by towering red trees imported from the comet farms at the solar system’s edge. There had been crows at the palace as long as Horatio could remember. Court legend told that they would only disappear in the evening before the sun went supernova. Certain the birds would return tomorrow, Horatio was oddly comforted by their flight. Hawkmoor took him through the hidden paths behind the royal estate, and they came out beside the river. Extending his lights, Hawkmoor revealed the arched bridge that spanned the dark waters, then accelerated, catching the hump at some speed and giving a satisfied grunt as they briefly became airborne.

‘I don’t know why you have to do that every time.’

‘Neither do I, sir.’

Ahead of them lay an illuminated palace. Hawkmoor followed the gardeners’ roads, popping loose gravel over the surface of sculpted ponds and flinging pieces of grit across banded lawns. A drowsing gardener vibrated its cuttings box in annoyance as a fleck of granite pinged off its head. Much of the palace’s modern formation was moulded lifewood, a coral-shaped architecture that lay soused under multi-colour spotlights concealed about the lawn. The structure’s parapets rose and fell like the waves of a frozen ocean, curling seashell shapes dotted with windows, its flowing walls broken by embrasures and the spires of elegant bulb-topped turrets. Silk pennants snaked in a night breeze above the palace, active fibres dancing with scenes from the Carbon Age, the triumphant exploration of Jupiter, the liberation of Moscow, solar sail fighters manoeuvring close to the hydrogen whisper of the sun with their ship weapon lances extended, and of course the pioneering heroes and heroines of Earth’s Gaiaist movement: Njigata Numazawa, Doctor Sheridan Croydon and the beatific features of the Countess of Seleste Sárris.

Pushing himself out of Hawkmoor, Horatio lifted his electric-harp from the passenger seat and slung it over his back. ‘I’ll pick you up from the garage later. And if you meet Red Roadburn there, try to show a little humility.’

‘Given the advanced state of myopia in the linesman who was called upon to make the final race adjudication during our last bout,’ Hawkmoor snorted, ‘it might be more appropriate, nay, I suggest perspicacious, if it were that second-rate crossbreed who exercised a small measure of discretion in his boastings. Sir.’

‘Now that’s exactly what I mean.’

Leaving Horatio in a cloud of drive chippings, the car spun off down the path. Horatio shrugged and made to go around the front of the palace. There might be a back door open somewhere, but an entrance was everything. If I fluff that, then the night is scarcely recoverable.

The king’s heroic guardsmen lined the arched entranceway, each eight-foot-tall, dubbed the cherry pickers for their crimson trousers and red ceramic breastplates. They snapped their rifles to attention as Horatio and the other guests strolled past them, their eyes slitted like those of a cat, intense and golden under busby helmet furs. Looking along the lawn, Horatio was glad that Hawkmoor showed the sense to drop him at the rear. A lengthy queue of cars meandered across the grounds, the occasional ornithopter dropping down to the pads behind the lakes, fluttering wings before dispersing another gaggle of sycophants for the banquet. Converging on the palace, a procession of invitees made their way on foot. They could be dukes or they might be local farmers. With the materials of life provided free from a hundred generations of bio-mechanical assemblers, nobody lacked for fine cloth anymore. Or food. Or an endless stream of parties. But with so much variety to choose from, the value placed on the art of discernment had risen to giddy extra heights.

Horatio walked with the gently gossiping crowd. It was a warm night and the women strolled in loose jodhpur style trousers or billowing sleeveless dresses, some linked to their owners’ mood patterns, colours fixed on golden anticipation and raspberry excitement as they approached the festivities. Like Horatio, most of the men followed the season’s fashion for the clean lines of teal jackets with high imitation HUTA-naval collars. Horatio nearly stumbled in anger as he spotted several centaur-shaped bodies among the press... how could they ruin their chances for recognition and social advancement by pursuing such a shallow vogue, one set by the rude gene-shaped form of the Unicorn Singer? Horatio glanced in a window, admiring his tawny shoulder-length hair and straight white smile, the laughing blue eyes that could turn as moody as beaten denim, and then he brushed a kernel of the baron’s rice off his jacket. Fortune favoured the handsome, and he would show the court a thing or two about genetic engineering in the following weeks. Danton had once told Horatio that he looked like a youthful version of an actor called Robert Redford. He had tried to access a holo of the man, but the data roots around his home could find nothing but a single grainy still – two wounded men firing ancient chemical reaction weapons in the shade of a hut, chips of wood flying as an unseen foe blasted back at them. Dangerous times for a thespian, obviously. There was ever the slight possibility someone had inserted a joke DNA virus in one of Horatio’s forefathers. After all, there had not always been a genetic engineers’ code of ethics, and time-bomb multi-generational alterations still occurred in the isolated natural birth. Babies born with the face of an Elvis or De Niro, middle-aged men who suddenly found their hair turning pink on their hundredth birthday, or waking up one morning with obscene melanin graffiti scrawled across their chest. But it normally only happened to descendants of the rich and famous, those who could trace their lineage back to politicians and royal – notables who warranted a student prank inside one of classical Earth’s surgeries.

A roofless carriage pulled up short in front of the palace’s open doors, a train of jet-black teddies in the harness, harmless ursine beasts humming an old stable song. Its passenger was already alighted, a loud altercation occurring on the steps.

‘But I have travelled a long way!’

An officer with a panther-skin pelisse shrugged. ‘We have our orders, madam. By invite-only. We expect to be overcrowded as it is. Perhaps I can direct you to one of the open events being held to mark the night’s celebrations... ?’

Horatio caught his breath. Standing on the steps was a woman, her gamine figure poured into an ebony halterneck body-dress, eyes flashing with anger as she faced off against the guardsman. And she was beautiful. More than that, the temptation of an angel, a living paradox, as seductive as sin and as chaste as virtue. Someone that demands understanding. She flicked her raven-dark hair in irritation, as though she had forgotten it was pulled back by a shining silver band.

‘This is too much.’

Mounting the steps, Horatio held out his invitation, a slice of brass engraved with the royal crest. ‘So there you are, I thought you were by the lake.’

Clicking his heels, the guardsman stood back. ‘My pardon, Mister Bard. I did not realise—’

Seeing her chance at entrance, the woman seized