It was the first boosted world Corso had ever found himself on, and he couldn’t say for sure if he was enjoying the experience. His stomach lurched every time he caught sight of the impossibly close horizon.

For all that, Eugenia was one of the largest of the Main Belt boosted worlds, and a little over two hundred kilometres in diameter. It had started out larger, but its original rough, potato-like shape had been less than ideal, so it had been blasted and sculpted into something more approximating a sphere. It had even been allowed to retain Petit-Prince, one of its two small moons. An iron sculpture of Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince stood near the centre of the plaza, gazing up at a point where his namesake would pass overhead every five days.

But before very long, the asteroid and its moons were going to become eternally separated. The Little Prince was going to have to make his own way through space.

Yugo Stankovic, one of Corso’s aides, was waiting for him in the foyer of the government building.

‘All right, Yugo, Nisha already gave me an outline of what’s happened. Is there anything else I should know?’ Corso asked, as Stankovic matched pace with him. The security detail made their way elsewhere while Corso and his aide headed for a bank of elevators.

‘What she told you, she got from me. We managed to disable the cargo platform remotely without any further incident, but it was pretty close.’

‘How bad could it have been?’

‘It could have wiped us out. The Consortium’s own intelligence services are working hard at stopping any word of this getting out to the media, and Eugenia’s prime minister took the chair of an emergency session about five minutes ago.’ Stankovic smiled and shrugged. ‘We’re not invited, of course.’

An elevator arrived and they stepped inside. ‘Who’s in charge of figuring out who’s responsible?’

‘Lieutenant Nazarro of our own Authority security is working on it with the local security heads in a separate meeting,’ Stankovic replied. ‘I should have an initial report from him within the hour.’

Corso flexed his hands, and found himself wishing for a more tangible enemy. All the careful manoeuvring of the last few years was coming to nothing. Whoever was responsible for these acts of sabotage was doing a good job of remaining eternally elusive, leaving him with the near-certainty that the only ones capable of covering their tracks so thoroughly were precisely those governments that coveted the Peacekeeper Authority’s power the most. As far as most of them were concerned, he was the one thing standing between them and the stars.

The elevator doors hissed open and they stepped into a suite of offices. Ted Lamoureaux was already there, sprawled on a couch.