The assistant stared at him without replying. Her nose caught the smell of bird plumage, musty and deep. She recalled how the alien lay on the bed looking up at her helplessly, surrounded by drifts of its own feathers and whispering, ‘I am here. I am.’ They had drilled its skull. What a place, she thought, to end your weird life. As if she was considering evidence the subtlety of which would be lost on Epstein, she walked to the window and stared down into the street. If she ordered up the right combination of overlays, she could examine Toni Reno both in his present condition and as he had been when she was first called to the alley off Tupolev. She consulted her forearm, down which the ideograms flowed Chinese black and chiminy red, solid and definite in the grainy crime-tourism air. It was raining again, but now the rain took no account at all of the hanging man. It rained through him. Epstein came and stood at her shoulder so that he could look into the street too.

‘I don’t want anything to do with this,’ he said. ‘The footage goes straight to your office, my people hold off on a report.’

When she failed to reply, but only gave him that oblique smile of hers, he knew this was the most difficult part of his day. Even the fifth floor managers at Sitecrime were frightened of her. They said she had no personality, they said she had no empathy: they said she didn’t understand people. Epstein knew all these things to be true. What happened to him next would depend on how skilfully he could back away from what he had discovered.

‘I’m just a uniform,’ he emphasised. ‘This is your issue.’

The assistant did not dispute that.

All across the Halo, alliances collapsed. Mounting crises in the Pentre De, Uswank and Frand-Portie systems broke into open conflict. Then war was everywhere and it was your war, to be accessed however it fitted best into your busy schedule. Seven second segments to three minute documentaries. Focused debate, embedded media. Twenty-four-hour live mano a mano between mixed assets in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, or a catch-up of the entire campaign – including interactive mapping of EMC’s feint towards Beta Carinae – from day one. In-depth views included: ‘How They Took the Pulsed-Gamma War to Cassiotone 9’; ‘The Ever-Present Threat of Gravity Wave Lasing’; and ‘We Ask You How You Would Have Done It Differently!’ People loved it. The simulacrum of war forced them fully into the present, where they could hone their life-anxieties and interpret them as excitement. Meanwhile, under cover of the coverage, the real war crept across the Halo until it threatened Panamax IV.