Stanton lowered the intensifier and shut off the microphone. He had heard and seen enough. He gazed out beyond the city line to the slabbed land beyond. Svent and Dusache had gone that way, after the military carrier and that was where the action would take place. Right now Stanton did not have a way of getting close to Pelter and killing him. Others did have the means. It did not matter to him how Pelter died, just that he did. He crouched back from the edge, stood up, then walked over to his stolen AGC. Pelter would leave soon, but Stanton had no intention of following him. He’d follow the five below. He would have no problem trailing such amateurs.

25

25

Ian Cormac: Yet another mythical creation of hero-starved humanity. Earth Central Security does have its monitors, its Sparkind and troops, and, yes, it does have its secret agents. But let us be honest about these people: they are, on the whole, grey and characterless. Again, this is all about what we want to believe. We want this superagent who so easily sorts out all the bad guys for us. Cormac is to ECS what a certain agent with the number 007 was to MI5. At best he is a fictional creation, at his worst he is a violent and disruptive role model.

From Quince Guide, compiled by humans

The light was like clotted blood and seemed to tangle the shadows in the chequer trees beyond the encampment in swirls and eddies, and strange globular buds glistened in the branches like molluscs. The encampment itself was lit by lights inside some of the tents. It had been Arn’s idea to inflate a couple of survival suits with crash foam and sit them inside the tents. With a radio playing some monotonous atonal singing, the whole was quite convincing. Crouched behind a crumbling wall, Cormac surveyed the trees through the night-setting on his visor. Amongst the native chequer trees, so named because of the pattern of their bark, were blue oaks: a variety much used in the later stages of terraforming projects, and called so because their acorns were blue. They grew very slowly, but were hardy enough to withstand extremes of weather not found on Earth. Beside Cormac crouched Thorn and the two dracomen. Aiden and Cento were somewhere in the trees, using thermal scanners to pick up on whoever might come. They had been gone for two hours.

‘Why’s the moonlight so red?’ asked Thorn.

Cormac had wondered that, too. The sunlight was turned a weak green by the atmosphere, yet under reflected light from the moon it took on the colour of old blood. He had asked Cento for an explanation.

He informed Thorn, ‘The green sunlight’s caused by the atmosphere—aerial algae apparently. The moon has huge mixed deposits of cinnabar and fluorspar on its surface. That’s where the red light comes from.’

‘How come?’