Stanton bit off any more comments and just watched them. What were they saying to each other, he wondered. What did their little electrical conversation entail?

‘Come on, Crane. Time to wake up,’ Pelter said, aloud.

Mr. Crane stood up in one abrupt movement. Stanton took in the black glitter of eyes now open below the brim of the hat. Crane’s head turned toward Pelter, and he took one long pace forward. Pelter stepped back, his hand pressing harder against the side of his head, and an expression of intense concentration on his face. Crane did not move further; instead he reached up and removed his hat to expose a totally bald head, a thin-featured face and those completely black eyes.

‘That’s better,’ said Pelter.

Stanton reflected how Crane’s artificial skin looked just that: artificial. It had been previously suggested that his skin should be changed, but no one ever wanted to get that close. Stanton supposed the skin must serve the purpose of preventing blood getting into Mr. Crane’s workings. He made sure he kept well out of reach as Crane emerged from his prison. Pelter lowered his hand, then turned for the stairs. Crane walked just a pace behind him, taking dainty little steps to hold the same position. Stanton picked up the two cases, followed, and wished he were somewhere else.

* * *

Cormac glanced up through the transparent roof, then back at the mirrored containment sphere. It seemed that there was a hand closing tighter in his chest for every moment he went without linking in. Maybe he had made the wrong move? Maybe it would be better to have stayed linked and got out of ECS? Immediately upon thinking these questions, which since leaving the shuttle he had been asking himself with greater regularity, he felt an angry self-contempt.

ECS had been Cormac’s life for so very long, and he truly believed in what he was doing. He looked ahead at the short queues before the various embarkation gates. There was an example of what he had been defending: those queues never became very long. There were no papers to be handed over, no passports, and no lengthy custom’s bureaucracy to bypass. Polity citizens travelled in absolute freedom from world to world. The only restriction was on proscribed weaponry, and even that did not prevent travel. If said weaponry was registered and deactivated, you could take it along with you. Even if you did not register it, you could still travel, only the weapon would be dust at your destination; disintegrated by the autoproscription device the runcibles had inbuilt. To travel distances once inconceivable, all you had to do was book your place and pay a fee, register your identity with the runcible AI when you arrived at the sphere, and walk on through. So bloody damned simple. These people here with their daft cosmetic alterations and possibly brain-scrambling augs, they just had no idea, no idea at all.