He looked at her blankly. Probably searching his databank for a suitable response, she thought. He was playing the part of a man romantically involved; in love. She wondered just how difficult it had been for him last night, when he had been inside her—if he had felt anything. She shuddered and pushed her hand deeper into her pocket, clasped the comforting warm metal there. How had she been fooled? He was handsome, yes; his hair short-cropped and a sort of silver colour, his skin that bland olive of the bulk of extraterrestrial humanity, his features sharp, striking—so much so that they belied the dead flatness of his grey eyes. But he was not so handsome, so perfect, as to give away what he was. He had faults, scars, the habit of picking his toenails in bed, a tendency not to suffer fools. All emulation, wasn’t it?

‘The dark otters are swarming,’ he stated.

It was a concise observation. He probably knew their number and deviation from standard size. Angelina felt slightly sick and hardly heard his next words.

‘An interesting sight . . . This is what we have come here to see?’

Not good enough.

Arian had been right from the start: he was a plant. She had to do it. She had to do it now. But it was difficult—so very hard to kill someone she had actually allowed through her defences, allowed to make love to her . . . have sex with her . . . emulate the actions of mating.

He stepped away from her, nearer to the edge, and looked down. The sea roiled, as viscid as oil against the sea wall. Below the surface, dark otters were shooting back and forth as they hunted adapted whitebait introduced two centuries before, still to learn that Earth flesh tasted foul and gave no nutrition. Angelina pulled out the weapon it had cost them so much to obtain. Money, and more than one life.

‘Sometimes I think,’ he said, turning to her with his face twisted in a parody of understanding, ‘that the—’

He saw the weapon.

‘You made love like a machine,’ Angelina said as she levelled the gun at him. The gun was matt black, and had the shape of an old projectile gun, but with LCD displays on its side and a barrel that was an open cube with a polished interior. It was what some called an antiphoton weapon, yet what it projected was not antiphotons, merely field-accelerated protons. It had been a necessary lie, once. Separatists had developed it, and now a Separatist would use it. Angelina had never seen one before, let alone used one. Necessary again. She watched him for a reaction. For a moment he appeared to be listening to something distant, then he slumped in defeat.

‘How long have you known?’ he asked, turning his shoulder to her and looking inland to the floodplain and neat fields of adapted papyrus.