The military cities sprawled across the southern hemisphere. They were less cities than EMC compounds, run as free-trade zones, pulling in migrant labour from across the halo the way a black hole rips gas out of an accretion disc. They drew the defeated races. They drew the enfeebled and stupid. They drew the New Men, like moths to a flame. You went to New Venusport because you had nowhere else to go.

South hemisphere New Venusport was essentially a maintenance operation. K-ships filled its skies, or shot vertically into orbit at Mach 50. Night and day they crouched in the service bays with arc-light slicking down their dark grey flanks. They were restless. They flickered in and out of visibility as their navigation systems trawled through ten spatial dimensions. They never disconnected their defences or target-acquisition systems, so the air around them was constantly cooking with everything from gamma to microwaves. Work near them, you were in a lead suit. Even the paint on their hulls was deadly. The maintenance bays weren’t all of it: elsewhere, EMC’s resource contractors had the south hemisphere regolith up in strip-mines as wide as nation-states, using machines powered and directed by the old alien technology. They switched on, stood back, stared at one another in delighted surmise.

“Hey, this thing could peel a planet!”

In the cities, air and food were foul, and you had no idea what came down in the rain. The New Men, packed into their warrens, preyed upon by the usual portfolio of gangsters, high-profile political zealots and EMC police, went off to work in the grey dawn, coughing and shivering and bemused, awkwardly hunching their shoulders. But it wasn’t all bad. New corporate workplace safety guidelines, self-imposed and self-policed, had brought the life expectancy of a male worker up a couple of points, to twenty-four years. Anyone could tell you that was an advance.

Meanwhile, scattered across the northern hemisphere, the corporate enclaves constructed themselves as Old Earth.

They favoured little towns—with little market squares—called Saulsignon or Brandett Hersham; little clean railway trains running through fields of chocolate-coloured ploughland. The men from EMC chose tall, beautiful women and gave them honey-coloured winter coats of real fur. The women chose men from upper management, whom they loved with a fierce mad true devotion, and gave them beautiful children with honey-coloured hair. There were grey stone churches with witch’s hat steeples, chateaux and shooting boxes. Water meadows lined the tributaries of the New Pearl River—there were wild flowers all summer, long, frozen floods a mile wide to skate on every winter. You went to New Venusport if you were lucky, and a hard worker. The corporation sent you there to do a job, but you went for the blue rainwashed skies and white cumulus clouds. The horses, so beautifully groomed. The country sports. And there was such good food in Saulsignon—all those different cheeses!

New Venusport, the recruiting brochures said: Planet of choice.