The sight didn't flummox him quite like it had Wallace, but his mind tightened appreciatively. "So? I'm impressed. This attack on the datanet is being taken seriously, yes?"

"The Trustees attach a certain importance to it," Greg said. "Now, what about Ranasfari?"

"Do you know what he's been working on?" Sean Francis asked cautiously.

"Room-temperature giga-conductor."

"Fine, OK, had to be sure. You understand? Can't just shout my mouth off, yes?"

"We understand," said Gabriel.

Francis caught the undertone of irony. "The series-four Merlin is fitted with giga-conductor power cells. Thing is, Event Horizon has put in a bid to fit the RAF's Matador AGM-404 exospheric interceptors with the same marque of cells. If it is the giga-conductor which has screwed up then we're really up the old creek, yes?"

"And is it?" Greg asked.

"Too soon to say. They're still running the fault analysis." Sean Francis's mind betrayed a lot of apprehension. Greg wrote it off as the pressure. Failure this soon after his promotion would send him tumbling right back down to the obscurity he'd clawed his way up from.

"Why do you need giga-conductor power cells on a nuclear-powered spaceprobe?" Greg asked.

"The isotopes only power the thrusters during the flight phase, lifting the Merlin out of Earth orbit and boosting it along its interception trajectory. Once it's matched velocities with its target asteroid they're jettisoned along with the shielding, which reduces the total mass to just over a tonne. Manoeuvring becomes a lot simpler and faster without all that surplus mass to shift around. The giga-conductor cells charge off the solar panels and provide power to the thrusters for the final approach phase, as well as moving the Merlin around the surface after rendezvous. Some of these Apollo Amor rocks are quite large, we need forty or fifty sample points to build up an accurate picture of the ore composition."

Greg could see the little group of flight controllers round the chief's desk craning their necks in his direction, impatience registering in their surface thoughts.

"You'd better be getting back," he told Sean Francis. "Glad to see you're getting ahead. One last thing: did you know Philip Evans is still alive?"

From an academic viewpoint Francis's reaction was a fascinating emotional evolution. His initial stare was pure disgust; from there Greg's espersense read him progressing through disbelief and into contempt, then back into worry, and finishing up plain confused.

"I saw the body," he said eventually.

"Right, well, thanks for your time."

"I hope you're not going to be so tasteless with Miss Evans. She was very close to her grandfather."

"Of course not. I'll tell you why I had to ask you that, one day," he said, projecting as much bonhomie as he could muster, which simply served to deepen Francis's confusion.

He flicked an uncertain glance at Gabriel, and departed, a much puzzled man.