"Vengeance." Philip Evans sounded sceptical. "If he's that twisted why not try to assassinate Juliet here? Got to be cheaper than buying eight hotrod hackers, and their silence. She's well protected, but no security is proof against a professional hardliner tekmerc, not when he's striking out of the blue."

She shrank a little inside, compressed by steely arctic fingers. It's only theory, she told herself, don't let it bother you. But there was no need for him to say it quite so bluntly.

"I don't know," said Greg. "I still don't understand why Kendric allowed Julia to buy him out. Even if he didn't know about the giga-conductor when he started the memox-spoiler operation, he certainly did by the time she confronted him."

"I see what you mean," Julia said. "We filed the patent on November the fifteenth, and informed the Ministry of Defence on the seventeenth. Even assuming Kendric doesn't have a mole feeding him data, he ought to have known it existed by the end of the year at the latest, like your contact did; which would've given him months to work out the implications before I hit him with the buyout. He should've held on for all he was worth, risked family displeasure over Siebruk Orbital. For those stakes they would've forgiven him anything. In fact, now he has withdrawn the di Girolamo house, they're going to be furious with him when I go public with the giga-conductor and they realise what they've lost out on." The idea of Kendric giving up bothered her deeply. Kendric was smart and crafty. That bastard would have something in reserve. She knew he would.

Gabriel stirred, blinking rapidly. "Wilholm's staff are clear," she announced.

"From what?" Julia asked.

"From knowing your grandfather is stored in this NN core. They hadn't put it together like your father."

Julia knew her cheeks were reddening at the reminder, and didn't care, not any more. "How do you know?"

"I scanned the possible futures where Greg interviews each of them this afternoon, he wouldn't find any culpability. Oh, except that your gardeners are flogging ten per cent of Wilholm's vegetables on the village market."

"Little buggers," Philip squawked.

"Oh shush, Grandpa, I know all about that."

"How come?"

"I'm mistress of the manor, remember? It's my job to know." She turned back to Gabriel. "I thought you said nothing about the future was certain?"

"Not in the future, no," said Gabriel. "But if the staff had known about the NN core and passed on the data, that would mean they'd pieced the knowledge together in the past, it's already happened, an immutable fact."

"Yah… right." It sounded kind of screwy, but the nodes confirmed the logic. Providing you believed in precognition in the first place.