"Such an exquisite young girl," Kendric said, watching Greg's face with narrowed eyes. "I have always admired your English roses. After one has broken through that cool reserve, their adventurousness knows no bounds." There was a fragment of disappointment registering in his mind at Greg's refusal to show the slightest execration.

"I'm afraid I can't stop long, Mr. di Girolamo," Greg said. "My friends would worry about what'd happened to me."

"No," Kendric said, his thoughts were steely.

"I'm sorry?"

"No. You're not staying at all, Mandel. Katerina let you on board. My mistake; you should not have been allowed within a million kilometres of the Mirriam."

"But I was wondering if you could help me."

"I enquired about you after our first encounter. I know what you are. A gland psychic. A Mindstar veteran. You were not going to ask me anything, you were going to uncover. Event Horizon's truthfinder general, sent to pry by your whore daughter mistress."

Greg held his dismay in check. "Any answers you give would be entirely voluntary. I can't read people's thoughts."

"So you claim, and other people fervently hope. It is a particular human weakness you pry on, Mandel; we want, need, to believe we are secure against you. But I have a vast repository of confidential commercial information in my brain. I choose not to believe the word of a repulsive grotesquery, a failed laboratory experiment."

Greg let the neurohormones discharge into his brain, desperately searching round with his intuition. There was guilt here, a strong scent; Kendric and Julia were tied together, hating each other, feeding off each other. With a shock he knew she was as guilty as Kendric. Both of them wilfully stimulating the other's black obsession, a perverted symbiosis.

He was jerked out of his meditative analysis by hands like a pair of vices clamping round his upper arms. The bodyguards were standing on either side of him.

"Mark, Toby, throw him off," Kendric said.

"I'm going," Greg told them. He sensed rather than saw Mark's smirk.

"Too right," the bodyguard said.

Greg contracted his espersense, neglecting the other minds arrayed around the Mirriam, focusing on Kendric alone. "Wolf," he shouted.

There was no reaction. No guilt, fright, consternation, panic. The name hadn't registered. Instead, a band of mild puzzlement tapered through Kendric's mind. It was followed by a rising tide of wry satisfaction when he realised how shaken Greg was by the negative.

Toby and Mark frogmarched him off the aft-deck and down the side of the superstructure, Kendric's laughter chasing him all the way.