He wanted a sensory extension that went way beyond his usual short-range emotion perception. To find it he retreated inward, ignoring his blood heat, heartbeats, breathing. The state waited for him right down at the bottom of the mental well, a fragile central pool. Gaseous shapes meandered below its surface. He slipped softly below the interface.

Greg perceived shadows, treacherous grey cobwebs congealing into misleading forms, aching empty gaps of grainy mist. The vision was silent, neither hot nor cold. Through it all, minds shone like diamond-point mirages, a flat cyclonic swirl of fireflies with himself at the tranquil storm-eye. He concentrated, seeking the opaque distortion of Mirriam, the familiar signature of one mind.

The water resolved as a sheet of black ice, a dead zone; he drifted across it, stretching out close to his absolute limit. Mirriam's hull rose above him, a cliff of insubstantial gauze. Passing through.

The three figures were cloudy alien protrusions into his lonely universe; their shape fuzzy, a pseudo-locus rippling around a solid kernel. Kendric and Hermione slid fluidly over and round Katerina, the three together a tightly knit serpentine coil.

Katerina was a soul in torment, hating herself for what she was doing, unable to refuse. She closed out the degradations Hermione performed, warm with the conviction her reward would come.

Greg observed her arousal growing as Kendric pleasured himself with her, his mind leaking distorted pictures of Julia. Fissures of intense rapture multiplied through her mind, interlacing, spreading to conquer, reducing her to animal abandon. Orgasm brought a blazing concussion of frenzied ecstasy, a neural nova.

Instinct and dusty memory fused within Greg's tarnished cranium, and at last he knew what Kendric had done to her.

The intangible universe twisted, spectral images elongating and spiralling down to a tightly wound vanishing point. The marina's sights and sounds boiled up around him, solid and loud.

"Let's go home," he said weakly. Sustaining such a vast psi-effusion was severely debilitating. Gravity seemed to have quadrupled.

"'Bout time," Suzi grumbled, slamming down the cowling and locking the catches with a vicious twist. "You look like shit, you know?"

"Thank you." The sky overhead was jaundiced, its turbidity fluctuating in time to his heartbeat.

"That gland must really take it out of you." Her foot pressed down on the accelerator pad.

"It does."

"Thought so, you were thrashing about like you were having a nightmare. Get what you want?"

"Yes."

"Hey, your nose has started bleeding again."

"It'll stop in a minute."

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

"Of course Kendric wouldn't know Wolf's name," Eleanor snapped irritably. "He's the man at the top, the one with the cleanest hands in town. He buys people who buy people who buy Wolf. That's why there was no response to the name, there'll be a whole chain of tekmercs between him and the cutting edge of the operation to get rid of Philip Evans. It's like that precaution you use in gear, what do you call it? And keep still."