Dillan Evans blinked, concentrating hard. "I don't remember. Oh, God, Julie, I don't remember." His eyes began to water.

"It's all right," she said quickly. "It's all right, Daddy, really it is. I'm going to have my lunch in a little while. You can sit with me."

"I can?" His smile returned.

"Yah, I'd like you to." She held the flowers up. "Did you grow these?"

"Yes. Yes I did, up from tiny seeds. Like you, Julie, I grew you, too. My very own snowflower. The one stem of beauty in the frozen wilderness of my life."

She put her arm in his, and steered him towards the library door.

"I was looking for your friend," Dillan Evans said. "The pretty one. I had some flowers for her as well." He began to look around, his face tragic.

"Katerina?"

"Was that her name? She had hair that shone so bright in the sun. I showed her round my garden. And we talked and talked. There's so few do that. Did you know she can charm butterflies on to her finger?"

Julia winced at the thought of Kats talking to her father. Had Adrian been there as well?

She closed the library door behind her, blocking out the worries of the present. But only so she could suffer in a different way, she thought bleakly. Typical.

"Like an angel," her father said in a wistful tone. "Radiant and golden."

CHAPTER SIX

Greg had never been in an airship before. In fact the last time he'd been airborne in anything other than the ghost wing was in the Northern European Alliance's retreat from Turkey. The experience had left him with unsavoury memories of air travel.

As with all retreats it was chaos bordering on utter shambles. Only the RAF emerged with any credit, commandeering anything with wings that didn't flap in one last ball-busting effort to get the squaddies out before the fall of eternal night. Greg wound up jammed between two blood-soaked medevac cases in a severely overloaded Antonov-74M, watching pinpoint nova flares floating serenely through the air in a desperate bid to lure the Jihad legion's Kukri missiles from the jet exhausts.

There was a universe of difference. The Alabama Spirit was a Lakehurst-class ship on the Atlantic run; a leviathan, first-class passengers had individual cabins, three lounges, their own dining room, a casino, and twenty-four-hour steward service.

He'd taken a Dornier tilt-fan shuttle up from Stanstead the previous evening, after he'd finished interviewing the furnace operators and the Zanthus managers. It had been dark when they embarked above the English channel, all he'd seen through the Dornier's cabin window was an oval of darkness blotting our the wisps of pale moonlit cloud. The airship's outer skin was one giant solar collector, providing electricity for the internal systems. Hydrogen-burning MHD generators powered a pair of large fans at the rear. He was looking forward to reaching Listoel in daylight and seeing the Alabama Spirit unmasked.