"Right in my own heart. Now you'll have to excuse me, I've got to get Victor Tyo organised."

"Right, sure." Granting him a favour.

End GregTime.

His image winked out, what might have been a smile tantalising her. She reached out and plucked the cybofax from the tree. Grinning stupidly, feeling wonderful.

One of Wilholm's sentinel panthers was looking at her five metres away, violet saucer eyes unblinking. She clicked her fingers and it padded over. Warm damp breath fell on her cheek.

"Good girl." She stroked it behind pointed flattened ears. It yawned lazily at the affection, pink tongue licking its double row of shark-heritage teeth. Tobias snorted disapproval, shaking his thick neck, then went back to foraging the grass.

Right in his own heart?

CHAPTER TEN

Alexius McNamara dropped through the sick bay's hatch, dressed in the sky-blue flightsuit which all the microgee module workers wore. His jowls overflowed his helmet strap, fingers resembled sausages. It was the last week of his shift.

"Grab him," Greg said simply. He'd soon learnt to speak in a half-shout, sound didn't carry far in free fall.

Victor Tyo and Isabel Curtis were already anchored to the chamber's walls on either side of the hatch. They clamped him between them with the efficiency of a tag-wrestling team, his legs and arms immobilised. Don Howarth jabbed a shockrod into his neck.

Greg had recognised the mental genotype as soon as he appeared: fissures of lassitude, leprous self-loathing. One of the kamikazes. He wasn't taking chances with them any more. His interview with Norman Knowles, one of the five managers, had finished badly. Greg had sensed Knowles was the one who'd circumvented the security monitors at the same time as Knowles worked out he had a gland. Unfortunately, Greg hadn't sensed Knowles was one of the kamikazes in time. Jerry Masefield had taken the brunt of the attack before he had been subdued. There was something uniquely disquieting about small globules of blood spraying about in free fall.

"Fuck you!" McNamara shouted.

The shockrod dug deeper. Don Howarth was a man worried for his position and pension. McNamara snarled.

Greg pushed off the wall, and stopped himself ten centimetres from him. They were inverted, and Greg sensed how that irritated the man. The Zanthus crew put a lot of stock in orientating themselves to a universal visual horizon.

"Spit at me, and I'll shove that shockrod up your arse, no messing," Greg said calmly.

McNamara gave a start, thought about it, and swallowed.

"That's right. They sent me up here because I have a gland."

Frightened eyes peered at Greg from within wells of flaccid flesh.

"You've been screwing around with the monolattice-filament extruder 'ware, McNamara. Writing off perfectly good fibres. How long have you been doing it?"

"Hey, psycho freak, your gland gives you cancer, know that? You'll die rotting."

"Don't," said Greg. "The whole nine months? Eight? Seven?" He sighed. "Seven it is."

"Bastard."

"How did they get a lever on you?"