Poole shook his head. ‘I’m not part of this, captain, believe me. I’m a mere creature of the Idealists - rather like Mara here, I suppose.’

Now the Captain’s ferocious stare was turned on Futurity. ‘And you,’ Tahget snarled, his scar livid. ‘What do you have to do with it? The truth, now.’

Futurity, flustered, protested, ‘Why, nothing, Captain. You know why I was brought in - to negotiate with Mara. You asked for the Ecclesia’s help! And I don’t understand why you’re even asking me such a question. I’m an Engineer, not an Idealist.’

Tahget snorted. ‘But you’re all alike, you Guilds. All of you clinging to your petty worldlets, with your stolen fragments of the soldier’s faith, your saintly relics and your shrines!’

Futurity was shocked. ‘Captain - believe me, Engineers and Idealists would never cooperate on a scheme like this. It’s unthinkable.’ He hunted for the right word. ‘We may seem alike to you. But we are rivals.’

‘Maybe that’s the point,’ Poole said smoothly. ‘Acolyte, I imagine the Idealists have their own flow-through of pilgrims, along with their money.’

‘Yes, that’s true.’

‘What, then, if Mara’s bomb goes off? What will be the impact on the Ecclesia’s trading?’

‘We don’t think of it as trading but a duty to helpless—’

‘Just answer the question,’ Tahget growled.

Futurity thought it through. ‘It would be a disaster for us,’ he conceded. ‘A refugee makes her journey only once in her lifetime. She brings her children. If she can choose, nobody would come to a place so unsafe as to allow something like this to happen.’

‘No more refugees with their meagre savings for you to cream,’ Poole said, watching Futurity’s reaction with a cold amusement. ‘No more pilgrims and their offerings. Your rivals would have struck a mighty economic blow, would they not?’

Tahget said, ‘My company certainly wouldn’t touch your poxy little globe with a gloved hand, acolyte. Perhaps we won’t anyhow.’ A vein throbbed in his forehead. ‘So we are all puppets of those illusionists. And there’s not one of them within light years, whose head I can crack open!’

Mara had listened to all this. Now she said, ‘None of this matters. What does matter is me, and my daughter.’

‘And your bomb,’ said Poole softly.

‘Take me back to my cabin,’ she said. ‘And don’t ask me to leave it again before we get to Chandra.’

With a curt nod, Tahget dismissed her.

Futurity went back to his own room. He was relieved the little crisis was over, but his cheeks burned with shame and anger that this whole incident had been set up to get at his own Ecclesia - that another Guild should be responsible - and it had taken Poole to see it, Poole, a Virtual designed by the Idealists themselves!