“I’m not saying Kcells have been bad for us,” Yuri said. “But the nature of the Olyix, this adaptability, is detrimental when they encounter a species with politics as complex as ours. They lack discrimination. Because they are driven so relentlessly to achieve their own goal, it doesn’t matter to them how they achieve it. They need our money to buy our electricity, so they will adopt our own methodology to obtain it. Any methodology we have, they see an opportunity. Anything else is probably a sin to them.”

“You object to them because they’ve become capitalists?” Eldlund exclaimed.

“No,” Callum taunted. “It’s because they’re better capitalists.”

“You don’t get it,” Yuri said calmly. “They don’t have our moral filter. It doesn’t matter to them what they do to get money, nor the consequences. And there is an awful lot of money involved with supplying the Salvation of Life with energy. That’s why we have to watch them very closely.”

“Money is always going to distort everything,” Alik said. “Nothing new in that. Greed is a constant. That just makes them more human, you ask me.”

“You’re wrong,” Yuri said flatly. “You, with your job, should know the levels to which people will sink when there’s real money involved. And because we race to the bottom, so do the Olyix. We are the architects of their current behavior. And I’ve seen the consequences firsthand. They’re not good.”

I watched with immense interest as Alik finally made his facial muscles contract, an expression approximating skepticism. “Such as?”

Yuri’s Race Against Time

YURI’S RACE AGAINST TIME

LONDON, AD 2167

The summer of 2167 was exceptionally warm, even by Europe’s new standards. In Yuri’s London office, the whining air-con was making no difference to the wretched late-August temperature. By quarter past ten on Thursday morning he wanted to open the window—not that he could; his office was on the sixty-third floor. Connexion’s extraordinary European central office rose out of the Greenwich Peninsular, a neo-Gothic helix-twist skyscraper of glass and black stone that topped out at ninety stories, like the watchtower of some fallen pagan archangel charged with guarding the city against invaders sailing up the Thames. From his office Yuri had a perfectly framed view of the huge old Dartford Bridge curving up out of the distant horizon. But that same panorama was one that poured sunlight through the glass all morning long.

Earth had been using solarwells to supply its power since 2069, with the last coal and gas power stations shutting down in 2082. That had given the biosphere eighty-five years to reabsorb the excess carbon monoxide and dioxide produced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Climatologists kept saying that was long enough for the atmosphere to stabilize at pre–Industrial Revolution levels, the idealized norm. Unfortunately, their elegant computer predictions never matched reality, and they all agreed 2167 was a fluke spike on the obstinately shallow cooling curve. One which the neogreen movement, whose ideology trumped science, was quick to blame on unusual solar activity, created by solarwells abusing the corona.