“You’ve been watching too many video fictions,” he said. “I don’t call villains out to fight in the midday sun. There’s nothing very challenging about walking up to a man who’s never seen you before and blowing him away before he knows what you’re up to.”

“And is that what you did to Altair of Altair and the Jack of Diamonds?” she asked with a smile.

“No,” he admitted. “I was careless in one case and clumsy in the other.”

“What about Alexander the Elder? He had six men protecting him when you took him.”

“Four.” he corrected her.

“You’re evading the point.”

“I thought the point was that you were interested in me because of the people I didn’t kill.”

“That’s true. But you’re a man of many talents, and I’m sure Santiago can make use of all of them.”

“We’ll see,” he said noncommittally.

They rode in silence for another half hour, the corn and wheat fields broken only by an occasional methane production plant, where the waste of Safe Harbor’s farm animals was converted into energy. Finally she turned off the road and approached a row of silos.

“More spoils of conquest?” he asked as the vehicle came to a halt.

“A medical center,” she replied.

“Why camouflage it?” he asked. “The Democracy has got better things to do than make raids on hospitals.”

“Because Safe Harbor’s population isn’t large enough to support a facility of this size,” explained Silent Annie. “A complex like this would draw unwanted attention to ourselves.”

He got out of the vehicle and followed her into one of the silos. She led him to an elevator, and after a brief descent he found himself in a white, sterile environment some sixty feet beneath the ground.

“How big is this place?” he asked, looking down the polished corridors that radiated in all directions.

“I don’t know the square footage,” she replied, “but it extends beneath the entire silo complex. We have twenty-three laboratories, half a dozen observation wards, a pair of surgeries, and four isolation wards. There’s also a commissary, as well as extensive staff quarters so that our people aren’t seen arriving and leaving every day.”

They began walking past the laboratories, each with its white-frocked medics and scientists, and finally came to the first of the observation wards. Cain paused to look in through a thick, one-way glass and saw nine men and women lying in beds, plugged in to life-support and monitoring units. They reminded him of burn victims, with blackened skins that blistered and peeled away from their bodies.

“What happened to them?” asked Cain, staring at an elderly woman whose cheekbones were both exposed.

“They’re from Hyperion.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It was opened up five years ago,” she said. “There were about five thousand initial settlers, all of them members of an obscure religious sect.”