She turned to see how Saul was taking this punishment, and saw blood trickling down the side of his face. He reached up with an arm seemingly made of lead to touch it, and observed blood on his fingers. How well could his new surgery stand up to this kind of treatment? He glanced at her questioningly, but she just shook her head. She didn’t know.

Then the pressure was off and the plane banking. In front of them the screen divided, one view showing an anvil of cloud ahead and the other revealing the Minsk spaceport sliding by underneath. No sign now of the crash site below, which brought home to her the sheer scale both of the port itself and, by inference, of everything the two big cats here were up against. But soon that view was lost in cloud for a few minutes before the plane punched through into bright sunshine above an endless plain of white. Now the screen lost its division, as a display appeared along the bottom – Mach 3.2 & 20 min to SCRAM – and it began counting down.

‘I don’t quite know what to do with you,’ said Malden, and Hannah assumed he was addressing her until he leaned forward to look across her at Saul. ‘It seems you do have similar aims to my own.’

That was a concession at least.

‘What about me?’ Hannah asked.

‘You will help me.’ It was not a request. Under Malden’s control, she saw herself in exactly the same position she had experienced under the Committee. ‘What software is he running?’

She met his gaze. ‘His own.’

Malden returned his attention to Saul. ‘Hannah told me you were once Alan Saul – one of their most brilliant researchers – until Smith used pain amplifiers and cerebral reprogramming to destroy your mind.’

Saul shrugged. ‘Alan Saul is gone. I’m a two-year-old.’

‘Smith runs security aboard the Argus Station.’

‘I know.’

Malden just stared for a long moment, obviously making his calculations. ‘Argus Station is heavily firewalled with numerous cut-offs between it and Govnet. Most importantly it has a plain old-fashioned off switch to completely disconnect it from Govnet.’

‘The EM field they turn on to block solar radiation whenever there’s a storm,’ Saul agreed.

‘You know, it’s been very difficult to obtain information from up there for some time . . . I tried accessing by satellite uplink but failed. Security is far too heavy and when I started trying to steal access codes, the EM field came on and cut the station system out of the circuit. Its own internal network is maintained by coded shortwave radio when the EM field is off, and line-of-sight laser and hardwire when it’s on.’

‘Hence you going there with soldiers?’

‘I need to get inside the station, to be effective. I need to disconnect the transformers supplying the EM field to be sure I won’t be cut out.’

‘I myself intended just to sneak aboard,’ said Saul.