‘Obviously, Smith took an interest in the attack upon his old stomping ground of Inspectorate HQ London, so located Janus on Govnet, and through Janus located my bunker. His abilities are such that he could not have failed to locate Malden, once Malden had started operating as comlife. He did not fail to locate him. From his own words, Smith clearly allowed Malden to conduct his little revolution, possibly with Committee approval or possibly not . . .’

The ensuing pause was lengthy, his lips still moving according to some subroutine, then finally the voicebox re-engaging. ‘Smith was sensitive to anything involving the name Avram Coran, therefore must have tracked that identity back to reveal how I obtained it at Gene Bank . . . He’s been on top of me and Malden right from the start, I think.’ Saul refocused on Hannah, his voice becoming marginally more human. ‘But I still wonder why he allowed Malden to get away with what he did down at Minsk. I suspect Smith’s agenda might differ from the Committee’s.’

‘Good to know how we got here,’ Braddock interjected, ‘but I’d rather now know how the hell we’re going to get out.’

‘Smith has tight control of the station network, and will be watching out for me. If I try to penetrate it, he might be able to do to me what he did to Malden. I need to create a diversion and find another route in, if I am to kill him.’

There it was, stated with cold precision: kill him.

‘How, though?’ Hannah asked.

‘Robots,’ Saul replied succinctly, a statement of fact, his gaze again elsewhere.

‘If you could explain?’ Hannah suggested.

‘Once the EM shield is on, all electromagnetic communications go down. The computer networks throughout Argus Station are maintained by physical wiring and line-of-sight laser. However, for the robots both those forms of connection will only be intermittent, since they are constantly on the move. They will be running on their own programs for the duration of shielding, and only updated every time they physically connect up, or connect by laser, or when the shields go down.’

‘Smith can’t be in the robots,’ declared Hannah. ‘At least not fully. Maybe they possess stripped-down copies of his AI component within them, but there’s not enough processing space for much more.’

‘I doubt he even bothers,’ Saul said.

‘We need to find robots?’ Braddock asked.

‘We do.’

‘Readerguns are going to be a problem.’

‘Quite true, but not until we depart the rim and head inwards, to where they are concentrated. And I have no intention of going there just yet,’ he said decisively. ‘Come on, we’ve been here long enough.’

They’d reached their current narrow place of concealment via an even narrower crawlway designed for some of the very robots Saul was talking about. He now headed for the exit leading to this, then paused.

‘Solar activity must be high,’ he observed.

‘What?’ Hannah asked.