Another man was standing over him. He was very big, the owner of the shadow at the door. Drusher groped around, found his spectacles and jammed them back on. They were bent, but he could see the man. He was wearing a jack-armoured coat. His head was shaved, rounded and solid like the tip of a large-calibre bullet. He had a goatee.

He looked down at Drusher, baffled.

‘The hell you playing at?’ he asked.

‘Don’t kill me!’ Drusher gurgled.

‘I’m not going to,’ the man replied.

Drusher wrenched out the pistol and aimed it at the man’s face.

‘Do not kill me!’ he cried.

The man looked at the gun in annoyance.

‘Well, now I want to,’ he said.

Stab-beams bobbed behind him. More people, running over.

‘Have you found him?’ a voice asked.

‘I found someone,’ said the bald man, frowning at Drusher. ‘He’s got a gun.’

‘And I’ll use it!’ Drusher yelled, lying on his back and brandishing the weapon wildly.

The bald man sighed and, in some manner that Drusher couldn’t quite understand but which clearly involved terrifying reflexes, took the gun out of Drusher’s hand.

‘Now he hasn’t,’ the bald man called out.

The other figures arrived. They shone their stablights at him.

‘Is that him?’ the bald man asked.

‘Yes,’ said one of the figures. A woman. ‘Valentin Drusher. Magos biologis.’

‘He doesn’t look like a magos biologis,’ said the bald man. ‘Just some old loon. Why isn’t he wearing any trousers?’

‘I was in bed!’ Drusher wailed.

‘With your boots on?’ the bald man asked.

‘That was after!’ cried Drusher.

The woman bent down beside Drusher.

‘Get up and stop making a fuss, Valentin,’ she said. ‘These nice people have come a long way to find you.’

Drusher knew her voice. After fifteen years, he still knew the smell of her too. Body heat, leather, a faint fragrance called True Heart that had cost him too much money in a Tycho city perfumery twenty years before.

‘Macks?’

‘Hello, Drusher,’ said Germaine Macks. ‘It’s been a while.’

Two

TWO

A Specific Area of Technical Expertise

There were four of them. Macks and three others, two men and a woman.

‘I made you this,’ the other woman said. She put a tin mug down on the table beside Drusher.

She was a finely made woman with very dark skin, her hair tight-pinned around her head. Drusher could not guess her age. Thirty, perhaps? She wore gloves and an embroidered cerise jacket.

‘What is it?’ Drusher asked, dabbing at his split lip.

‘Caffeine,’ she said.

‘I don’t have any caffeine,’ he replied.

The woman frowned and gestured towards the kitchen. ‘Brown powder. Silver tin. Second shelf. Marked “Caffeine”.’

‘A sample of desiccated treefox droppings, for analysis,’ said Drusher.

She nodded thoughtfully, then shrugged.

‘Probably better not drink it, then,’ she advised.