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disappeared. Instantaneously it reappeared inside the first ring and continued to accelerate—its
AG motors working against the gravity of Earth. Again and again it ran that course, energy being fed into it by microwave transmitters in the displacement rings themselves, enough energy to power a solar civilization for years. Finally that civilization let it go. The probe headed out into darkness, to confirm or deny a theory about the existence of life on Earth.

2
    Astolere:
    It was a move of desperation to attempt a ground assault on the Callisto facility, and one for which the Umbrathane have paid dearly. But we have yet to learn the full extent of the payment we might make in using this infant technology. My brother Saphothere’s venture into the past, using one of the bioconstructs, we knew would have unforeseen consequences in itself. That he took with him an atomic weapon to place at the point of the assault force’s arrival, we knew could only make things worse. Eight thousand of those ground troops died in the conflagration—and as for the rest of us? We now all have memories of two parallel events, while living in the future of only one. And we all now know that such manipulation of events, so close to us on the time-line, has pushed us down off the main line, and that we are one step closer to oblivion.
    Â 
    T ACK WAS INHERENTLY IMMORAL. He had been grown for immorality and trained for it. He knew the rules, all of them, and he knew how to break them with a thoroughness that was frightening. The rule he knew how to break most efficiently was ‘Thou shalt not kill’ or any legalese derivation of such.
    Tack did not have a mother or father in the usual sense. He had been cloned from a particularly efficient CIA killer, and vat-grown two hundred years after that same killer had paid a visit to a crematorium furnace without the benefit of being dead. The burned killer’s genetic tissue had been taken from him years before as part of one of the top-secret loony projects of that time. Tack’s accelerated upbringing had consisted of, during daytime, an enforced training that had killed off many of his classmates—all surprisingly similar in appearance to himself—and at nights being hooked up to a semi-AI computer via the
surgically installed interface plug in the base of his skull. At the age of ten he was physically an adult, mentally an adult, but mentally something else as well. His intensive knowledge of both Eastern martial arts and modern weaponry blended into a coherent whole that made him the supreme killer. His understanding of the world at large came not from personal experience but via uploading. In him his makers and masters had achieved their goal: they had both soldier and secret agent, and did not have to worry about whether or not he would obey orders, for he was programmable .
    Glancing back now at the little whore, he wondered what Nandru Jurgens hoped to achieve with her, for it was evident to Tack that she was as dispensable to the Task Force soldier as she was to Tack himself. Some time soon the sale would have to be made and in any such transaction there was always a point where one party must, however briefly, be prepared to trust the other party. And it was in such brief intervals that Tack operated most efficiently. He expected some kind of threat and some kind of double-cross, but was confident of his own and his comrades’ ability to circumvent this; confident that by the end of this day he would be in possession of both the item itself and the money, and that Jurgens and this little whore would be dead.
    â€˜Where to?’ he asked.
    â€˜Head for the Anglia Reforest and put down by the old thermal generating tower,’ Polly replied.
    As the driver changed course, Tack faced forward again and briefly scanned the console on the side of his seeker gun. Since first pointing it at the whore it had, by laser and ultrasound scanning, recorded her