ASPECT®

WARNER BOOKS

An AOL Time Warner Company This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

WARNER BOOKS EDITION

Copyright © 2002 by Peter F. Hamilton All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Cover design by Don Puckey

Cover illustration by Jim Burns

Aspect® name and logo are registered trademarks of Warner Books, Inc.

Warner Books, Inc.

1271 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Visit our Web site at www. twbookmark.com

An AOL Time Warner Company Printed in the United States of America Originally published in hardcover by Warner Books.

First Paperback Printing: March 2003

10987654321

For Kate, who said yes

CHAPTER ONE

Time was when the bar would have welcomed a man from Zantiu-Braun's strategic security division, given him his first beer on the house and listened with keen admiration to his stories of life as it was lived oh so differently out among the new colony planets. But then that could be said of anywhere on Earth halfway through the twenty-fourth century. In the public conscience, the glamour of interstellar expansion was fading like the enchantment of an aging actress.