One of the victims of the Ngaa was Zoe Cornwall, kidnapped by the Ngaa and then murdered by it. Once Blade loved her and she loved him, in a past that now sometimes seemed as distant as the Middle Ages. They'd planned to marry, but the demands of Blade's work in the Project and the Official Secrets Act eventually drove them apart. Blade wasn't sure he'd ever stopped loving her. In any case, he hated to see innocent people of any sort dragged into the dangers he faced as a matter of professional duty.

Perhaps he was selfish in wanting Zoe alive, and certainly it would have been hard for them to start up a life together again. The Ngaa not only left her a widow but murdered her three children as well. She would have carried her own set of scars to the end of her life.

But it still hurt-terribly.

Blade had read the whole report on the battle against the Ngaa, a stack of paper as long as a best-selling novel. He'd marveled at the ability of bureaucratic prose to reduce horrors and disasters to the proportions of a leaky faucet. He'd also been reassured that every possible precaution was being taken to prevent such a disaster from happening again. To be sure, there'd been only one Ngaa, but it was far from certain that Dimension X didn't hold other and perhaps worse menaces. In fact, very little was certain about Dimension X, and the affair of the Ngaa had if anything increased that uncertainty. If Blade hadn't known these precautions were being taken, he'd have been forced to have second thoughts about another trip to Dimension X. Danger to himself was one thing. Danger to the whole human race or even a few dozen innocent people was an entirely different matter.

These thoughts and memories carried Blade the rest of the way down the corridor and through the outer rooms of the main complex. J met him at the door to Lord Leighton's holy of holies, the room holding the master computer.