"The boss man could be preoccupied," Sparver said.

"He should have answered by now. I'm worried. Maybe we ought to get back there, see – "

"We need those summary packages, Thalia. In five minutes you'll be locked out of the core again."

Sparver was right. The one-time code – good for ten minutes of unrestricted activity – would not buy her access to the core a second time.

"Hurry up," she said, through clenched teeth.

She tried Dreyfus again, but still there was no reply. After what felt like an eternity, the core ejected the summary packages from a slot near its base. Thalia clipped together the thick diskettes and then secured them to her belt. Absurd as it was, she swore she could feel the weight of the information inside them. It would have taken days to squeeze that amount of data across a beam.

"You done?" Sparver asked.

"This is all we need. We can leave the local abstraction running."

"And if they try to get around the block you just put in?"

"They'll have a dead core on their hands. They'll be lucky if life support still works after that, let alone abstraction." Thalia turned back to the core and authorised it to rescind the Panoply access privilege it had just granted her.

"That's it, then," she said, feeling an unexpected sense of anticlimax.

"There. Wasn't so hard, was it?"

"I'm worried about the boss."

"It's just the rock this thing's made of, blocking our signals." Sparver smiled at the technician again.

"We're done. Can I trust you not to do anything silly if I pull the whiphound off you?"

The man swallowed painfully and twitched his head in a nod.

"I'll take that as a 'yes'," Sparver said. He reached out his hand and beckoned the whiphound. With a flick of its tail, the weapon sprang its handle into Sparver's grip, the tail whisking back into the housing with a lashing sound.