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with them?’
    ‘Communication is fine,’ Korsakov said, his fine grey eyes surveying Kanu from beneath an imperious brow, surmounted by a sweep of long grey hair which he wore combed back. ‘But it can’t be more than that. These machines stole Mars from us. It was our world, our inheritance, and they tore it from our control.’
    The flier, powered up and ready, was turning on a platform after being serviced.
    ‘I’m broadly aware of recent history, Yevgeny.’
    The tall, stooping Korsakov began: ‘I can’t speak for the United Aquatic Nations—’
    ‘Then don’t.’
    ‘But your people have an expectation, Kanu. A tacit understanding that your sympathies, when put to the test, will always fall on the human side of the equation.’
    ‘Is anyone saying they don’t?’
    ‘The robot is using you, Kanu. Machines don’t understand friendship. This is leverage, pure and simple.’
    Kanu was glad when the other two ambassadors arrived at the landing deck. They were also wearing surface suits, although their outfits hinted at their differing allegiances within the solar system. Kanu wore a blue-green suit pattened with starfish, their arms linked together in a kind of synaptic net. Korsakov, who stood for the United Orbital Nations, wore regolith grey, embossed with a representation of craters. Dalal, the representative for the United Surface Nations, carried the motif of a single tree, its branches hung with birds and fruit.
    Lucien, the recently appointed ambassador for the Consolidation – everything out to the Oort Cloud that was not Earth, the Moon or Mars – wore a suit threaded with a ripple-like design of complex interlocking orbits.
    ‘Swift will be joining us?’ Dalal asked of Kanu.
    ‘Yes. He should be here in a moment.’
    ‘I don’t care for this arrangement,’ Lucien confessed. ‘We should be free to conduct our inspection without having a robot along for the ride.’
    ‘It’s what’s been agreed,’ Kanu answered, just as Swift appeared from a door leading onto the deck. ‘Transparency. Cooperation. It’s bound to help.’
    ‘Them, or us?’ Korsakov muttered, stooping to avoid scraping his head on the underside of the vehicle.
    Once the flier was sealed, the air was pumped out of the deck and the dome opened to the sky. The passengers took lounge seats and tucked their helmets between their feet. By consent Garudi Dalal took the controls. She vectored them east, maintaining altitude at the agreed value. In the cabin, a soft automatic voice reeled off indices of airspeed, temperature and pressure. Kanu turned around in his lounge seat to view the receeding spire of the embassy, the dome clam-shelling tight once they were gone.
    The embassy was a dark fluted spire with broad, rootlike foundations. It corkscrewed a kilometre and a half from the summit of Olympus Mons, a unicorn’s horn jammed into Mars. With the four ambassadors now aboard the flier, the place was completely devoid of human inhabitation. In fact, since the ambassadors were in the sky, there was now no human presence on the surface of Mars at all.
    They had been under way for an hour when Dalal raised her voice, though without any particular urgency. ‘Something coming up. Three envoys, standard approach formation.’
    Korsakov moved to look over her shoulder, studying the console displays. ‘Weapons readiness?’
    ‘Nominal,’ Dalal answered.
    The flier itself carried no armaments – that would have been an express violation of the terms of the embassy settlement – but they were under constant surveillance and cover from the orbital fortresses. Kanu had been expecting the escorts, though. They were a normal feature of their occasional inspection flights.
    ‘They won’t harm us,’ he said. ‘Not with Swift as a hostage.’
    Swift looked affronted. ‘I trust that is meant as a joke.’
    ‘You’d make a very poor hostage given what you’ve always told me about your massively distributed nature.’
    Swift