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more accurately, he knows that government intel knows about them, so we have to move them all tonight.'
    'Hell's fire, chief - are we gonna have to shoot our way out}'
    Theo slowed as he reached the leaf-wreathed stairway leading up to his hab.
    'That's the funny part, Rory -1 don't think there'll be anyone watching the caches, never mind getting ready to jump us. Listen, I'm at my house right now. Have Ivanov or Janssen pick me up in fifteen. And one more thing - see what you can find out about a special forces guy called Donny.' He gave a brief description iron memory.
    'That must have been some meeting ye had up at the palace,' Rory said. 'Am I right in thinking that this ambassador's meet 'n' greet isna all it seems}'
    'Rory, you don't know the half of it.'
    And as he hurried up the wooden steps, he thought And I don't think I do either.
     

LEGION
     
    It was a contract survey ship called Segmenter that found the planet Darien while studying the perilous gulfs of the Huvuun Deepzone.
    Through tangled swirls and curtains of interstellar dust and debris, Segmenter had painstakingly (and clandestinely) plotted and scanned and measured for several long weeks before stumbling over an uncharted star system, complete with four planets, one of which was habitable. Since this part of the Huvuun was currently claimed by two antagonistic civilisations, the Brolturans and the Imisil, there then followed a tense hour or more during which the system was scanned for any other ships, beacons, probes or sensor nets. Once it was clear that there were no such hazards in the area, Segmenter moved in closer while its crew set to work.
    Data soon began arriving: a variant-three habitable world, with a cluster of medium-tecli-level settlements and also a large habitable moon. The planet's sentients were confirmed as Human, and their rudimentary information network revealed a population of approximately 2.75 million. The moon was inhabited by an indigenous biped sentient species called the Uvovo, who coexisted with an extensive forest ecology . . .
    A full report was compiled by one of Segmenter's scanners, then passed up to the captain. He saw at once that the Human element made it too important for his remit and had the report encrypted and dispatched via Tier 2 hyperspace comnet to the headquarters of the Suneye Combine, the huge interstellar corpora tic 1 which had contracted Segmenter's services. From there it flashed to the Office of External Measures on Iseri, the supreme homeworld of the Sendruka Hegemony. Six hours after leaving Segmenter, the report's contents were being discussed by the highest Hegemony figures and their AIs, and policy formulation was well under way.
    But the Segmenter's, captain was not above trying to sell the same goods twice and had quickly found a customer at the rogue port of Blacknest. Pleased with his new acquisition, the datadealer deposited a tidy sum in a secure account, then streamed the data directly to a number of patrons with standing orders for information on new planets.
    One patron was a Kiskashin line-pirate on Yndyeri Duvo, a 2nd-echelon world in the Erdindeso Autarky. His reputation for selling anything to anyone had gained him a string of customers for whom the word 'eccentric' was merely a starting point. And amongst the most taciturn was one he had named Lord Mysterious. Lord Mysterious had appeared nearly twenty years ago with a solid tap of Piraseri credit and a terse description of his information requirements tagged with a secure, localnet address on Duvo's sister world, Yndyeri Tetro, The Kiskashin was a phlegmatic merchant, and as long as a customer's credit held up he had no interest in finding out much more about them. So as soon as the Darien report blinked into his portable dataspace (while he was haggling with a tekmarker over the cost of band-depth for the coming hexad) he recognised this as the kind of thing Lord Mysterious had specified in his gatherer profile. But rather than