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were purple smears under his eyes. He did not look like someone you called Rik. The office ... that didn’t seem like part of a friendly outfit, either: I couldn’t see any hidden weaponry, but the bare desk and the scrambler-lock dials on every drawer or cupboard in sight helped remind me that I was in the middle of a level-9 secret zone.
    “But you’ll want to know more about the Kraz assignment,” he said before I could put together a question (at least he’d saved me the trouble of deciding whether I could stomach calling him Rik or not).
    “It’s a diplomatic mission really, rather awkward , you’ll see what I mean, but with luck it won’t be hazardous.” He pressed his lips together and looked at his watch. “They should be here in a second ...
    Yes, um, Ken, the affair really is of the highest importance. Matter of world security—revolting phrase.
    We were in a sufficiently bad mess already, with only your lot keepingEurope from blowing up or falling apart ... the last thing anyone expected was danger from outside , for goodness’ sake! Sorry, mustn’t ramble. The position’s been a mite tense at Tunnel since we made the contact—here they are now.”
    There were footsteps outside, a knock at the door; a man and woman came in. Birch aimed a flashbulb smile at them: “This is Ken Jacklin from Combat. Ken, this is Rossa Corman; she’s from the special Comm auxiliary and she’ll be the other half of your team. This isMick y Wui, Tech/1 in charge of AP
    systems.Mick y’s responsible for giving you a good smooth ride, ha ha.”
    The “ha ha” sounded more like a nervous twitch than anything even Birch thought was funny. I scanned the newcomers. Wui with his wavy hair, stiff beard like a spray of fiberglass and blue eyes didn’t look Oriental; but, in a way, Corman did. She was small, with olive skin pretty near as smooth as that of some Forceman still babyfaced from the regrowth tank, and her eyes were narrowed as if ready for sunlight. I filed away details of her short, mouse-brown hair; Wui’s hearty smile; the tension that made Birch jerk like broken clockwork and Corman hold herself stiff while Wui didn’t seem bothered at all.
    “I didn’t know there was a special auxiliary to the Force,” I said to defuse the silence that seemed to be building up.
    “Another high-classification matter,” Birch said. “You’ll hear all about it in due course.Mick y, you’re the AP expert. I think you’re really the best one to fill in some background for Ken and Rossa now. Must have the background to understand the nature of the problem. Don’t forget the classification levels, please.”
    Which reminded me: “There was a lot of fuss at Force South Bank about me not knowing AP stuff.
    Does that still hold?”
    “Oh Christ,” said Wui. “Another Security cock-up.”
    Birch said, “No, Ken and Rossa are fully cleared for general information—just not the contingency plans and working details of AP hardware.”
    That was a relief. I reckoned I could just about recognize AP hardware when I saw it but no way could I spill data on how to make it. The contingency plans ... I wondered what they were. There was a twist in Birch’s voice when he used my and Corman’s first names, as if he wasn’t really too happy with the first-name policy; there was something of the same tone when he said “contingency plans.”
    Birch went and sat behind his desk, and waved his hands until he’d steered us all into pulling the hard utility chairs from the wall and sitting in a half-circle in front of the desk.
    Wui pushed back his hair then, and shook his head. “This is all level-9 stuff, of course. You probably don’t know it, but after everyone got out of the space business around about the turn of the century, there was a big push to move into space with matter transmitters. The Americans had a lucky break and set a big instant-transit gate working. Project Hideyhole: the ultimate safety bunker that started