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killing two and badly injuring three others. And those were just the incidents that were public knowledge. There were surely countless others that had never got reported.
    You didn’t need to be a genius to foresee where all this was headed. The mutual hostility would keep on growing, the violence spiralling, until settler and Tritonian were engaged in full-scale, widespread war.
    Was Polis+ responsible for the unrest? Was there a Plusser agitator working behind the scenes, stoking the fires of grievance among the Tritonians, prompting this previously passive race to rise up and fight? Was it all a cunning plot to oust the Diaspora from a world which was too close to their territory for comfort?
    Handler didn’t know, and neither did Dev. Someone in TerCon must think so, though, since ISS had been contracted to send in an operative.
    Dev and Handler’s primary goal was securing a military escort from Station Ares. Then they would need firepower, Handler insisted, and reinforcements. Because they were headed right into the thick of the unrest.
    Dev reflected on the nature of the task ahead. It was the usual mishmash of nebulous intel and impending disaster. He wondered if this was how ISS treated all its operatives, bunging them out into the field to fumble their way to a solution, or if it was a policy they reserved specially for him.
    Probably not. He was nothing special. He had been selected for this particular mission since he was available and in closest proximity, that was all. Luck of the draw. The short straw.
    But then every straw was short when you were an indentured employee of Interstellar Security Solutions.
    Dev was working for the company because he had no choice. Technically he did not exist. He had no body to call his own. He was an itinerant consciousness, a being of pure data that ISS could transmit wherever they liked, wherever they decreed he should go.
    His true body had been all but destroyed on the battlefield during the Frontier War. ISS had promised to build him another one, good as new. The condition was that he would first serve as one of their agents. An entire human body, grown from scratch, was not cheap. He could never normally have afforded one; only the fabulously wealthy could. ISS had offered him the option of earning one.
    All he had to do was hit his quota of a thousand points.
    It was a system of payment by instalments, a scheme based on notional credits which ISS could dole out or take away as they saw fit. Dev was awarded points according to the outcome of his missions. The more resounding the success, the greater the number of points he would receive. Failures and excessive collateral damage incurred deductions.
    Once he hit the magic one thousand mark, his debt to ISS would be discharged. A pristine new body, an exact copy of the original Dev Harmer, would be his. Dev would be free to be himself again – literally.
    Until then, he was just so much space flotsam, fetching up in trouble spots and flashpoints, fighting fires before they could burn out of control.
    Beta Ophiuchi was making its last gasp, melting into the horizon. It was an aged star, past the hydrogen fusion phase of its life, now burning helium to carbon at its core. The name the ancient Arabic astronomers had given it was Cebalrai, meaning ‘sheepdog.’ Dev imagined a tired old hound, worn out from years of hard labour, lapsing into a rickety, arthritic senescence.
    He could empathise.
    Onward the Reckless Abandon went, beating a path through unending sea. Though it was a well-designed vessel, with a plethora of active stabilisation technologies such as gyroscopically-controlled hull fins and self-regulating smartfluid internal anti-roll ballast tanks, the continual sine wave motion of its passage took its toll on Dev. His host form, it seemed, was a swimmer but no sailor; good under the water but not on it. The perpetual nagging headache didn’t help, nor the buzz in his ears that now accompanied it.
    He went