The corpse lay on its back, light reflecting off dusty black carapace and splayed legs.The armoured suit made minute creaking sounds as it cooled in the shade of the gutted building. The open hand of a gauntlet jutted palm-up into the air, as if the dead man is making a last dismissive gesture, a perfunctory wave goodbye, actually the prosaic result of some last tremor of a servomechanism as it failed. The hand made a precarious seat for the thin girl perched on it.

Nearby, a boy stood, and like the girl he looks emaciated, washed out somehow, and very young. She has wispy straw hair while he is bald, but the sharp planes of their faces and the waxy translucent skin make them look alike, sick twins. In an old photograph they would grey into sad corpses, concentration camp victims, but in life there is something about them, almost an ethereal subdermal glow. And their eyes are strange too, as if they radiate light rather than take it in...

The boy walks a few meters, each step slow and deliberate, then picks up and peers intently at the combat laser dropped by the armour- suited man as he died. Carefully, he lifts it and sights down the ridged barrel past the partially demolished outer wall and out into the distance. He hoists the laser tube onto a narrow shoulder and walks over to take the girl's hand, helping her up from her grim seat.

Together they walk back through the cavernous, partially-ruined building, past rusting piles of accumulated debris and down dusty stairwells where the walls are periodically decorated with yellow and black warning signs and stark Cyrillic writing, penetrating deeper and deeper into the massive complex. As they descend the light diminishes, but their footsteps do not falter, and then at some point light begins to return. But it is an eerie greenish luminescence that filters up through jagged shadow, and it makes their pallid skin even more like that of the drowned.

The watery light grows stronger as they enter a huge, hangar-like room with immense cantilevered and arched steel structures looming up to the ceiling; bulky struts and massive sheets of heat-scarred bolted metal jut from stained and pitted concrete walls. In the centre of the room there is a large circular pool, and from some source deep within this pool light radiates.

Twisted and tangled debris surrounds the pool on three sides, but around the near side of the pool are signs of rude habitation: there are tattered rugs, some made into crude shelters; cooking pots; and the remains of fires. And strewn among these things are bodies, perhaps a hundred or more, of both sexes and all fragile but oddly young-looking, resting quietly. There are even babies, silent babies who lay in the arms of waif-like mothers; and there are also stick children; all with eyes mutely staring. When they notice the couple come down from above, these angular people slowly and silently come to their feet and turn to face the pool; even those who, impossibly frail, lean on lengths of plastic tubing somewhat thicker than their own limbs.

The couple step carefully through the midst of the thin people to stand at the edge of the pool. The girl seats herself on a dented and scorched console casing, its screen a solidified glass puddle, and distractedly examines the palms of hands with tendons like thin bare tensile cable. The boy gently places the laser down next to her and turns to face the now waiting others.

Slowly, he raises his arms high, and stands like this gazing around at the people for some minutes, perfect quiet reigning in the metal and concrete chamber. His gaze travels over the group, an assembly of insubstantial wraiths fusing into the eerie soft light; and they return that gaze with cool glowing eyes and faces blank and still.

He turns around now and peers into the glowing pool, its light reflecting off his eyes, the smooth curve of his skull, the sharp cheekbones; his face is totally calm. Then he turns back to his silent audience, and then to the girl, who stands and walks over to join him. They turn together to face the pool, they shuck off the rags they are wearing, and then, strips of spare flesh in the ghostly half-light, they step to the side of the pool and lower themselves into the luminescent liquid. Behind them others begin to discard their scrappy coverings and drift forward to join in the immersion. As they submerge the liquid forms tiny glowing eddies around their frail bodies, accepting the insubstantial forms with minimal disturbance.

* * * * *

Major Karen Cato is reflecting, not contentedly, on her current circumstance. Cato is forty-eight, and as a major, stalled at mid- officer level in the private global security monopoly known as STRONG. As commander of the city's south east security quadrant, she sits in her office on the top floor of a twenty story tower bristling with various types of sensors, telematics gear and automatic laser and minimissile systems. Out the window she can see the city to the north west , and beyond that the great white strip of sea wall. In the other direction, she knows, lay scattered ruins and empty countryside slowly coming to terms with the new weather as temperate climate fauna and flora push their way north.

Last thing this duty shift she will hand command over to her executive officer, Lieutenant Tegner. Cato has just got word that tests show that the three month old foetus she carries is in good health, and she has decided to take maternity leave.

Cato herself was born in Sydney , Australia , once a thriving city, but now she works in St Petersburg , Russia . Cato has worked for STRONG all her adult life, and STRONG transferred her five years ago to St Petersburg , one of the seventy-seven city-states STRONG is contracted to protect. All these city-states are in the high northern latitudes, except for Hobart , Christchurch and Wellington . This is because the global climate has been warming up for three centuries, and civilisation has been moving north or south towards the poles in response.

STRONG, Cato knows from the company records, emerged in the mid twenty first century out of the remnants of certain national military forces, most importantly the US Air Force. Very quickly it solved the protracted environmental-economic problem by setting up a number of `safe cities', protected by STRONG's electronics and guns and interconnected by global SST and surface effect transports, as well as satellite telematics networks. Outside STRONG's electronic walls - country devastated by rapid climate change, peaking pollution levels, collapsing natural resource reserves and virulent new diseases, and the internecine conflict that resulted from all these things as well as usual unremoved political differences - society fell apart. STRONG then set about removing any possibility of threat to its urban clients by the simple means of systematically exterminating any and all forms of technological capability outside the cities, especially if it had military potential. They had been very thorough: as Cato knew, a few pathetic survivors fought the rats for scraps in the partially demolished suburbs, but that was about it. She knew this because there was blanket spysat surveillance of all extramural regions, the images burst-fed to STRONG Central, Chicago, where they were computer analysed for signs of trouble. And the city had its own RPV spy-eyes as well zeroing in on anything the spysats picked up on, the tiny helicopters controlled by banks of operators in the basement, each hyped up on a potent cocktail of stimulants to enhance performance.

Working at STRONG, with its brutally hierarchical management structure and tried and true technologies that had changed little in the last fifty years, had become a secure, dull job. And such things were rare.

So Cato had chosen to have her single allocated child, and shift some attention from her dead end job to the kid. But she wonders, in the quiet moments of the long shifts, what kind of mother she will make...

Her comm channel chimes, and she flicks a switch. Cato peers down at the neatly handsome face of her second-in-command with a little frown that's become as much policy as genuine. Lieutenant Tegner has it all: good family, good education, and good looking. Cato can't help but dislike him. "What is it, Tegner?" she asks wearily.

"Better get down here, boss," he says in that irritatingly flip way she can't break him of. "Contact lost with a knight."

"Coming down." Maybe attention to duty is better than pointless conjecture, she thinks. After all, the child will not go away. She heads towards the situation room.

Tegner and a pair of techies are busy punching buttons, their attention on the large situation screens which are showing some live vid from spy-eyes and a few enhanced satellite shots.

"Yes?" she says crisply, turning their faces towards her.

"Yesterday at eight hundred hours," Tegner tells her, "we received notification from STRONG Central that analysis of satellite data indicated unusual activity at a location within sector seventeen."

"Pursuant of STRONG City Security Directive 6284 issued last month, any grouping of three people or more in the outer districts mandates dispersive action. Accordingly, having received your approval, Lieutenant Tegner authorised the deployment of two Type Four spy-eyes in the sector. Flying a standard D&I pattern, these devices spiralled in on the specific area indicated by satellite analysis-"

"Which is the old nuclear power plant," Cato says.

"Yes. Anyway we lost 'em," he says. "Just went pffft! as soon as they went indoors."

Cato eyes him sharply. "Indoors? What's left of that plant?"

Tegner consults a monitor. "Um, records say the containment building's still intact, not much else. The concrete burial casing has pretty much disintegrated. As you know Major, the core is still there."

Cato glares at her exec. "And are there still readings?"

"Well, yes. There's a real hot spot in there somewhere." He punches keys, and then looks back at Cato. "And there's more. Net rumours about some experiment in radiation treatment carried out there. About two hundred years ago. It's not on the official records."

"Jesus," she growls. "So you sent in remotes, and they fizzed. And now we've lost a knight. Why only one, anyway?"

"It was the only one we had operational. And anyway, when wasn't one Type Two Cyberover enough?" Tegner says uneasily.

"Fully armed?" She eases off, giving him room.

"Full S&D mission ordnance. Oh, but still without those sonic analysers Central has been promising us for the last five years." Cato does not blink at this: she has learned to take Central's immobility in her stride.

"And where did you lose the signal?" Cato asks.

"Here," says Tegner, turning back to the big viewscreen. He punches instructions and steadycam images fill the large screen: someone is walking through industrial rubble towards a large building with almost one whole wall down. Inset data tells Cato this is the view from Corporal Patel's suit.

"All quiet, no sign of life," Patel says, a slight accent still discernible through the fuzz. "Going inside to take a look." He makes a long scan of the surrounding ruined landscape before moving into the containment building.

"Whoa, something odd here," Patel says suddenly, an edge to his voice even through the electronics. He whirls around and glances up, and just before his signal wavers and cuts out, Cato sees two gaunt faces staring at down at her from what looks like the remains of some kind of catwalk.

"Christ," she says. "I want a full squad of knights down there, Tegner. Now."

"We haven't got a full squad, boss. We'll have to get a couple from Central. Take us a couple of hours, minimum. You know what they're like."

"Well do it. And keep a couple of remotes over the plant."

"Doin' it already, boss," he says, hitting keys.

"Orlov," she says to the senior of the techies, "take over. Tegner, you come with me." Tegner says something to Orlov, who nods mechanically, and then scurries over to join Cato, now entering the lift. He follows her in and she punches for her office ten floors up.

Cato looks hard at her exec for a long moment. "I don't need this shit, Tegner," she says at last. He looks surprised, starts to say something.

"No, listen," she cuts him off. "I'm going on maternity leave tomorrow-"

He looks even more surprised, then grins. "Anyone I know?"

This is a poor joke: Tegner knows that as middle management, Cato takes her chances with the sperm storage banks. No child has been naturally conceived in the city-states for over two centuries, thanks mainly to the still not understood global decline in male fertility.

"You wish," she says with contempt. "So I want this dealt with nice and tight, okay?" He nods meekly. "Just do what you have to. Got it?" He nods again.

"Now, I want you to scare up something on this plant. Old city records, corporate files, regulatory commission archives, whatever, but we've got to get us some clues on what's happening out there."

She takes a deep breath. "I have to talk to Armstrong, and then I want to go on leave without any loose ends to come back and haunt me."

For a few moments there is an awkward silence as the floors slide by. Then Tegner says uneasily, "Boss, don't you think things are generally getting a little smelly around here..."

Cato eyes him, says, "What do you mean?"

"Well, there hasn't been one technical improvement in our gear since I've been here, nine years now. And Central is so slow to get us stuff. It's... well, it's like everything is grinding to a halt. You know, I looked up some stuff in the company archives - they used to have technical advances all the time in the old days. New stuff each year, even."

"Yeah, well that was then. Any case, you'd best keep talk like that to yourself, Lieutenant," she says tightly, again staring as the floor numbers flick past. She can feel Tegner stiffen beside her.

"God, Major!" he bursts out, totally losing his cool now,

"don't you get the feeling sometimes we're securing an old age home, what with Armstrong and all those centuries old... They just keep getting older, you know. The only technology breakthroughs in the last century have been in rejuv. They allocate all available resources to it."

"Tegner."

"Jesus, Karen, can't you see it. If the city people don't die, there'll be no room for us. They feed us just enough rejuv to keep us young enough to work here protecting them. We'll be doing this fucking job forever!"

"Tegner! I said keep it to yourself." She glares at her subordinate. The elevator halts, she gives Tegner another long look and steps out onto her office floor.

Seconds later Cato momentarily glimpses her own frowning reflection in the fish tank by her desk as she punches the controls to patch her through to Armstrong. She still looks the way she did at twenty-five, but she doesn't feel the same. She knows Tegner is right about the cities, and the stagnation. Employees are allowed one child each at present, but how long before even that privilege goes? Was that why she decided to have her child now?

A sleek, tanned flunkey comes on the screen and tells her to wait. Several minutes later Armstrong appears, appearing as young and healthy as money can make him at one hundred and eighty three years old. He looks vaguely pleased, as though she'd conveniently called him away from some boring party. In the background, past Armstrong's silver lasercut, the flunkey is standing near an ornamental fountain chatting with a girl who is distractedly putting something up her perfect nose.

For a fraction of a second none of it makes any sense and Cato just feels like logging off. But then she sees herself at eighty five, or ninety, if they shift the retirement age again, snuggled into her own little VR module, diving off Truk with the kid maybe, the rejuv juice coursing through her system.

"Yes, Major Cato, what can I do for you?" Armstrong's voice is older than his face: they can't rejuv everything yet.

"Dr Armstrong, as you might remember, I go on maternity leave tomorrow..."

"Oh yes, congratulations, Major."

"Thank you, sir. Anyway, I just wanted to check that you didn't have any last minute instructions for me..."

"No, no. Have a good leave and provide the city with another efficient security officer, eh?"

Cato is momentarily confused, alarmed, until she realises he means the baby. "Oh, yes sir," she splutters, but Armstrong has already gone, back to his corporate patrician life of interminable parties and golf games and board meetings. She didn't get to tell him about the lost Cyberover, and for split second debates whether to call back. It would seem inefficient of her...

She punches for her exec instead. "What have you got for me, Tegner?"

"Uh, I got onto a Professor Robert Foster, boss. He was actually there when that illegal test was carried out."

"What did he say?"

"There was an accident at the plant in It was never been cleaned up properly, just contained-"

"Do you know what happened?"

"Evidently they tried out a revolutionary new coolant. It didn't go at all like they thought. The coolant didn't work properly, convection pattern was strange. And the radiation profile was very peculiar..."

"And what actually went wrong?" Cato asks.

"Well, no one knows. There was an explosion, some people were killed and the monitoring gear was destroyed. The shit hit the fan then. Nuclear Systems Corp was already in financial trouble, and they couldn't afford another failure, so they sat on it."

"Is that it?"

"No. A bunch called Merrick Industrial Salvage bought the rights and moved in with these new repairbots. Lost them all."

"So is that it?"

"Officially, yes. But there are old rumours about some black experiment run there. The radiation was so strange and hard, someone got the bright the idea to test it on living tissue. Rumour is they kidnapped some street kids."

Orlov's contact message is winking and she puts him on. Eastside perimeter sensors have gone. I've asked Central for an infra-red satscan."

"Fat chance. Get our knights out and about and some remotes up. I'm coming down."

By the time Cato hits the control room things are worse. Orlov is shouting into a comm mike and frantically punching keyboards; Tegner is busy but under control. "Some shit going down, boss," he says when he notices her. "All the eastside perimeter sensors and defences out of touch. Remotes also fucked on that side. Screen three is Koto's cam-" and as he says this the Cyberover's steadycam image wavers and blinks out. "Fuck!" he yells, and he now begins frantically punching keys.

"Er, boss, this is bad." Tegner says. "Whatever the problem is, it's heading for the RPV control room. It's leaving a trail of crashed systems..." He looks across at her. "Can we warn them?"

Cato stares at him. Tegner knows as well as she that removing someone from the pharmaceutically generated hypnagogic state that allows the spy-eye operators to run up to seven units at once just about guarantees permanent brain damage. He knows, but he wishes he didn't. For the first time she wonders whether he is really command material after all.

She shakes her head. "An hour comedown, Tegner, minimum. Or they get the brainbends. Might as well be dead." She gazes at all the useless communications and control technology, and makes a decision.

"Come on, Tegner," she says over her shoulder as she heads at a run out of the control room, "let's find out what the fuck we've got here."

"It's wrecking the nano-electronics!" she says as they enter the lift to go down to the RPV control room. "It's screwing the microcircuitry, like EMP or something."

"Christ, I wish I had a gun," Tegner gasps.

"Too dangerous," Cato says bitterly. "Central Directive 698-53 - no firearms in an electronically controlled environment. Fuck!"

The lift halts at the basement, and with a glance at each other, they head through the door into the RPV control room. Somehow, the fire suppressors are working to put out the multitude of sputtering electrical fires burning around the room and dusting the dead bodies of the dozen RPV controllers still laying in their couches, heads encased in smoking control headsets. With the reek of burnt flesh mingling with more artificial smells, Cato fights back nausea and bends down to examine the corpse of one of the remotes jockeys.

"Electrocuted," says Tegner, who's already come to his own conclusions. "Electronics burnt out, fried their brains."

Cato notices the other lift light is on. "Come on," Cato shouts as she steps over powdery corpses and heads back into the lift. “It's heading towards the situation room."

When they come through the doors into the situation room, they find it occupied by strangers. In addition to the standing stiffly against one wall, five people are standing or sitting silently around the large room. They are dressed in filthy rags that hang loose over small, scare-crow bodies and contrast starkly with the pale skin, so wan that blue veins stand out clearly. The eyes are inhuman.

"Who are you?" she says simply, taking in their gaunt, young faces. They have to be from outside, she decides, but even so...

They just stare, wide eyed, mute, and Cato is about to repeat her question when it comes into her head - there is no sound, no lip movement, but she hears an answer...

It is the bald male: "We're your neighbours," he says without speaking.

Cato glances at Tegner and catches his eye. Tegner nods. She looks back at the bald intruder, and he is calmly smiling.

"Are you responsible for the damage to this installation?" she demands. "And for destroying our mobiles?" She feels like some stern headmistress admonishing naughty, dangerous children.

"Yes," and this time it is the girl standing near the bald male, "we quieted your killing machines."

Cato stares at the girl. "Quieted? How did you “quiet” them?" she asks coolly.

"It's just something we do," the bald male again. "We go near electronic gear, it fucks up, stops."

"How exactly do you stop it?" Cato persists, searching their empty faces.

"It's the rad," the girl tells her, as if it were straightforward.

"We're radioactive," adds the bald one. "It affects electronic stuff."

"Jesus, they're from the old nuclear plant!" Tegner says. "They're the ones that took out our knights!"

For a long moment Cato stares at the strangers, their youth and shabbiness so alien in the sterile, functional control room.

And then something occurs to her, something so terrifying it transforms her face into a mask of sick horror. "Oh God no! Get away from me!" she screams explosively. Reeling away she lurches to the door and scrambles out into the corridor.

Tegner catches up with her as she stumbles in the direction of the sick bay sobbing and holding both hands on her stomach. "Oh god! Oh god!" she repeats, a desperate mantra. Then she notices Tegner coming up behind her, and she screams at him, "I can feel it! I can feel it! They're killing my baby!"

And then suddenly she slides to a halt, and grabs Tegner by the arm. "No!" she gulps. "No. Come on, my office. We've got to warn Central, or Armstrong. Yes, Armstrong!" She breaks away for the lifts, Tegner on her heels.

She punches for her floor and turns to her exec. "Can it be true? Can they really be so radioactive they can affect microelectronic circuitry?"

"It would explain things, wouldn't it," Tegner says flatly. “But Christ, they should be dead themselves. How could they...?" He stares wide-eyed at Cato.

"Anyway," Cato says, trying to ease her breathing, "if it is true, they can walk right into city hall. All the security systems are electronic."

"But it must be a localised effect," Tegner says as they go through the door into Cato's office. "Maybe five, ten metres from their bodies..."

Cato motions him to be quiet as Armstrong's flunkey comes on the screen. "This is a code red emergency, shithead," she growls. "Get me Armstrong, now! "

Armstrong comes on a long two minutes later, just a little flustered. "This had better be-" he begins.

"Shut up, Armstrong, and just listen for once!" Cato yells at the screen. "There's been a break in! City integrity is completely compromised! Got that, totally compromised! They're from the outer districts and they're radioactive and they can somehow screu up electronic systems-"

"Now look, young lady," Armstrong says. "Get hold of-"

But Cato can't hear any more, because she is staring at the group of intruders who've just entered the room. "Oh god," she says dully, and backs away, hunched over, her hands splayed over her belly.

"Lieutenant," Armstrong is saying, as he can see Tegner still standing in front of the telecam, "what is that woman-"

"Don't worry about it," says Tegner, not looking at the screen. "You'll find out soon enough." And Armstrong's reddening face distorts and disappears as the intruders approach.

Cato has dropped to her knees and is groaning, her back to the intruders. But then she throws back her head and half turns to face the bald male. "Why aren't you dead if you're so irradiated?" she says, a challenge.

"We're not sure," he tells her. "We have some drugs, left over from an experiment. But it seems we're evolving to handle it-"

"But how? How can you evolve that fast?" yells Cato. "It's only three hundred years since..."

"Oh, we've had more time than you think. The rad has altered our bodies fairly rad-ically." Then he smiles, a lost, dreamy smile. “None of us live beyond three years, you see. Two years is a generation for us. We live short, interesting lives."

Cato stares at him, trying to understand. "Even so... What twenty, fifty, even a hundred generations? It isn't enough!"

The intruders just stare in silence, their obvious presence all that needs to be said. Instead, it's Tegner who speaks. "Maybe," he says, and Cato recognises the look her exec gets when he's theorising over some phenomenon, big or small, "with that rain of radiation passing through them, who knows? Some sort of hyper- accelerated thyroid effect... And there's evidence that organisms, under enough pressure, can influence their own evolution. Directed mutation, yeah."

Cato stares at her exec, hating him for explaining their existence. He should be on her side...

And then she shifts her attention back to the intruders as the girl starts communicating.

"Ironic, isn't it. You leave all your mess to poison us, but instead it protects us from your killers. And now we've become so weird from the poison, our very existence is toxic to you! Yes, really ironic!"

Cato looks at the girl for a moment, and then climbs to her feet, hugging her belly.

"Tegner, help me to the sick bay," she says carefully. Tegner moves away from the silent console and helps steady her as they head for the door. Then they turn back as they hear the bald male.

End