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bones.
    Accept no substitute . Slogans from the Earth First party political broadcasts blipped through his head.
    Don’t listen to the corporate hype. Keep your feet on the ground. Fight for a better life here and a better world now.
    In the airport at Arequipa, he used his UNGLA credentials to hook a sleeper-class seat aboard the next direct flatline flight to Miami with Delta. He’d have preferred suborbital, but for that you still had to go to Lima, and it probably wasn’t worth the extra time and hassle the detour would take. This way at least he could get some rest. There was about an hour to wait, so he bought over-the-counter codeine, took double the advised dosage, and chased it with something generic from a departure-lounge Buenos Aires Beef Co. outlet. He munched his way through the franchise food on the observation deck, not really tasting it, staring out at the snowcapped volcanic cone of El Misti and wondering if there really, truly wasn’t something else he could do for a living.
    Sure. Go talk to Zooly when you get back, see if she’s looking for doormen for the midweek slot.
    Sour grin. They started calling his flight. He finished the cold remnants of his pampaburger olé, wiped his fingers, and went.
    He slept badly on the flight to Miami, ticked with dreams of Felipe Souza ’s silent passageways and the faint terror that Gaby’s ghost was drifting after him in the low-g quiet, face composed and miraculously undistorted by the shot that had killed her, her brains drip-drooling darkly down out of the hole he’d blown in the back of her skull. Variation on a theme, but nothing new—just it was usually another woman who came floating up behind him in the deserted spacecraft, never quite touching him, whispering sibilantly into his ear above the dead-hush whine of silence.
    He jolted awake, sweatily, to the pilot’s announcement that they were starting their descent into Miami and that the airport was locked down under a security scare, so no connecting flights would be taking off for the foreseeable future. Local accommodation options could be accessed through—Fuck.
    The Virgin suborb shuttle would have put him in the sky over London forty-five minutes after it took off from Miami. He could have been home for last orders at Banners and his own bed under the tree-flanked eaves of the Crouch End flat. Could have drifted awake late the next morning to the sound of birds outside the window and cloud-fractured sunlight filtering through the bright leaves. Some British summer downtime at last-with the wound, the Agency would have no choice—and the whole Atlantic between him and the emotional topography of MarsPrep.
    Instead, he carried his suitcase along broad, bright concourses lined with ten-by-two-meter holoscreens that admonished think it’s all red rocks and airlocks? think again and we only send winners to mars.
    Miami was a transamericas hub, and that meant a hub for every company involved in the Western Nations Colony Initiative. Some color-supplement journalist with access to more mainframe time than she deserved estimated, for a piece of inflight fluff he’d read a couple of years ago, at present every seventh person passing through Miami International does so on business related, directly or indirectly, to Mars and the COLIN program. That figure is set to rise . These days it was probably more like one in four.
    He rode slideways and escalators up through it all, still feeling vaguely numb from the codeine. On the far side of the terminal complex, he checked into the new MIA Marriott, took a room with a skyline view, and ordered a medical check from the room service options. He charged it all on the Agency jack. As a contractor, he had fairly limited expense credit—working undercover in any case made for mostly wafer and cash transactions, which he then had to claim back as part of his fee—but with a worst-case couple of days left till he could get back to London and officially close the