Jack showed them how to use the stun gun.

"I have three more back on my ship," he told Nathalie privately. "What would you have done if you'd known that a couple of hours ago?"

"Taken them."

Jack grinned down at her, recognising a ruthless pragmatism equal to his own. The only difference was that his was in his own interest, while Nathalie's was in Vico's.

"Where did you get this, Jack?" Vico asked, coming out of absorption. "I've never seen tech like this before."

"From the future," Jack said incautiously.

"Ah. So you are a time-traveller. The Council wouldn't like that. They can't spread their regime through time as well as space." He sighed. "Apparently it's happened before. The person in question ended up declared insane, which isn't a good thing to be under this administration."

"I'm starting to think that you have to be mad to come here," Jack said.

Vico smiled thinly. "Tell me, do we succeed? Is the dictatorship overthrown?"

Jack said nothing, racking his memory of far-off history lessons he'd never paid much attention to at the time. This was a big no-no in the Agency; telling people about their own futures could really muck up causality as they attempted to fulfil or to avoid them.

"Would you act differently if you knew you do, or not?" he asked, genuinely curious.

"No, I wouldn't," Vico said, with barely a pause. His face had tightened to a curious intent look. He was a fanatic, Jack thought, utterly dedicated to his goal. He had no time even to love Nathalie, who was now looking at him with that blazing tenderness again. He wouldn't think much of Jack's philosophy of life at all.

"I honestly can't remember," Jack said, disliking him more than ever.

Jack spent the next few weeks barely putting his nose above ground. Vico conscripted him into the planning details of the bombing. Jack gathered that flexibility was a plus, as the situation changed rapidly. Tactics he had learned when he had been with the Agency or picked up in various times and places since all came in handy. In all Jack's chequered career, he'd never yet been a terrorist; to his secret amusement, he was rather good at it. Not being convicted of the cause, he wouldn't mince words, even though he hated the Redshirts, and the Military Council who'd screwed up the place, as much as he hated anything.

There wasn't a lot of other amusement to be had. The "squads"—Vico's organised gangs of feral-kids-turned-troops—were composed of serious grim young men and slightly fewer serious grim young women. Even those of them that Jack considered old enough were mostly unresponsive to his flirting technique. He was getting bored.

The date they eventually decided on for the attack apparently held some significance for the group; Jack didn't bother to find out what it was. The team was decided on—"No-one too clumsy, no-one too scared, no-one too fat," Nathalie had said. That evening, they all dressed in dark clothing, with their faces black and matte eyeshades on. The effect, to Jack, was that of a heliophobes' support group trying to look trendy. The rearguard included Vico, Jack and, naturally, Nathalie. Vico had one of Jack's guns, but Jack had a few bits of extra tech up his sleeve. And in other places.

They moved through the streets at first, and although eventually they did dive into the sewers, these were larger and better built than the ones in Jack's previous experience. They were still stinking, though. Vico and some of the others produced masks and tied them over their mouths and noses. This trying journey, on catwalks suspended about the foul flow, ended at last at an access ladder, which led to a long-forgotten manhole beneath shrubs in the gardens outside Government House. Jack tumbled up on to leaf mould and broken stems, taking deep grateful breaths of night air. It smelled damp and wonderfully clean.

"I've just thought of a flaw in the plan," he said.

"Do tell," Vico snapped, his voice sharp with tension.

"They'll be able to smell us coming."

"Tsha!"

Jack grinned, hoping that Vico could see the flash of his teeth in the darkness. Someone pinched him with startling viciousness; he flung out his arm and made contact with someone so small it could only be Nathalie. He grimaced, wishing she wasn't so obsessed with Vico, and that Vico wasn't so obsessed with anarchy or revolution or whatever it was. Crouching in the middle of a wet bush, stinking of sewers, his pockets full of explosives, was far, far down on Jack's list of fun ways to spend an evening.

His mental grumpings were cut short as Vico marshalled his troops and motioned them out beneath the stems of the shrubbery and onto the dew-soaked lawn. The looming bulk of Government House, surrounded by walls and smaller buildings, seemed to press down on Jack. Well, whatever we do for freedom and democracy and all that jazz, we're certainly striking a blow for architectural aesthetics tonight. High up in one of the end towers lights burnt into the night. Nathalie pointed and poked Vico, her face wearing that fierce joy that rather frightened Jack.

The little band moved inwards. As far as Jack had gathered, one of the guards of this particular gate was one of Vico's lot,which was why this route had been chosen. With their fifth-column ally, the struggle was brief and practically noiseless. The stun guns soon took care of the extraneous civilians who inhabited the outer gate like a warren, and the unconscious bodies were all moved head outside. The Red guard who was part of Vico's group was busily feeding old footage into the security recordings, obliterating the evidence of their entry.

"Hurry up," Vico ordered, his voice sharp, as they stripped the guards of their access keys. Beyond this point, Jack was only familiar with blurred, grainy photos of the surroundings, but the route had been drilled into his head by Nathalie. They moved fast, though not running, through an elaborately decorated sunk corridor, three access ducts and a bewildering maze of cellars filled with omnipresent damp, arcane machinery and bizarre smells, although the sewer stench that clung around everyone muted this last. Saying this lot is the Underground isn't just a figure of speech, Jack thought.

They spread out to their assigned places, pinpointing the structural weaknesses. Jack had already been impressed by the research that Vico and his teams had managed to do under less than academic conditions. His assignment was a long beam set flush with the ceiling; it was too high for him to reach and he had to set Nathalie on his shoulders to set the explosives. She was entirely competent, he found; he'd been trained to do her job in case of accident, but actually all he had to do was stand where she told him to and pass gear up to her.

"Are you not done yet?" Vico said, appearing from wherever his patch had been. "Most of the other teams are already moving out."

"Almost," Nathalie hissed. "Give me more tape, Jack."

"You want to go a bit easier on Nat here," Jack said warningly as he passed up the tape. "She's had more to do than almost anyone else."

Vico ignored him. The girl's weight shifted slightly on his shoulders as she leaned sideways, and Jack steadied her with a hand on her thigh. It hadn't escaped him that their positions gave him an unparalleled opportunity for feeling up Nathalie's legs; he'd already been taking advantage of that, but Vico seemed determined not to notice. Jack's favourite method of dealing with boy- or girl-friends was to include them, too, he really didn't think this would work with Vico. His loss, Jack thought, sliding his hand farther up Nathalie's leg.

"Finished," she announced triumphantly, and slid down Jack's back to the ground. "Let's get out of here."

Their escape route led, not surprisingly, through a drainage channel that ran outside the Government House complex, into the river. They had to wade through knee-high water, the run-off from the roofs and courtyards, and then crawl with the water swirling about their elbows and thighs. Jack half-expected every moment to feel the explosion behind, although he knew that the timers had been set to allow them time to escape. It wasn't that he was short of courage, he just preferred not to have to exercise it.

The gurgle of water grew louder ahead. The grille that separated the drain from the river had already been cut through by the rest of the team. Jack looked at the river gliding past less than a foot below the level of his nose. To make matters worse, the bank above overhung the grille so that one had to go through it backwards. It was a tight squeeze; Jack saw now why the team had all to be fairly slim; fortunately, with the food shortages, there hadn't been a lack of choice. Vico was undaunted, and there Nathalie followed, lithe as a cat, so Jack wriggled out of the narrow gap, water splashing his back, immensely relieved that this imbecile enterprise was nearing its end. Dripping wet, he inched his way along the steep slope of the concrete bank, Nathalie a soft-breathing shadow ahead of him.

Suddenly a voice from the top of the bank rang out: "What's that?"

Jack froze. Nathalie pressed against the bank, still and silent, a shadow among shadows. When he looked away and back, he couldn't distinguish her figure.

But it wasn't enough. The investigator was standing on a flight of steps leading to the water's edge. The dim light from the city that deepened by contrast Nathalie's shadows picked out the top of the back. A woman and a Redshirt, Jack was able to see, before she stepped forward and switched on a powerful torch.