It was these long people-less interludes every day that gave Paula Myo her greatest cause for concern. The surveillance operation would be much better served by crowds and activity providing cover for the Agency’s operatives. As it was they had to linger over long meals and drinks as they sat on the verandas of neighboring cafés and restaurants. It was proving a popular duty. Paula disapproved, they were likely to grow lax during such leisurely episodes.

The center of their attention was the Nystol Gallery, a big three-story canal-side building in the Cesena district that specialized in EK art, electrokinetic machines with hundreds or even thousands of moving parts. Paula had reviewed the gallery’s catalogue, going virtual through the TSI construct, where she marveled as every non-art-lover did at the striking, pointless fusion of art and machine; some were like working sculptures of animals, aliens, and mythical creatures, their micro-gears and pistons running through biological functions with cheeky mimicry, while others were random collections of mechanical components assembled in bizarre asymmetric patterns, that shouldn’t work, yet somehow managed to buzz, whir, rotate, and wobble about with jerky elegance; still others were variants on the old domino relay, with modules of fire, water, air, rubber, protoplasm, and ordinary misapplied components from domestic or industrial machines, all of them reacting against each other, activating the next piece, then somehow resetting themselves in an impossible perpetual motion.

The Nystol was a good cover for its owner, a Mr. Valtare Rigin, whose other specialist enterprise was black-market armaments. For a start, Venice Coast was not the kind of city where such activities took place. It had no industry other than art and fishing and boats and tourism. There had been no grand civic cultural plan back when it started in 2200, no desire to rival the illustrious ancient urban areas of Earth or the dynamic wealth-hungry new cities vying for funds and entrepreneurs that were springing up across phase two space. This was built on a dream and a prayer, starting on a sandy spit called Prato near the center of an eight-hundred-kilometer stretch of swampy coastline on the Calitri continent that was protected to seaward by meandering lines of small marshy islands. Local marine life attracted several families who’d arrived from Italy and were already tiring of the new planet’s capital, San Marino. The waters were thriving with a variety of edible fish eminently suitable to Italian cuisine. Several of the families who settled on the spit were from old Venice, so that boating culture was there right from the start.

Huge dredgers imported from the mega shipyards on Verona scooped out big channels for the fishing boats, then began clearing smaller channels around Prato. More substantial houses started getting built on the higher, reclaimed land, with little canals dug directly to them so the boats could have easy access. That was when the growing town’s inhabitants realized the potential of what they had. The original spit began to expand as the newly dredged swamp silt was piled up on the east and west sides. After a couple of years Prato had become an elongated island with a wide clear lagoon separating it from the main coast where the swamp had once been; with a single causeway for the railway lines. It set the pattern for the future.

For a hundred eighty years the dredgers and constructionbots just kept on going. The long island twisted sinuously many times to keep more or less parallel to the contours of the coast, with districts continually added to both ends. Architects, artisans, and designers collaborated with City Hall to keep their new commissions Italianate in nature, preserving and amplifying the water-bound city’s character. It became fashionable for Grand Families and Intersolar Dynasties and the individual superwealthy to own a villa somewhere along Venice Coast. The thousands of offshore islands proved even more lucrative real estate.

The Cesena district where the Nystol Gallery was situated lay thirty kilometers east of Prato, three stops on the express monorail. After four days, Paula knew it intimately, every street, canal, bridge, covered alleyway, and square. Her hotel was seven and a half minutes’ walk from the local monorail station, with five bridges over the canals; three of carved stone, one wood, and one metal. The Nystol was four and a half minutes, and three bridges; while the local police station was a mere two minutes, with four bridges in the way. She’d arrived at Venice Coast with a team of eight from her office, supplemented by a further five from technical support, and thirty officers from the tactical assault division. Twelve of Anacona’s senior detectives had been loaned to her by the planet’s eager Interior Minister, providing invaluable assistance down on the narrow waterways and maze of streets where it was really needed. Their presence was an indicator of how much importance governments placed on the new Commonwealth Planetary Security Agency, the quiet twin of the Commonwealth Starflight Agency.

With the launch of the scoutships back to Dyson Alpha public interest had been focused solely on the Starflight Agency. Now the Planetary Security Agency was receiving fifty-five percent of the overall budget. For someone who’d scraped in on a pitiful fifty-eight percent of the Intersolar vote, President Doi was strangely forceful when it came to providing funds for the new Agency. There was talk on the unisphere news shows that income tax was going to have to be raised to pay for the vastly expanded facilities.

Greater resources should have helped ease the transition for Paula. She didn’t like it at all; the Agency wasn’t the Directorate she’d joined, even if reorganization had brought her more money and a bigger staff. That staff now unfortunately included Alic Hogan, her new deputy, who Columbia had appointed from his own legal department. If ever there was a political placeman, it was Hogan. His constant requests for full briefings from all the Investigators, and insistence that all procedures were conducted by the book, were causing a lot of resentment in the Paris office. He knew very little about running a case, and everything about watching over people’s shoulders.

Over the last few months she’d begun to wonder if she was becoming conservative in her old age, hating change simply because it was change; refusing to acknowledge that society was altering around her. It surprised her, because if nothing else she considered herself a realist. Police forces always adapted to keep pace with the civilization in which they maintained order. Although more likely it was the increasing degree of political control exerted over Agency operatives that made her uncomfortable. She resented the notion that limits might be imposed over her own work; after so many years served to reach a virtually semiautonomous position it would be awful to be hauled back into the general accounting system.

“Like everyone else.”

“Excuse me?” Tarlo asked.

Paula gave her deputy a mildly irritated smile; she hadn’t realized she’d spoken out loud. “Nothing. Thinking aloud.”

“Sure,” Tarlo said, and returned to the menu.

His California attitude was something Paula could finally appreciate here. Tarlo merged perfectly into Venice Coast’s laid-back lifestyle. The two of them were sitting at a café table, under a broad parasol by the side of the Clade canal. Three hundred meters away, on the opposite side, was the back of the Nystol Gallery. Its sheer red-brick wall rose vertically out of the placid water, with only a single loading door on the lower floor, a meter or so above the black tide line; a couple of wooden mooring posts stood on either side of it, their white and blue stripes sun-scorched to near invisibility. Wide, stone-rimmed windows marked out the second and third floors, below an overhanging roof of red clay tiles. A row of thick semiorganic precipitator leaves were draped just below the guttering, as if some giant vine were growing out of the rafters. Fresh water was an expensive commodity in Venice Coast, by themselves the sieve wells drilled through the basement of most blocks couldn’t support the huge demand of the residents.