AT FIRST IT HAD been nothing but a whisper, more vapoury lies on the Omninet: The legendary Royal Newton had been overthrown, defeated by a mysterious stranger who had assumed his role.

The rumours percolated onto the news groups and trickled onto the back pages of the tabloids as gossip column fodder before duly shifting onto the front pages and becoming news. By then, of course, the story had fractured into a dozen versions, all of them "exclusive" and from "sources close to the Newton family."

Royal Newton, the richest man in the world, was dead; no, he was in a mental hospital; no, he was living in penury in the devastated remains of Paris or New Rome or London; no, he had been incarcerated in one of the satellite prison cubes that occasionally fell out of their orbits; no, he had killed himself; he had been overthrown in a palace coup; he had given away his fortune and become a monk; he had changed sex and become a nun; he had joined a troupe of neo-hippies and was living in Alaska, tending the caribou; he had been seen at the helm of an outward-bound colony ship... the variations became more exorbitant and fabulous with every passing hour.

And none of the stories, no matter how outrageous, came remotely close to the truth.

Royal Newton had been overthrown and ruined by Doctor John Dee, a five-hundred-year-old mathematician, rogue, and astrologer from the court of Queen Elizabeth I. Dee, who had seen how such things were done, had modeled himself on the merchant princes of his day and achieved what no one else had been able to.

Lee Vantis, however, was one of the handful of people in the world who knew that Royal Newton had not been killed and was still alive -- after a fashion. The electrician had been on call the day Newton had taken his heart attack, his plastic and metal artificial heart actually exploding within his chest. Paradoxically, even though Newton's artificial lungs had been shredded by the shards of chrome and Teflon, the heart's backup power cell had kept his blood circulating long enough for the doctors to hook him up to an artificial lung. The intricate Union demarcation rules on the Moonbase had dictated that an electrician had to handle the heart, and Vantis had been called in to remove the sparking and crackling artificial heart unit from Newton's chest. The myriad monitors and tubes draped from the man's body were proof enough that the richest man in the world was still alive.

Vantis had seen Newton twice in the weeks since the accident. Once when he had been back to the emergency ward to repair a faulty bed which insisted on folding itself shut at twelve noon every day -- whether it was occupied or not -- and on another occasion to reduce the pressure on the sliding doors which either closed with agonising slowness or snapped shut like the jaws of some rabid animal. On both occasions Vantis had been unable to find anything wrong with either piece of equipment and was beginning to suspect that the new religious movement which preached that God was in the machines might have something going for them.

However, on each occasion he had seen the small, dark man at Newton's bed. Vantis's attention had been drawn to the man because he seemed to be deep in conversation with the unconscious Newton. The small man paced alongside the bed, arms flailing wildly, fingers darting, dark eyes wild and bright.

Vantis asked around and eventually the rumours began to trickle back. Nothing remained truly secret on the claustrophobic confines of the Moonbase for long. The stranger was someone called Dee, rumored to be English, and he was the man responsible for Newton's heart attack -- though no one was quite sure how. This Dee was certainly wealthy and obviously quite high up in Newton's organisation, Minuteman Holdings, because he had moved into Newton's apartment and installed his own people, a red-haired beauty named Kelly Edwards and a enormous, dark-skinned, bald bodyguard who went by the name of Morgan d'Winter.

And Lee Vantis couldn't help but wonder how much this information would be worth on the open market. Or, better idea still, how much Dee would pay to keep his name off the Omninet and out of the newsgroups.

Doctor John Dee read through the email twice, an overlong beautifully manicured fingernail following the words on the screen, lips moving in synch with the letters. If he lived to be a hundred, he would never come to terms with these too-regular letters shaped and placed behind glass. He grinned suddenly; actually he supposed he had lived to be a hundred -- in fact, more than five hundred years. Well, no matter how old he was, in his opinion, a missive should be on vellum or, at the very least, on paper, and in a legible, nicely rounded hand. He always maintained that it was possible to tell much of the character of a person from how they shaped and wrought their letters. But this -- this printing told nothing of the person's character, his state of mind, or the purpose; though, in truth, he acknowledged, this was one of those occasions when he didn't need to know more than the words on the screen. Blackmail was blackmail, no matter how it was written or phrased.

"Doctor Dee, it is most urgent that we meet to discuss your relationship vis-à-vis Royal Newton."

Dee reached forward and touched the screen, and the email whispered out of the printer set into the desk. Settling deep into the antique high-backed leather chair, the small man steepled his fingers before his face, pressing the tips to his thin lips, and considered the wafer-thin sheet of transparent paper. How much did the person know? And what did he want?

He looked at the header on the email -- Lee Vantis. Real or assumed? Dee knew how difficult it was to acquire a false name in this time and place, but he was also aware that his assistant, Kelly Edwards, had prepared four different emails, names, and nationalities for himself for when he wished to send discrete messages.

Dee's fingers moved across the console, accessing the Moonbase records, and moments later Vantis's description and biography appeared. So the man existed, with an address in a four-by-four cubicle in the workers' quarters. Dee looked at the mail again; the headers certainly seemed to confirm that it had come from this Vantis person. Dee wondered if he would be so stupid as to make a threat and use his real address. Stupid or arrogant? Men could be dreadful fools through vanity as well as ignorance, he reminded himself.

On a whim he reached over and manually dialled Vantis's cubicle number. All the equipment in the room was voice-and presence-activated, but Kelly Edwards had not managed to completely remove Royal Newton's voice from the programs -- with the result that some of the commands executed erratically or disastrously, and Doctor Dee was actually too short to activate some of the motion detectors which were set to Newton's height.

The call was answered on the second ring, the square panel rippling with liquid colour before showing Vantis's slightly distorted head and the hint of a filthy, chaotic cube behind him. Dee knew that Vantis would not be able to see him in the screen; only the golden Minuteman Holdings symbol was revealed, revolving sedately on a field of blue velvet. "Did you just send me a message, Mr. Vantis?" Dee said without preamble, the machine taking his flat, clipped accent and turning it into something female and liquid.

"Is that you, Doctor Dee?" Vantis spoke with the nasal twang of those who had spent too long in the recycled air of Moonbase.

"I speak for Doctor Dee," Dee said absently, one eye on the screen, while simultaneously watching another monitor which had begun to scroll Vantis's movements over the past months, his expenditures, and current financial status. "What do you want?"

"If that is you, Doctor Dee" -- Vantis leaned close to the tiny monitor in his cubicle as if he could peer into it to see the speaker beyond -- "then I have a proposal for you."

"And what is that?"

Vantis grinned, showing perfect plastic teeth. "I'll not discuss it on an open channel. This is for a face-to-face meeting."

Dee tapped the second monitor with the back of his hand. There! Vantis has been in the infirmary on two separate occasions, one of them apparently in connection with a brawl -- not a reassuring sign, but indicative of the man, Dee supposed. There was always a possibility that he had seen Dee and Newton. The man had meager savings, no prospects, and had been disciplined on two recent occasions for arriving at work obviously under the influence of pure oxygen.

"It seems I must place myself at your disposal, Mr. Vantis. Where would you care to meet?"

"Do you know the Unnamed Bar in the Sub-Levels?" He sounded furtive, but with a veneer of bravado to cover it.

"I do not. But I will find it."

"In an hour, then," Vantis said eagerly. "And come alone. If I see you come in with that black bodyguard of yours, then I'm gone and your story is splashed all over the Omninet."

"I'll be there," Dee said softly, his manner anything but threatening. "And I will come alone." He thumbed off the screen and sat back into the chair, an expression of absolute distaste on his narrow face. Blackmail was such an interesting sport -- when played properly. In his time he had blackmailed and been blackmailed in turn, and really, the rules were very simple. To be blackmailed, one had to allow oneself to be blackmailed.

And he was not willing to acquiesce.