19

Since before scientists declared the GUT (grand unification theory) completed four centuries ago (and undergoing continuous revision ever since), the distinctions between sciences have been blurring, and many so-called sciences have been fracturing. Initially, a biologist studied the natural world. With the advent of genetic manipulation, some biologists became geneticists and, with all that genetics implied for humans, some doctors also became geneticists. Nanotechnology, using machines manufactured, grown, and both, gave us inevitably the nanologist. But nanomachines can be used to manipulate DNA, so the geneticists use them, as do the doctors. Ah: nanogeneticist, bionanologist, nanosurgeon . . . and what about computer applications, Al-guided nanosurgery, atomic-level biophysics? What about the mathematics, the philosophy, the logic? And so the confusion grows. Nowadays, when asked, a scientist will name himself a bio-physicist, and leave it at that. On the whole, with it being possible to load a crib for any area of knowledge you require, scientists do not have to spend a lifetime pursuing one discipline. Very often their work is utterly and completely their own, and not easily labelled.

- From How It Is by Gordon

Tergal watched Bonehead swerve away from the shimmering wall at the last moment, and Stone barrel straight into it. His young mount juddered to a halt as if it had run into a layer of thick tar. Around it the shimmer dissipated, revealing the landscape beyond to be as barren and flat as it was on this side. After Stone had extricated itself, the smaller sand hog continued on after Bonehead, both of them continuing parallel to the wall, and moving away just as fast as they could run.

‘Shit,’ said Anderson.

‘Yes, that would seem to be the depth of it,’ Tergal observed.

Anderson indicated the wedge-shaped object they had inspected the previous evening. ‘We’ll take cover there. Maybe it’ll just go after the hogs.’ He now stooped to take up his automatic weapon and its ammunition, then hesitated before picking up his old fusile with its powder and shot. Tergal permitted a cynical snort to escape him before sprinting towards the once-airborne artefact. Soon they were both crouching behind metal, watching the approaching droon.

They observed it pause and rear upright, extending the segmented column of its upper body and swinging its ridged head in the direction of the departing sand hogs. Something, Tergal realized, seemed to be confusing it, and he supposed that to be the strange barrier out of which the shimmer was now slowly fading in the morning light. But then its head swung back towards them, tilted, and it came on.

Tergal was horrified. ‘It’s curious,’ he gasped.

‘Now that’s called anthropomorphism,’ Anderson whispered. He ducked back again, dragging Tergal down with him by the shoulder.

‘Right,’ he hissed. ‘If everything I’ve read is correct, its vision is considerably better than ours, and it can probably sniff out a fart in a hurricane and taste our sweat in the air.’

‘Oh, that’s all right then,’ Tergal whispered. ‘How’s its hearing?’

‘Not so good, but it won’t really need it.’

‘We’re going to be dissolved in acid, aren’t we?’

Anderson shrugged, tipped powder into the barrel of his fusile—a lot of powder—tamped it down, then added three heavy shot between successive layers of wadding. Great, thought Tergal, now I get to see the damned weapon blow up in his face. Holding his finger up to his lips, Anderson moved to the end of the metal wall and peered round. After a moment, he ducked back, pushing a copper priming-cap into place in his fusile, then cranked back the hammer. Moving up beside the knight, Tergal braved another look. The droon had paused again, but even as Tergal leant round, its head swung towards him, wrinkles like frown lines appearing between its lower four eyes, and it began eagerly stamping forwards.

Anderson stepped out past Tergal, aimed at the creature’s sloping visage, and fired. The kick from the weapon flung him to the ground. Tergal gaped down at the fusile’s split and smoking barrel, then back at the droon as it reached up with an angular two-fingered hand to touch the cavity punched alongside the orange mouth which it opened below its two upper eyes. Then abruptly the creature rose up even higher as if taking in a huge breath, mouths opening in every ridge of its ziggurat head, its head stretching and extending higher and higher.

‘Fuck,’ muttered Anderson. ‘Brain isn’t in its head.’

Tergal leapt forwards to grab Anderson, and began dragging him to cover just as a volley of white mucus thumped into the ground, running in a machine-gun line straight towards the knight. Some of this muck flicked the fusile and sent it dissolving through the air. Struggling upright, Anderson shrugged free and grabbed his automatic weapon. Both men began firing as the monster stepped fully into view. Pieces of its carapace flaked away while the droon jerked in irritation, but it was like firing on a monolith. As the beast began to hawk up another mess of mucal acid, they turned and ran for the next corner of their grounded hiding place. Tergal flinched at a hollow thud on the metal wall right behind him, followed by the spattering of acid all around. As they rounded the corner, the whole structure shifted alarmingly as the monster thundered into it.

‘Keep going!’ Anderson bellowed behind him, tugging at the straps to his greave. He abandoned the piece of armour, now bubbling, on the ground. Tergal levelled his weapon just below the monster’s head, hoping to hit something vital. As he emptied his clip and ejected it, Anderson caught up with him. Another jet of acid splashed off the nearest edge and they again dived for cover.

‘This is getting absurd!’ Tergal yelled, noting how hysterical his voice sounded.

Yet another corner rounded, and then they were running along beside the second long side of the wedge. Behind them, the droon’s tail slammed hard against the same metal wall, the latest ejecta of acid splashing the ground right beside it, throwing sand-coated globules past them. Then suddenly there sounded a loud crashing and scrabbling. Maybe the droon itself had also decided this circular chase had gone on long enough.

‘It’s on top,’ Anderson gasped.

Suddenly Tergal did not want any more adventures, and he now really wished he wasn’t participating in this one. He stared at Anderson in bewilderment, then looked up to the upper surface of the grounded container, expecting to see the droon rear above him at any moment. Abruptly, Anderson seemed to go berserk, turning to fire his weapon at the metal wall. Tergal just stared at him. They were going to die horribly, painfully, and any time now.

‘Fire over there as well!’ Anderson bellowed.

Tergal did as instructed, wondering if this might really scare the droon down. It seemed sheer madness, but then their bullets seemed impotent anyway.

‘Me!’ Anderson yelled. Abandoning his empty weapon, he tucked his arms in and pulled the chinstrap of his helmet tight. Then he ran at the wall, and dived head first. With a loud crump, Anderson was halfway through the metal, his legs waving in the air. Suddenly Tergal understood: the combination of droon acid and bullet holes . . . Then he was up behind, shoving the knight’s feet. The man finally wormed through and fell inside with a crash. Tergal stepped back, glancing up just as a shadow drew across him. Then he ran at the hole and, slimmer than Anderson, sailed through in a smooth dive, though he landed on top of the knight. They both struggled upright and, in a very strange room lit by a milky radiance, moved quickly away from the hole. The tiered prow of the monster’s. head slammed into ruptured metal, as it tried to force its way through. Finally it became utterly still for a moment, as if assessing the situation, then withdrew.

That was the beginning of a very long night.

* * * *

A floating mass of wood splinters, lumps of torn and tangled steel, fragments of cast iron and slivers of glass were now mostly what remained of his macabre collection. Scattered through this debris were cogs from his automaton and, strangely, the completely undamaged bowler hat. Jack mourned the loss, then in the next microsecond he began assessing other damage. He soon found, as expected, that he had broken no bones. Certainly, the massive acceleration had split his hull in many places, ripped things inside him and caused numerous fires, but that only meant humans could no longer inhabit him—which was not something he really considered a disadvantage. His structural skeleton, composed of laminated tungsten ceramal, shock-absorbing foamed alloys and woven diamond monofilament, was intact, and after being distorted was slowly regaining its accustomed shape.

Clear of the planet, he left a trail of leaking atmosphere as his initial acceleration carried him beyond the effective range of beam weapons deployed by the Grim Reaper and the King of Hearts. Those first hits had melted some of his hull, but fortuitously the cooling effect of atmosphere leakage and heat transferral all around his hull by its layered superconductor grid had very much limited the damage. Now Jack assessed his situation.

The Grim Reaper and the King of Hearts were located between him and the USER, and he had little chance of getting through to the device and destroying it without them intersecting his course. He also noted that, rather than going after Skellor on the planet’s surface, they were now coming after him. Obviously the two AI attack ships were here to obtain Jain technology, and without either Jerusalem’s or Earth Central’s approval. Certainly they would not want Jack getting near the planet to put a spanner into their machinations. But surely by fleeing he had removed himself from that equation? Apparently not. Their pursuit of him could only mean one thing: their equation did not include living witnesses.

Jack considered his options. He could accelerate out of the system on conventional drive and they would never catch him, and then, as soon as they turned off the USER to make their escape, he could drop into U-space and head for the Polity. He did not like that option. Ships like him did not run, having certain inbuilt psychosocial tendencies jocularly described as a ‘Fuck you complex’. Initiating his fusion engines in a twenty-second burn, he altered his course towards a Jovian planet in the system: a planet with plenty of large moons and a double ring of asteroids and dust—a perfect killing field for either himself or for them. His preference being for himself doing the killing.

What is happening? What is happening? came a singsong query.

Surprised for a second time, Jack tracked back through his internal systems, thinking something had shaken loose. Something had—but not because of any physical damage. The memcording of the woman Separatist, Aphran, had somehow broken out of contained storage and, though controlling nothing, had spread sensory informational tendrils into some of his systems. Truly there was a ghost in the machine. Jack, as much as he felt such things, experienced a frisson of fear. A purely human memcording could not do something like this, so he surmised that though there was nothing physically Jain aboard, something of the programming code of that technology had become part of this ghost.

It seems that some Polity AIs would like some Jain tech all of their own to play with.

Jack linked to each of Aphran’s invasive tendrils, and tied them into a VR framework he always kept ready to use, then spliced part of his own awareness in there as well. He stood then as the hangman on a white plain, and Aphran appeared, naked and pure white, floating in diaphanous fire before him.

‘Then they are the dangerous interfering machines I always thought them,’ said Aphran, at last showing some of the attitudes of her past.

‘I also am such a machine,’ reminded Jack.

‘Machine, machine, machine . . .’

Jack began to make programs to counter those informational tendrils: those fractured and loosely linked segments of wormish data. He saw that only total excision would work, for the agent required to counter this invasion would be unstoppable once started. It would eat its way into containment and destroy her utterly. Suddenly, Aphran was down on the white surface, the fire gone from around her and an environment suit clothing her white body. Jack wondered if, in her current strange madness, she had considered him to be a male human she could influence by her nakedness or sexuality. Certainly she now possessed more control over her appearance and her mind. She was no longer the damaged thing he had uploaded. She had healed inside him.

‘Please, don’t kill me,’ she said.

Feeling then the breath of a communication laser touching his hull, Jack remembered something of Cormac’s almost instinctive reasoning. Aphran was an unknown, and as such could be dangerous to more than himself, and in his present situation it would be foolish for him to destroy potential weapons—he needed every edge he could get.

‘Hide yourself and observe,’ he told her.

* * * *

A USER had been employed in the system; that was certain because he had set his gridlink searching for local U-space information traffic to key into, and found nothing all night. As for radio, or any of the other radiations the hardware in his head could receive or transmit, he was getting little return there either. From the city there came the perpetual murmur of something indecipherable, wavering randomly across various frequencies, and Cormac supposed the people here must be experimenting with primitive radio. He was getting a beacon return from the Jack Ketch at longer and longer intervals, which meant the ship was departing the planet and could not or would not reply. He had also briefly received beacon returns from the two other ships Jack had warned of, and did not try to contact them.

We have no back-up, Gant observed from the lander. Perhaps we should pull out until we find out what’s going on.

Gant had also been unable to get any response during the night. There had been none even from Fethan and Cento, and Cormac wondered if they were dead or just staying low profile because of some sort of danger up there.

In morning twilight, with two metallier guards nervously leading the way, Cormac headed towards the roadhouse. Kilnsman Astier had instructed both men to do exactly as Cormac asked, and no longer be so trigger-happy. They now both carried their weapons slung and with the safeties on, and seemed disinclined to disobey Astier’s order—probably because they had faced an unkillable man who, underneath his skin, seemed to be made of metal, and witnessed how dangerous was the weapon at Cormac’s wrist. But also because their kilnsman had been returned to them miraculously alive. One of the two accompanying guards kept checking his own right hand, and flexing fingers that the previous day had been lying severed in the sand. It had been a very minor task for the autodoc aboard the lander, but Cormac understood how something like that impressed less . . . advanced cultures.

To Gant, Cormac sent: We’ll assess the situation here, and do just that. Catching Skellor has always been problematic—like hunting in a woodpile for a poisonous snake.

With a blindfold on, Gant reminded.

Yes—his chameleonware.

Cormac didn’t really need that reminder. He was starting to get edgy now: he didn’t know enough about what had happened and, with the vital resource of the Jack Ketch and that ship’s telefactors unavailable, could only judge things by what he learned here on the ground. He had set his gridlink to try and crack the encryption Jack used in his signal to his ‘factors, but there was no guarantee of success or that the telefactors would become available again any time soon.

As the two men led him up the stairs to the road-house, Cormac considered what he had learned both last evening and this morning. Astier, and the man who had lost his fingers, had been endlessly curious; hungry for knowledge—an inculcated metallier trait, it would appear. But while Cormac regularly answered their questions, he also probed and learned much.

The metalliers were standard-format humans, and must have been descendants of the colony ship’s crew. Others here were ‘dapt colonists, and a small number was a mixture of both—mostly mineralliers who lived in both metallier and colonist domains. This lack of interbreeding, Cormac soon discovered, was the result of opinions of racial superiority on both sides. The colonists rightly considered themselves superior because they were hardier, though it amused Cormac to discover they thought they were pure-bred humans. Interestingly, it was the metalliers’ physical inferiority that had led them to evolve a more technical society, not their vaunted mental superiority. However, Cormac was surprised to learn that the prevalence of weapons here was not the result of interracial conflict, but because conditions, until recent technical advances made by the metalliers, had been very harsh. And the present apparent militarism was a direct result of orders from Chief Metallier Tanaquil. Someone had warned that personage about Skellor, and Cormac really wanted to know who. But right now he needed to talk to someone who might have actually seen Skellor.

‘Mineralliers Chandle and Dornik?’ The two awaited him at a table in the roadhouse refectory. He noticed that the man, Dornik, was a full ‘dapt, whilst the woman, Chandle, showed only a hint of genetic adaptation—whenever she blinked down nictitating membranes.

The male seemed about to blurt something out, but the woman rested a hand on his arm to silence him and asked, ‘And you are?’

‘Ian Cormac’

Just as if saying his own name provided some sort of key, he felt something slide into place in his head, almost with the sound and feel of a piece of a 3D puzzle fashioned out of lead blocks. A communication channel opened, and he felt great relief, but only momentarily. It was not Jack. Cormac was now in contact with the telefactor earlier sent to Dragon’s supposed location. In doubled vision, he now observed two of the strange mounts these people used bolting riderless along the edge of the hard-field wall. He would have to come back to that, however, as the woman was now staring at him, awaiting some reply. Diverting to storage the information he was receiving from the factor’s sensors, he then replayed the last few seconds recorded in his gridlink:

‘A strange name, and a very brief answer to my question,’ the woman had said, gesturing to the window and towards the lander outside.

‘I am from what is called the Polity, and am here hunting the same person as these fellows.’ Cormac indicated the two guards.

‘You’re a policeman from Earth?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

Damn.

A second signal keyed in from a telefactor lying tilted on a mountain slope. Even though the machine was half blinded, Cormac still saw a vision of hell: molten rock and glowing embers, fires consuming seared vegetation in a deep valley and throwing up columns of black smoke. Then a third signal keyed in from one high in the air over endless desert, and a fourth from a ‘factor slowly tracking through tumbled stone ruins. He shunted all they were sending to storage and awaited the fifth signal—from the telefactor investigating the nearby city—but it stubbornly refused to come. He returned his attention to the woman, who sat there seemingly at a loss as to how to continue after his affirmation.

He enquired, ‘Kilnsman Astier questioned you about any unusual people you might have seen. You said you did see someone, but were apparently reticent about exactly what you saw. Could you describe this individual to me?’

‘I’m not even sure he was real . . . things I saw . . . but now . . .’ She gestured towards the window again.

‘Tell me it all,’ said Cormac. ‘Leave nothing out -and be assured there’s not much I won’t believe.’

Chandle then told him about her encounter with a man who could make himself invisible: what he said, how he looked, when it occurred. As she went on to talk about the explosions in the Sand Towers, he held up his hand. ‘I know about that. Can you tell me any more about this man?’

She shook her head. ‘He just disappeared—heading towards the city.’

As Cormac stood from the table, Chandle asked, ‘What is he?’

‘Something horrible,’ Cormac replied.

Heading towards the city.

As he left the roadhouse Cormac looked up as a shadow drew across him, and observed the first of two blimps descending between him and the lander. He picked up his pace, speculating that the blimps had to be hydrogen-filled, as he doubted they possessed the technical capacity here to refine that quantity of helium. In his gridlink, he skimmed an overview of that sort of primitive technology, and discovered he was right. Drawing closer, he saw the armed metalliers stepping out of the suspended cabin, noted their raggedy look -and the objects clinging behind their ears.

Idiot!

It was like a slap to him when he recollected exactly why his gridlink had been deactivated not so many years ago: it interfered with his functioning as an agent of Earth Central, crippled his humanity and his ability to assess human situations. And like an addict coming back to his favourite drug, he had taken to it again oh so quickly, and had so quickly forgotten. The telefactor at the city was not functioning. Skellor had gone there: a man more ruthless than any AI and possessing a technology capable of turning people into mere extensions of himself. Cormac broke into a run, circling the figures now disembarking from the balloon’s cabin and flinging Shuriken up as a guard between himself and them.

Gant! He’s here! he sent to the Golem.

Gant was into the lander and then out again in a flash, a pulse-rifle up and aimed. Weapons fire slammed into him, knocking him back staggering. He returned fire, killing several metalliers running towards him. Of those coming towards Cormac, one spun round, his body cut cleanly in half at the waist, and another toppled with his head separating on a fountain of blood. Shuriken was whickering in sharp mechanical delight. The other blimp was drawing overhead and Cormac ran in its shadow. He reached inside his coat and drew his thin-gun, for its shots burned whereas Shuriken only cut. Suddenly a cloud of light erupted, washing heat across him, flinging people along the ground. Gant had acted on the idea before Cormac did, and the first balloon was now explosively on fire. Shielding his face, Cormac reached the lander and ducked through the door. He recalled Shuriken, and it flashed inside to thrum above him just before Gant too dived through the door. Cormac palmed the lock plate as Gant leapt into the pilot’s chair.

‘Get us out of here!’

The lander began to rise, tilting to miss the second blimp. Cormac ignored the sound of small-arms fire, because it could cause no damage, but he felt a sinking sensation when something heavy hit the hull.

‘We’ve got a passenger,’ observed Gant leadenly.

* * * *

Ten of the twelve landers departed Ogygian, the remaining two being unable to break away from the frozen docking clamps. Fethan shaded his eyes, more out of long-acquired habit than from any need to protect them, just as a second lander detonated far ahead and to his right. Clinically he then observed the remains of an ion-drive nacelle go gyrating past, and listened to the patter of other debris against the hull.

Cento? he queried.

It had been the Golem’s idea that they go down in separate landers, so spreading the odds that one of them might reach the surface intact and survive to tell the tale.

No, I wasn’t in that one, the Golem replied over their internal radio link. They could not use the ship-to-ship communicators because that would have alerted Skellor to their presence. Just as, much to Fethan’s chagrin, neither of them could interfere with the landers’ automatic systems to make corrections. Though if it was a choice between that and dying in a conflagration because the vessel hit atmosphere at the wrong angle, then interfere he would.

Any clue where we’re going to put down? he asked.

Too far out to calculate vectors, but I’d guess the target is that city and that, once we’re close enough, a landing program will cut in and bring us down in the flatlands right before it. Certainly, no auto-program would attempt a landing in the terrain lying behind it.

If those programs work.

Fethan sat back, feeling the perished synthetic padding of the seat cracking and breaking as he shifted against the frayed strap holding him in place, and wondered what they would do once they did reach the surface. Maybe by bearding Skellor up here Fethan and Cento would have been risking their lives pointlessly, but merely surviving to tell ECS what had occurred here Fethan did not like either. Maybe he was mostly ceramoplastics and metals, but that did not make him just a damned recording machine. He thought then about the other, even larger, battles.

Ships—ECS ships—had entered the system, employed a USER, then proceeded to attack the Jack Ketch. Instinctively he felt that these attacking ships had to be renegades, but he could not even be sure of that. Maybe Jack had somehow stepped over the line, and ECS had sent these ships to destroy him? Fethan suspected the chances of actually arresting a warship were remote. Whatever, that was a conflict completely beyond his own capabilities, one in which the ships would employ moon-fragmenting and AI-mind-bending weapons in some huge lethal ballet where nanosecond decisions vitally counted. Down on the surface there was perhaps some other conflict in the offing? Skellor was probably still in the city, operating the message laser, and Cormac was almost certainly closing in on him. The agent needed to know everything Fethan now knew.

We’ll have to go into the city to see if we can link up with Cormac and Gant. Maybe we’ll be able to deal with Skellor before it comes to the kill program back at the ship springing its trap.

Perhaps it would be better to pull back and let Skellor come. The interference to Cento’s signal, as much as the actual words, told Fethan he had been duped.

You’re still aboard Ogygian, aren’t you? he said.

More distant now, Cento replied, My feelings are all emulation, but still I feel the need for vengeance. Skellor must pay for . . . ayden, Hou . . . and ... ss.

Who?

. . . burnt them . . . them all ... no ... be so cruel.

What are you talking about?

Cento spoke more, but Fethan understood none of it, as the transmission now broke up completely.

* * * *

The thing about watching watchers, Vulture felt, was that no one had invented a greater exercise in futility. She was bored out of her avian skull and beginning to do the most ridiculous things to keep herself entertained. Baiting sleer nymphs out from under the rubble pile located on the opposite side of the outcrop to where the telefactor rested had not been the brightest idea, but at least she had only lost a few feathers. The current game was one recalled from her inception memory banks, and was another pointless exercise almost Zen-like in its futility. Having drawn out the grid on the flat surface of the slab using a piece of natural chalk with an attractive greenish tint deriving from local copper compounds, Vulture picked up a pebble in her beak, tossed it ahead of her, and proceeded with her game of hopscotch. Within a few minutes she was wondering about making the whole thing more interesting by using a sleer nymph rather than a stone. It was then that a shadow drew across her.

‘If your tunnels extend all the way out here,’ she grumbled, ‘then why am I out here watching that lump of fucking scrap? One of your pseudopods could have done it as easily.’

The Dragon head above was not very forthcoming. It tilted for a moment to inspect the hopscotch grid, before returning its attention to Vulture. ‘You like games.’

‘The alternative was twiddling my thumbs.’ Vulture stretched out her wings and gave a loose-jointed shrug.

‘I have a new game for you to play. Win it and you die, lose it and someone else begins to live.’

‘Oh, it’s all just plus points for me then,’ said the ex-ship’s AI acerbically.

‘Do what I want and I will consider all debts repaid, and you will then be free.’

Vulture wondered for the nth time about just flying away, but was not so stupid as to be fooled by her apparent freedom—no doubt there was some sneaky little program sitting inside her, ready to press in the point of a dagger when she did not choose to cooperate.

‘How about if I say screw you?’ she asked, just to be sure.

Dragon tilted this one head, milky saliva dripping from one side of its mouth. ‘Then I take back the flesh you have borrowed, even though it has no thumbs.’

‘Okay.’ Vulture hopped back along the length of her grid; one talon, two talons, then a beat of her wings to carry her up on top of the rock she frequented in order to check that the telefactor had not moved. ‘Tell me about it.’

Dragon described a game—a kind of three-dimensional chess and Rubik’s cube all in one—and how Vulture must play it. The description came across in no human language or machine code previously known to Vulture, but she understood it, was fascinated, and a little horrified by what it all implied for an AI like herself. It meant there was a hell for her kind.

‘But why?’ Vulture eventually asked. ‘Why not just destroy the damned machine?’

‘Because I can,’ Dragon replied cryptically.

* * * *

Cormac held up his arm and, with merely thought, recalled Shuriken to its holster. Okay, he’d found the snake in the woodpile; now the trick was to pull its fangs without it biting him, blindfolded. ‘Set it on auto—the direction we’re going.’

Gant did as instructed, then scrambled from his seat.

Cormac stepped over to a plastic box secured along one wall and opened it. Inside, neatly packed, was equipment he might need. He quickly found two APW carbines and tossed one to Gant.

‘Narrow focus, and try not to hit anything that’s keeping us in the air.’

Gant adjusted the weapon accordingly and peered at the ceiling.

Cormac placed his own carbine at his feet and from the box removed a smaller brushed-aluminium case. He opened that to reveal the three innocuous-looking cylinders of CTDs. Taking one out he studied its detonator: a programming miniconsole and a single touchpad. Pressing his thumb against the pad, he got ‘Ribonucleic coding . . .’ on a little screen, then ‘Accepted’ and the miniconsole activated. Just then, violet light ignited inside the landers as Gant punched holes through the ceiling where silvery filaments were growing in the metal. The lander filled with smoke and with flares of disintegrating metal.

Cormac dredged calm from deep inside himself. Setting the CTD for timed detonation, he gave it one minute and shoved it under a folded environment suit. He then took out two AG harnesses.

‘Here, put it on.’ He tossed one harness to Gant, then took up a carbine. Just then came the whoomph of the door seals disengaging. Instead of using the carbine, Cormac drew his thin-gun and fired at the locking mechanism, turning delicate components into a bubbling mess. Then, on narrow focus, he used the carbine to punch holes randomly around the door.

‘Now, that’s not fair,’ came a familiar voice from the com console.

He’s into the system, Cormac sent to Gant.

Get your harness on, Gant sent back.

Cormac quickly obliged. Something was now worming through the holes in the roof: a woody member jointed like an insect’s leg. As he again took up his carbine, Cormac saw something else scuttle for cover across the floor.

Spin us and blow the front screen.

Gant stepped into the cockpit and hit the requisite controls. Cormac grabbed a nearby handle and hung on. With a roar of engines, the horizon began to slip to the left. G-forces dragged him sideways, his feet coming off the deck, then swung him towards the screen. Violet fire lit up the inside of the lander and the screen departed in a dusty cloud with a huge sucking inhalation. He released his hold and tumbled through the air.

Tricky fucker, aren’t you? said Skellor over Cormac’s gridlink, as the agent manipulated the controls of his AG harness.

Go fuck yourself, Skellor.

In a moment, he had stabilized himself and could see the lander still heading away. He turned in mid-air, trying to locate Gant, then saw him far below—still falling.

Gant! What are you playing at!

Not. . . working . . . came the dead soldier’s reply.

Cormac watched him plummet, strike the edge of a butte, and tumble down in a shower of rubble into a canyon. The horizon then ignited like a flashbulb, and Cormac began a rapid descent himself, knowing what was coming. Twenty metres from his landing, the wind slammed across and tossed him cartwheeling through air filled with stinging grit. Slowly regaining control, he ran with the wind until he could safely descend into a canyon, and there, in the shelter of a tilted sandstone slab, he awaited the passing of the brief storm. Later, he was glad to see Gant stomping towards him, though dismayed to see how much of the dead soldier’s syntheflesh had been ripped away. But that was a small price to pay.

‘We got him,’ said Cormac, standing up.

Gant slapped Cormac’s weapon away, grabbed him by the throat and hoisted him up off the ground.

‘Guess again, shit head.’

* * * *

The titanic Jerusalem dropped into U-space with a nickering, grinding disturbance of reality, as if a smaller ship was just acceptable but this was going too far. In void that was hostile to tender organic linear minds and which drove their possessors to extremities like plucking out offending eyes, and when discovering that didn’t work, groping for some implement to dig deeper, the great ship accelerated beyond human calculation. Jerusalem itself- a mind using quantum computing and functioning in ways that defied evolutionary logic -looked upon this immutable infinity and considered it good . . . and home. However, the AI realized it would shortly be in for a rough ride.

In 3D translation, the view ahead was one of a roiling grey sun everted from the surrounding greyness like some huge tumour. It could appear as small as Jerusalem willed it, for here the AI had to apply dimension, not measure it. However, the sphere was two hundred light years across in realspace, and no amount of logic juggling was going to put Jerusalem at the centre of it, anywhere. What was required was unalloyed brute force.

Most Polity ships just could not penetrate the maelstrom created by a USER, but then most ships possessed three or four fusion reactors and a minimum requirement of U-space engines and hard-fields that could be powered up, with replacements in storage. Jerusalem put all eight hundred of the ship’s reactors online, to provide vast amounts of energy to stabilize phased layers of U-space engines in its hull and reinforce its scaling of hard-fields. In time, and in no time, it hit the USER sphere of interference like a bullet hitting an apple. But this was one very large apple.

* * * *

Pocketing his toys, Mr Crane stood up and then, almost guiltily, scrubbed out the eighteen-square grid with his boot. The large bird which had taken off from a distant outcrop and was now hovering overhead would not normally have attracted his attention, but his journey had shown this to be a world where the fauna barely got above ground, let alone into the air. But that was not what brought him to his feet. He could sense a change in the static electricity levels in the air, and now a figure was walking towards him, on the other side of the barrier. Then the way was open.

The force field disappeared with the faintest of pops, as of a bubble burst, its meniscus breaking into a million silver leaves dispersing on the air. The figure turned out to be a woman, who glanced at him curiously as he strode on through. He ignored her: she wasn’t Dragon and though her presence here had something to do with the sudden collapse of the field, she did not appear to be one of that entity’s creations.

‘I’m here to show you the way,’ someone said.

Crane glanced sideways, expecting to see the woman coming after him. The bird passed close overhead and, in a cloud of dust and a couple of detached feathers, landed just in front of Crane.

‘Over there.’ The bird, gesturing with one wing: ‘That’s where you go.’

Crane just stared.

The bird continued, ‘I’m Dragon’s envoy, and through me that entity has a message for you.’

Crane stared at it harder.

‘You ever played chess?’ Vulture asked.

* * * *