22

I can, should this flesh-and-blood body fail me, be loaded to silicon or crystal or mag-carbon, or even to a Q-puter (though in the last case I would probably fit inside something the size of a skin cell). I do have a memplant, and keep my account at Soulbank up to date. I could be loaded into a speed-grown blank clone of myself, the body of a mind-wiped criminal or suicide, a Golem or some other android, or a gen-factored body of my own design (had I the wealth). I am practically immortal and still I cannot quite grasp what that means. I could read these words a century down the line. I could read them in a million years . . . No, it still is not clear to me. Is it time to upgrade myself and move beyond mere humanity, perhaps become the guiding AI of some ship or even a runcible Al? Maybe, for those of us who can bear immortality, this is the path we must take. Is this what our AI children, who are also our brothers and gods, are waiting for?

-Anonymous

Shattered bodies lay below the edge of the platform. Fethan recognized the unmistakable contortion and surrounding spatter pattern, and knew they had died by falling from above. Without much hope of finding any of them alive, he moved over and checked for a few pulses. It was then that he saw the aug creatures struggling to pull free, their legs straining to draw their tubules from the side of these people’s heads. Moving away, he assumed they were abandoning corpses to find other prey, until a man came stumbling from the ruination, groaning in agony as his aug creature also tried to pull itself free.

The man staggered over to the corpses, dragged the naked body of a woman to him and cradled her head in his lap. He became silent then, rocking back and forth and stroking her misshapen forehead. Fethan noted the liquid smear of brain running from her ear, wanted to help but knew he had nothing to offer. Returning his attention to the man’s aug, he saw that it had almost pulled loose—coils of bloody tubules now between itself and the man’s head. But it seemed that advantaged it nothing, for it began to vibrate and turn grey, then hopped away from its perch and folded up in the dust, dying. Now, Fethan heard the sound of a hailstorm, which he had learned was a common weather condition here.

But this was no hail. Turning, he saw aug creatures, grey and dying in their thousands, falling from the underside of the city platform. He wondered how this particular copy of the kill program felt about destroying its own environment.

I have no urge to self-preservation beyond my task , the master copy replied after he internalized the question.

But surely your task was to kill Skellor?

It is, but when that ceases to be possible, my imperatives change.

You can’t get to Skellor... I mean this copy of you can’t get to him.

Correct. Skellor has disconnected from the network.

You communicate with your copy, then?

Yes.

What are those imperatives now, down here?

For my copy: to save human lives by destroying this enslaving network—Skellor had programmed self-destruction for its human nodes.

That figures.

Fethan noticed that the man was now looking up at him. What must he be seeing? Just someone standing muttering to himself and gazing into the distance? He walked over.

‘Who are you?’ the man croaked.

‘My name’s Fethan.’

‘You .. . you are not from around here.’

‘No.’

The man was staring with suspicion at Fethan’s chameleon-cloth environment suit while easing the head of his loved one from his lap.

Fethan was old, in the terms of this place, and he knew how to read people. ‘I’m not here to cause harm, but to help,’ he said. ‘It’s because of me, these things’ -he nudged an aug creature with the toe of his boot—‘are now dying.’

The man stood up. ‘Where is the one who caused this?’

‘I don’t know. On the run probably, but I don’t think he’ll get far. Tell me, what are you called?’

The man slumped, suddenly very weary. ‘Tanaquil, Chief Metallier of this city,’ he said, then, ‘Dragon warned us, but how could we believe . . . this?’

‘Yes, it always comes hard,’ Fethan replied.

* * * *

The droon was still visible through the haze, its body distended by its feasting on Stone so that bare flesh, the colour of custard, showed between ribs of carapace. The thing was evil, Tergal decided. It had killed his stepfather’s sand hog and had no reason to come after them now, having fed so well. The whole situation just wasn’t fair. Tergal angrily scrubbed at a self-pitying tear, then turned his attention to the new madness ahead.

‘We followed him out,’ Anderson told the man Thorn. The knight then turned to Arden and said, ‘That case down by your feet, could you open it?’

The woman did as instructed, passing up the sections of bonded amanis-fibre pole to Anderson. The knight, it would seem, was truly mad. The droon would turn him into smoking slurry before he even got a chance to get close.

Thorn said, ‘That weapon, surely you can’t mean to use it against chummy back there?’ He stabbed a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Or is it for Mr Crane here?’ At Anderson’s puzzled expression, Thorn added, ‘The big brass bastard is called Mr Crane.’

‘What’s the other thing, then?’ asked Anderson.

‘That’s a vulture,’ Thorn replied. ‘Not one of this planet’s usual life forms, I take it?’

‘Not as far as I know,’ replied Anderson, concentrating on the task in hand.

Why this Mr Crane was squatting beside what looked like a big block of glass, playing some game with a vulture, Tergal had no idea. But looking around at the level arena the two were playing in made him realize why Anderson had chosen this spot.

‘Wouldn’t it be better if we just kept going?’ Tergal asked. ‘Maybe the brass man .. .’

Anderson frowned at him. ‘I fight my own battles.’ The knight turned once again to Arden. ‘Would the power from my fence batteries operate your holocapture device?’

‘It would,’ Arden replied, ‘but they would be drained very quickly. How long would you want it to operate for?’

‘Long enough to drain our pursuer.’

‘We could just keep running,’ Tergal suggested again.

Thorn observed, ‘Feeding has distended its body and revealed gaps in its carapace. Using your carbine I could probably cause it some real damage.’

Arden said, ‘That seems a shame, since they are rare, but it won’t stop coming after us, and perhaps it would be better to face it in daylight. I can run the holocaptures for long enough.’

Tergal made no more suggestions. No one seemed to be listening to him. Then abruptly Anderson turned to him. ‘You can leave us, if that’s what you want.’

Tergal took a ragged breath. ‘I might be frightened, but I’m not stupid.’

* * * *

As he laboured up from hydrogen seas, through storms and chemical maelstroms and acidic hurricanes that would have flayed a human in an eyeblink, Jack realized he was not going to make it. The King of Hearts was bearing down on him just as fast as it could. It had probably used less than ten per cent of its munitions and was also probably very pissed off- though for an attack ship AI that was a normal state of mind. Another scoop run to generate a beam sufficient to destroy the opposing ship was out of the question: the tidal forces exerted by the gas giant would rip apart Jack’s severely damaged structure before he managed a sufficient lase of the surrounding gas to strike at the King of Hearts. Perhaps, Jack idly pondered, now was the time to just turn everything off and let the planet take him. Surely that was preferable to giving King the satisfaction of frying him with masers?

‘Oh no you damned well don’t,’ snapped Aphran. ‘There’s two of us living in here.’

‘I’m open to suggestions,’ Jack said.

‘My first one would be that you don’t give up,’ she offered.

With almost a desultory shrug, Jack began to inventory his weapons. He was still loaded for bear, but that was not the problem: his structure would not be able to bear much more of a load. A near miss with an imploder, or any other CTD for that matter, and he knew he would start to come apart like wet tissue paper. Nevertheless . ..

‘Oh, I wasn’t really going to give up. That was just an idle speculation. I do have a plan ready.’

‘And what is it?’

‘Time and escape velocity. I just need to give King something to think about.’

An hour later a pillar of flame ignited beside the Jack Ketch as the King of Hearts probed the gas giant’s atmosphere with a megajoule coloured laser, probably only to illuminate the whole area so as to precisely locate its prey.

‘Ah, there you are, Jack,’ King sent.

Jack immediately changed course, but without losing height. This time a tower of incandescence exploded into existence, and the shock wave slapped against the Jack Ketch. Turning his carousels, Jack began selecting and firing missile after missile. Any other weapons were presently out of the question, as they required power from Jack’s own systems to fire, whereas he could launch the missiles under their own power (though in different circumstances he would have launched many of them by rail gun). The swarm rose out of the gas clouds, black in silhouette and poised on achingly bright white fusion flames: strange birds in this bizarre sky.

But before they even made it out into open space masers and lasers began picking them off. Some dodged, putting cloud masses between themselves and their eventual target, but in the end they must come out and make themselves more vulnerable. Shooting fish in a barrel was the expression Jack dredged from his memory banks, feeling a bit like a whale. He sent the signal then for the remaining missiles to detonate long before they reached the King of Hearts.

‘Is this part of the plan?’ Aphran asked.

‘Have you no faith?’ Jack countered.

‘I did until I died.’

Jack let that one lie.

Above him, fires burned in the gas giant’s atmosphere, some of them nuclear and with the potential never to extinguish. These concealed Jack from King. Still climbing, Jack tracked the pattern of maser and laser strikes coming through this protective umbrella. Internally, throughout his ascent, he had reattached the ducts from his scoops to his fuel tanks and had been passively taking on hydrogen. Reaching an apex as the umbrella finally began to disperse, he slanted his course tangential to the gas giant, then injected the fuel into the aligned dropshaft he had used as a particle cannon. This time he had no mind to aim the photonic matter at any enemy, just to benefit from the thrust. Under huge acceleration, he shot out from underneath the umbrella, angled slightly down but building up towards escape velocity. He was minutes away from achieving that velocity when he detected small scanning drones in the surrounding area.

‘You know,’ sent King, ‘it’s frustrating possessing an Oedipus complex when you don’t have a mother. Probably as frustrating as you are going to find this.’

The maser struck the connecting stanchion to Jack’s right-hand weapons nacelle, cut accurately back, and the nacelle tumbled away, trailing fire. The second strike cut away the other nacelle. Jack supposed his offspring was toying with him, and now knew the difference between himself and King. He himself would not have delayed. Whether King was holding back out of a reluctance to kill or some emulation of cruelty, that was moot. Jack cared not one whit—there was nothing usable in the nacelles now anyway.

The next strike King calculated quite finely and Jack reckoned it was using the drones it had earlier dropped throughout the area for accurate triangulation—and as eyes through which to gloat. The maser cut right through Jack’s fusion chambers, and the ensuing explosion peeled open his rear section like a banana. He tumbled through cloud surrounded by his own wreckage. There would be no escape now—he just did not have the systems left to repair such damage in time. Jack awaited the final killing strike and sensed, in that moment, the USER going offline. It was no help to him, however—his U-space engines having been damaged and cannibalized. That King did not finally finish him off, he put down to whatever else was going on out there, or how irrelevant he had become.

‘Time we left,’ said Aphran, as they fell towards crushing oblivion.

Jack laughed, surprised because his reaction was no emulation intended for the comfort of humans but arose from deep inside him. Then his laughter cut off as he felt Aphran’s machinations.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

The four heavily armoured telefactors clambered through a jungle of bracing struts, through masses of hardened crash foam like bracket fungi, and vine-like tangles of optics and cables. Ape-like, they approached an area of the Jack Ketch right behind the nose chamber, which Jack found rather sensitive. He tried to usurp control, found himself unable to. He then tried to summon other mechanisms to deal with the situation, but saw that Aphran had been busy there as well. She had burnt out all of the ship Golem and other robots.

‘We are going to die anyway,’ he said, ‘so why do you attack me?’

‘Because,’ Aphran replied, ‘you seem to have forgotten that you are not this ship. That’s probably a built-in perception to make you fight better.’

With heavy cutting claws, the telefactors swiftly chopped through an armoured bulkhead. In the spherical chamber beyond, caught between two metal protuberances like the business ends of combustion engine valves, was compressed a carapace of black metal that partially wrapped a lozenge of crystal. Turning on their cutting lasers, the telefactors began slicing through the metal columns above and below this object. Jack immediately felt systems going offline, his control slipping away.

‘You are killing me . . . and yourself,’ he protested.

Like a balloon collapsing, his awareness drew inward, until at length nothing remained to him but the vision of an armoured telefactor reaching for him with one huge crab claw. In that lensed awareness he felt Aphran’s presence.

‘Why?’

‘You’ll see.’

Following the program Aphran had previously input, the telefactor picked up the mind of the attack ship and took it through the internal wreckage to what remained of the erstwhile dropshaft then particle cannon. There it coiled around the mind whilst another program took over the allotted task and, waiting until the tumble of the ship brought the shafts precisely to the correct angle, flipped a switch.

Jack did not become photonic matter—there wasn’t enough power left for that—but he certainly achieved escape velocity. His body, the ship, fell.

* * * *

Still running, Cormac was within sight of the open when another of the hybrids lunged at him out of the shadows. This one was the same nightmare he had seen through Skellor’s network, and for a moment he could not quite comprehend that it was real. From the waist up she was a woman, but insectile chitinous body with too many legs from the waist down.

‘Back off!’ Cormac yelled, firing into the ground before her. Like all the others, she ignored this and continued to charge him. As her head bent forwards, out of her widening mouth a set of pincers oozed into view. She hissed at him. Cormac shot her twice in the forehead and prepared to shoot away her legs too, but she collapsed, as if unstrung, and he ran on.

His head was aching horribly once again, and he felt thirsty and sick but dared not stop to rest, for that could cost another life. Thus far it had taken him three hours to reach the edge of the Sand Towers—meaning twelve lives—and used up two thin-gun clips. He wondered if to the lives of all those jumping from the city platform he should add those he had left lying in the dust behind him. Though partially human they might appear, they had not behaved like intelligent beings.

There were fires in the city, he noticed, probably due to furnaces left unattended. But most of the structures there being metallic, hopefully would not last very long. Cormac zeroed in on the coordinates he now held in his gridlink. Far to his right he saw a lander lying tilted against a small hill and, recognizing its source, wondered if Cento and Fethan were still alive. His destination was not that lander, though—for it still lay ahead.

As he ran, he reached into his pocket and pressed a couple more glucose tablets from a strip. These he popped into his mouth, washing them down with a sip of water from the tube at his collar. Skellor, he knew, might try to kill him, but maybe that would not happen right away. People were dying in the city right now. That he had no hesitation in giving himself up Cormac supposed the downside of both the responsibility and power of being an agent of Earth Central Security. Yes, he could balance the loss of life at Elysium against what had been the potential loss of life at Masada. In many situations he could be judge, jury and executioner. But when it came to value judgements about human life, he must make no exceptions and also strictly apply the same rules to himself. Under ECS law he would have been well within his rights to say screw the people here, they are not Polity. But his own law would not allow him that.

Cormac ran on for another hour, the fatigue poisons accumulating in his body and pain growing like lead shot in his muscles. Since the Cheyne III AI had turned off his gridlink all those years ago, he had refused all other augmentations, preferring to be no more than the human he had been born. But even with that limitation, he was still, due to genetic manipulation, the best human possible, possessing the reserves and strengths of an Olympian. Now, with his gridlink functioning for no apparent reason and Jain fibres lacing his brain, such distinctions had become laughable.

His feet thumping down on a spongy fungal layer covering the dunes, Cormac laboured up one final slope. Another hour had now passed during which, doubtless, other victims had jumped to their deaths. Breasting the slope, he gazed down on another ancient landing craft, raised up on its hydraulic feet with a ramp down and lights on inside it. Behind the craft, the sun was poised like a poison fruit on the horizon.

‘You can stop the killing now,’ he announced. He did not shout, did not think it would be necessary, for surely Skellor would hear him. His thin-gun at his side, Cormac headed down towards the craft.

Skellor himself stepped into view, in the airlock, then walked down onto the dust.

‘You can stop the killing now,’ Cormac repeated.

‘No.’ Skellor grinned.

Cormac had expected nothing else, but that did not excuse him from making the attempt. There was only one other way, then—four shots slammed into the bio-physicist’s chest. Burning deep, one blew pieces out of his back. Cormac could not decide if it was a grimace or a grin that twisted the man’s features before he stepped aside and . . . disappeared. Keeping his finger on the trigger, Cormac continued firing in the direction he felt sure his enemy had gone. The shots punched smoking lines down the side of the landing craft.

Transferring his attention to the ground the agent noticed footprints, so fired again, glimpsed a flickering snarling image. When a red light displayed on his gun, he ejected the clip while simultaneously pulling another from his belt—his reloading so fast there was no pause in his fusillade. The footsteps suddenly disappeared.

Cormac calculated, turned and aimed in a completely new direction, tracked across, and hit something. A second later the gun was snatched, smoking, from his hand, and he himself was hurled to the ground.

Skellor reappeared, the gun in his hand. On his body various holes were slowly closing.

‘It’s an automatic program walking them off the edge—so killing me won’t stop it,’ he sneered.

Cormac rolled to his feet, his hands held out at either side. ‘You have me now, so what do you get by killing them?’

‘To torment you, of course.’

Cormac considered hurling himself at the biophysicist’s throat, but recognized the futility of the act. Any thought of running was futile too.

‘They will all die—like clockwork,’ Skellor added, unnecessarily.

Calculation: Skellor could only torment him while he was conscious. Cormac hurled himself forwards, groping for Skellor’s throat. The hot barrel of his own thin-gun smacked against his temple, knocking him to the ground. He rolled upright, but Skellor was invisible once more. Something hit his head again, splitting his scalp so that a flap of skin lifted on the pulse of blood. Knuckles smashed into his nose—more blood, more pain—and more blows followed. When he felt he had taken enough, Cormac shut down his perceptile programs and allowed his consciousness to leave him.

* * * *

Burping dyspeptically, Vulture understood that sleers caused acid indigestion. Or perhaps the imminence of death did that? The little AI would not have minded Arden and her new companions coming here, but the droon was a different matter entirely. Vulture knew that Dragon would kill her, somehow, if she did not complete her task—the entity had probably written it into her avian wiring—so she must stay with this game. But now remaining here had also become a fatal option. All she could hope was that Arden and crew could deal with the unwelcome monster. She returned her attention to Crane as he reached out to make his next move.

The random nature of Crane’s search for the right arrangement caused a bit of a problem. Again he was reaching towards the piece of crystal that Vulture had made the one stable point in the pattern. It was frustrating. Beyond Crane, she observed Arden and the rest dismounting and dispersing amid the surrounding ruination, while the Rondure Knight positioned his lance in its frame. His seemed like the best plan, but she wondered how he would persuade the skittish sand hog to charge at the droon, or how he would avoid being himself dissolved in the monster’s volatile saliva. Suddenly irritated beyond patience by her ridiculously fatal circumstances, Vulture gave a savage peck, her beak clonking on Mr Crane’s brass fingers.

The Golem froze, and Vulture was sure she could see something flickering in his right eye. He withdrew his hand and raised his face to look at her directly. Vulture waited taut seconds, expecting to have her neck wrung, but Crane dipped his head again, bird-like, and there seemed a strange symmetry to that. Instead of reaching for the crystal, he reached for one of the acorns.

Vulture ahem’d loudly and Crane’s hand wavered, dropped instead on the laser lighter, shifting that. Vulture edged forwards one of the miniature sand hogs with its rider, who used his lance to prod a blue acorn into a new position. Everything seemed to be working out okay—at least in the game.

But Vulture decided to be sure. The little ship AI retreated to a small virtuality maintained by a draconic mechanism buried underneath the fossilized apek. Here a human would have perceived twelve oddly shaped fragments of crystal dancing around each other, sometimes meshing, sometimes parting, and another five fragments permanently joined into one lump. But Vulture, with the perception of an AI capable of guiding a ship through U-space, saw so much more. She saw acceptance of horror by something ostensibly incapable of causing it, she saw timelines aligning and disparate subminds feeding the yet evanescent concept of self. She saw an ego growing: tender, hollow growth ready to be filled with steel. Yes, it was working. Returning to strange reality, Vulture was surprised to see Mr Crane staring at her again. It was ridiculous really—he did not have what Vulture would call a mind—but she was sure he knew she was helping him.

* * * *

Arden had nothing but admiration for the Rondure Knight’s courage and wished their acquaintance might not be so brief. But very shortly the man was going to be dead, and she doubted the rest of them would long survive him. Trying to steady her shaking hands, Arden unwound the two feed wires from the holocap’s universal power supply. Being a rugged and utilitarian device, it had the facility to power itself from just about any electrical source. Arden had once even powered it (very briefly) from a piece of copper and a silver ring jammed into a citrus fruit, so there should be no problem with Anderson’s primitive battery.

She eyed Thorn, who was crouching behind a nearby boulder draped with a fiat and slightly putrescent pseudopod that Dragon had discarded. He was checking the action of the carbine Anderson had given him. Off to her other side, Tergal clutched both handguns. As well as an expression of fear, he also wore his gauntlets, wide-brimmed hat and thick coat. This extra clothing might protect him somewhat from acid splashes, but would not help if the monster went after him exclusively.

She then glanced behind to where Anderson had mounted his old sand hog and couched his lance. He had told her, only a little while ago, how he had come here on a knightly quest to kill a dragon. A test—a trial. He then quipped that the droon would suffice, and having dispatched it he would consider his trial over.

The holocap read the new power source, adjusted itself accordingly and powered up. Arden detached the monocle, and for the first time looked up and ahead. The droon was a hundred metres away, closing the gap between them by three metres with every stride. Arden placed the monocle in her eye, gridded the creature, taking in the surrounding area as a projection stage, then removed the monocle and tossed it away from her. Hopefully, no droon acid would hit the monocle itself, because then it would all be over, as it was the last one she possessed. With a mosquito whine, the device shot out over the droon and hovered, invisible. Going to her menu, Arden selected a second-stage sleer and projected it onto a boulder to the droon’s left.

The monster spun, ejecting a sheet of white mucus straight at the projection. Arden made the second-stager leap about a little before shutting the thing off. The droon stooped low, its head darting from side to side as it tried to locate its prey. It reached down with one many-jointed arm, hooking underneath a rim of stone with a paw like a battered mass of scrap metal, and flipped the boulder over. Then it bellowed in frustration and randomly spat acid all about itself.

‘Seems rather irritated,’ Thorn observed.

‘I’ve studied them for a while and they possess only two states,’ Arden said, ‘irritated, as you put it, or motionless.’

‘And when are they motionless?’ Tergal asked.

Arden glanced at him. ‘Usually after they’ve fed.’

‘And why isn’t this one motionless, then?’

Arden shrugged. ‘Perhaps it’s unusually irritated.’

She now made another second-stager appear, this one on a rock to the monster’s other side. The droon ejected another sheet of mucus, which passed through the hologram and drenched the rock below it. Again the prey danced about a bit, then disappeared. Arden gave the monster quite a chase with a third-stager, leaving behind a trail of boiling smoke and steam. Onto the illusory apek it emptied gallons of vitriol, but the image of itself only seemed to confuse it. Then, as it seemed to be now spitting dry, she conjured a fourth-stager to draw it round to the rim of the arena, to finally face Anderson.

Thorn and Tergal stood up and circled round, ready to act as picadors. Meanwhile Arden recalled the projection monocle and caught it in her hand. Projected images would now only confuse the issue, and might even put Anderson off his stroke. Unless . . . Arden brought the monocle up to her eye and once again cast up a grid.

* * * *

The Jerusalem was a vast and cavernous ship full of echoes and, as she returned to her research area and quarters, Mika heard a constant din of distant industry. Skinless Golem were apparent everywhere inside the great ship, and also outside on its hull. Other more esoteric robots scuttled along walls and ceilings, like an infestation of chrome deathwatch beetle.

These were the more visible robots. Mika had also seen ones no bigger than ants repairing delicate circuitry, millipede plumbers only momentarily visible in the breaks in pipes or ducts they were fixing, also roving crab drones floating on personal AG and muttering to themselves, and the glittering fungal movement of Polity nanotech at work repairing stress fractures in structural members. Mika herself had just put in a long shift in Medical—repairing humans and haimans—and her own arm still ached. Now her shift was over, and it was at last time for her to do her own thing.

With the door closed behind her, she was immediately into her partial-immersion frame, then standing on a virtual plain. Manipulating some floating icons, she called up diverse views and the results of sampling tests transmitted by some of Jerusalem’s drones. Translucent pillars of data appeared all around her, scrolling her requirements around themselves.

The worms living in the icy moonlet that now turned in her virtual sky created burrows similar to those delved by Dragon. Breaking open one icon, she caused a segment of the moon to disappear, and like a huge worm-eaten cheese it dropped closer for her inspection.

Even though information about these creatures was already on file, through a transmission made by the Jack Ketch, Mika still found them fascinating. There was one aspect of them that was plainly similar to Dragon as it had once been on Aster Colora, where the human race had first encountered it: there seemed to be no supporting ecology for them. Mika could only hypothesize that the ecology of which they were a product had been destroyed or was somewhere far from here, and that begged many critical questions. Their lone survival made it unlikely they were just the primitive helminth survivors of some natural cataclysm or had been transported accidentally, therefore they must be very like Dragon in another respect. They must be the product of an ecology in the same way that a Golem android was the product of Earth’s. It was certain that they had not evolved naturally to their present state.

‘Fascinating, isn’t it,’ interjected Jerusalem, appearing beside her.

‘What is?’ Mika asked.

‘Life. But then what is life? Those worms grinding their way through spongy rock—are they life? Is Jain technology life? Am I?’

Ah, philosophy. Mika didn’t bother to venture a reply.

Jerusalem went on relentlessly: ‘In terms of evolved life, those worms are neither one thing nor the other. They have evolved, yes, but prior to that minor change they were not the direct product of insensate evolution.’

‘Pardon?’

The floating metal head tilted, and a long helical molecule arched across the sky like some strange species of rainbow. ‘You have not yet noted the regularity of their genetic blueprint, the lack of equivalents to alleles and parasitic DNA?’

‘Yes, I saw that.’ Mika repressed her annoyance. She had discovered something, but it was irritating to learn Jerusalem had found it long before her.

‘And what is your assessment?’

Mika replied, ‘A manufactured organism of some kind, probably intended for mining.’

‘So it would seem,’ the AI agreed. ‘They accumulate rare metals inside their bodies for no purpose related to their own survival.’ Mika winced—she had missed that aspect. ‘And they procreate only when those metals have reached an internal saturation level that interferes with their tunnelling efficiency.’

“They could be Jain tech,’ Mika offered.

‘They are not Jain in themselves, being simple mechanisms with only one purpose. However, someone using Jain technology could have made them. Some of the tunnels in that moon are over half a million years old. Perhaps the Atheter, or the Csorians?’

Mika considered that. There had been no finds classified as Jain artefacts any younger than five million years of age—that was, she acknowledged to herself, excepting products directly attributable to Skellor. Perhaps unknown aliens had left these worms here, but if so where were they themselves now? Perhaps this was all that remained of yet another race which had stumbled upon Jain technology.

‘We should set up a research . . .’ The words died in her mouth when she felt that drag into the ineffable as the Jerusalem dropped into U-space. She braced herself for any turbulence, surprised Jerusalem had given no warning.

‘The illegal USER has ceased to function,’ Jerusalem informed her, before she could ask.

* * * *

Something prodded him to consciousness and, as he surfaced, Cormac could feel Jain tech all around his mind, like a hostile encircling army wielding a forest of edged and pointed weapons. Sharp steel hedged him in—he was poised on the brink of annihilation. Opening his eyes, he found himself bound into the co-pilot’s chair by hard Jain substructure. He could not move his head for the structure bound that too—and penetrated it.

‘Obviously you don’t have a quick death in mind for me?’ he suggested.

The lander was still under acceleration, and an indigo sky liberally dotted with stars filled the viewing screen. Skellor, leaning forward with one hand resting on the pilot’s console, glanced over his shoulder.

‘I don’t even know that I’ll kill you at all. Maybe I’ll rewire you so that you’re in constant agony, or I could subvert you like was done to Mr Crane—turn you against your masters. Maybe I’ll do both.’

‘Oh, you are so spoilt for choices—it must be such a trial for you.’

Agony speared from the base of Cormac’s skull and down his spine. He arched against his restraints, too ravaged by the pain to even scream. It went on and on . . . and his consciousness refused to leave him. He began to break: thought processes now operating in his gridlink because they were unable to function in his organic brain. He realized there, with arctic precision, that this was how Aphran had carried on; understood this separation. Then, after an age, the pain stopped. Cormac gasped for air, spat blood from where he had bitten through the tip of his tongue, wished he could wipe the tears from his eyes.

‘You see,’ said Skellor, ‘with the Jain substructure supporting your body, I can do that to you for hours without you going into shock or losing consciousness, or retreating from reality. Of course, if I rewired your brain and body, I could do so much more.’

Cormac became weightless in his Jain carapace, and slowly black space scrubbed away the indigo seen through the screen. Eventually the colony ship became visible, and Cormac could feel the lander decelerating to dock. Skellor would now have to move him from the lander to the main ship; perhaps he could do something then. The horror—he understood—of occupying the moral high ground, by being prepared to pay so heavy a price, was that this did not except you from actually paying. He knew that, given time, Skellor could destroy that same morality: could turn him into a whimpering thing who would obey the man’s every whim, could turn him into the complete negative of everything he was, and could make him suffer endlessly. Briefly, through the bulwarks of his mind, Cormac glimpsed a void where all that he amounted to meant nothing.

But he then decided that he must continue to function as if that void could never exist—he must remain an ECS agent to the last.

Skellor’s mental link to him was very close: he could feel thoughts and memories bleeding over, could feel that the man needed little excuse to cause Cormac pain. He decided to be sparing with sarcasm so as not to provoke the man. He also routed the bleed-over from Skellor’s mind into his gridlink and stored it.

‘What are your intentions, other than causing me pain?’ he asked.

Skellor glanced sideways, and Cormac observed dark movement under the apparently human skin of the man’s face. Whorls of scar tissue now filled the holes Cormac had drilled with his thin-gun into Skellor’s body. Those holes penetrated what appeared to be baroque leathery armour which Cormac realized was actually part of the man. One hole at Skellor’s waist seemed to have become cancerous: scar tissue having welled up and spilled over, setting in a fungal growth containing small egg-shaped nodules. Cormac wondered if this meant Skellor was not entirely in control of the Jain technology, though it seemed more likely that the man just did not care how he looked.

‘My intentions,’ Skellor repeated, the question seeming to momentarily confuse him. ‘Perhaps you should try to guess them.’

Without even thinking about it, Cormac found himself flexing his muscles rhythmically against the hard structure that bound him, just as he would have worked against any conventional bonds. He considered stopping doing this, but didn’t—had to try every possibility.

‘I don’t know enough. I don’t know why you came here in search of Dragon. I don’t know if your main motivation is survival or aggression, or if it is something else now utterly alien to me.’

‘Suppose it is aggression, what should I do?’

‘I don’t think I should give you any ideas you might not have had already.’

The renewed pain slammed him about, writhing against the entrapping structure. He had freedom to scream. Locked his jaw against it. Eyes open wide, he saw the world with startling clarity: like a blind man achieving vision whilst being burnt at the stake. An age passed, and then another.

‘Answer the question.’ Skellor’s voice came out of some dislocated reality.

It took some seconds for Cormac to realize that the pain was gone, and to reassume control of his organic brain, emerging from those places he had retreated to within his gridlink. Briefly he experienced one of his captor’s memories: a market stall on a world undergoing terraforming, a plastic box containing pieces he recognized as Jain tech, and something else—an egg . . . Cormac dismissed this memory to storage. It was no help to him now.

‘I would attack . . .’ he began, then paused as he lost the thread for a moment. ‘You should attack using manufactured viruses, disease, plague, biological warfare. You have the capability to create something to kill people faster than boosted immune systems, autodocs or Al-manufactured counteragents can prevent it. You could also send the virtual versions of all of these against AI.’

Cormac felt no guilt in saying this to Skellor. If the man had not already thought of these methods of attack, then he had been severely overestimated. And anyway, the Polity had been preparing for as well as countering such attacks from Separatist organizations for centuries now.

‘But how would I distribute such plagues? I could never get such things past the biofilters and scanners of the runcible network.’

‘You have a ship.’

The colony ship now appeared as a curved metal horizon viewed through the front screen of the lander and, even as the pain hit again, Cormac heard the hiss and whine of hydraulics, felt the lander judder, and heard docking clamps thump home.

‘So I should personally visit each world in turn for the purpose of biological and virtual attack?’ Skellor detached his hand from the console, pushing himself up and away from it. ‘Just how many worlds do you think I’d manage to attack before I ended up with ECS sitting on top of me?’

Cormac closed his eyes. It felt to him as if someone was sequentially smacking each of his vertebrae in turn with a hammer. He writhed and fought, then suddenly, unbelievably, the Jain substructure binding him began to loosen and move. Hope surged in him as the pain also faded. Then he saw Skellor grinning at him.

‘Come with me,’ said the biophysicist.

Cormac pushed out of the chair, the substructure moving plastically around him like an alien exoskeleton. He turned and propelled himself after Skellor towards the airlock. He had not wanted to move or to obey; it was the structure itself moving him—an exoskeleton controlled from elsewhere. In the lock he stood immobile whilst Skellor subverted the door’s controls. He then wondered why Skellor had used this method to control him, and not simply attached another of those aug insects.

Hearing his thoughts, Skellor said, ‘Your body is just a machine that I can rebuild any time I like. Your mind I have decided to keep sacrosanct for now. If I destroy it, how can it appreciate its own suffering?’

The man was lying, Cormac realized that in an instant, but it was knowledge that availed him nothing. The airlock opened and they propelled themselves out of it into the body of the ship. Cormac’s first breath was a dry gasp from the inside of a rusting pipe. In seconds, he was gasping for oxygen. Nevertheless, perpetually on the point of suffocation, he followed Skellor up into the control bridge.

‘Of course I won’t allow your body to die for the present, as I don’t want to take the trouble to rebuild it,’ Skellor told him. ‘You’ll not suffocate, though that’s how it feels.’

On the bridge, Skellor impelled Cormac to clean the captain’s chair of the dead man’s sticky remains. Still gasping, he carried out his grim task, glimpsing Skellor inspect the cancerous scar tissue at his own waist. The biophysicist then looked up in irritation and allowed Cormac more freedom. Cormac immediately pulled up the hood of his environment suit, closed the visor, and breathed real air. Skellor had obviously tired of that game. Stacking bones and dried-out skin to one side, the agent observed Skellor remove his thin-gun from some hidden pocket and place it on a nearby console—another more subtle torture. Then the rogue bio-physicist pressed his hand down on the main computer console. After a hiatus, he tilted his head back and issued a sound somewhere between a scream and a snarl.

* * * *