15

Before the Quiet War, the Earth Central AI was an electronic bureaucrat processing the day-to-day minutiae of running Earth’s government and economy. With most industries being run by machines, it was the job of the political and corporate classes (one and the same by then) to dictate to the lower classes - who were mostly on some form of state handout - every aspect of their lives, or to pursue the really important aspects of their position, such as fattening their bank accounts, screwing their secretaries, being seen with media stars and generally sucking up the cream of society. These human politicians and corporate leaders, who made up the parliament of Earth Central, did not have time for balancing budgets, calculating taxation and running services on a worldwide and often extra-planetary scale. They took their eye off the ball. After the Quiet War, the Earth Central AI became supreme autocrat and a better ruler than the human race had seen before. Better, but not necessarily the best.

- Anonymous

As her little intership craft drew closer to that bloom of Jain coral, Mika felt easier about piloting the more she comprehended the scale of her surroundings. Out at the edge here the gaps between the branches were up to a half-mile wide, so she felt in little danger of crashing into them since she was equivalent to a gnat flying between the branches of an oak tree. However, it seemed that as those worries abated, they revealed a deeper fear sitting like a lead ball in her gut. Here she was, flying into a massive alien artefact in order to find alien AIs and wake them from their five-million-year sleep. When she actually focused her mind on that, she felt near to the borderlands of madness and didn’t know whether to giggle or scream. So next she forced herself to focus on her immediate surroundings and each consecutive task ahead.

Travelling past it at only a few hundred miles an hour, she studied the attack ship caught between two branches. It was of an old style not often seen in the Polity nowadays: all sharp comers and flat surfaces, which were a requirement for the kind of chameleonware and armour used then, and two U-engine nacelles protruding so far from the main body that they appeared to be pinioned on the end of wings. She noted how the craft had been penetrated by vinelike Jain tendrils, and distorted and lost much of its substance as if someone had poured acid on the centre of its main body. She visualized the massive bloom here spreading like a slow explosion, and then one branch of Jain-tech shooting out like a Dragon pseudopod to spear this ship and suck the life out of it. Surely the AI aboard had acceded to this, else it would have moved out of the way? Mika had never seen Jain growth travel any faster than the strike of a snake, which over the distances involved here would have appeared as a slow crawl. Then again the AI might have been unwilling but been previously crippled to make it easy prey. The dappled black and purple shadows beyond the attack ship abruptly reminded her of her own troubled dreams. She saw in them the shape of what lay beyond; something ineffable, complex, alien . . .

She accelerated and soon her surroundings grew dark enough for even the light amplification of her suit visor to begin struggling and throwing ghostly after-images across her vision. Checking through her craft’s controls she pulled up a radar density map of her surroundings, but it wasn’t really what she was after. Then, far down on the menu because it was an option rarely used, she found the control she wanted and turned it on. With a whine two hatches opened in the craft’s nose and large square lights extruded from them. When their powerful white glare illuminated the way ahead, she wondered what effect the lights might have on her craft’s power supply, but a quick check reassured her that the drain was manageable. Only then did she notice movement to one side.

For a long moment she dared not look, was almost scared that nothing substantial lay there. Then she angrily forced her gaze over to the left, where two branches forked to create a structure like a scapula. There, on a branch like the trunk of a redwood fashioned of bone, it looked as if someone had poured treacle, which was streaming down in rivulets. She turned the craft, swinging the two beams of light across. Branches were lit for miles ahead until it seemed that in the distance they formed a solid wall, but it was only on that particular branch that there was any sign of movement. It seemed as if a horde of snakes was writhing along it, and after a moment Mika realized what they were.

‘Cobras,’ she said, relieved.

‘Pardon?’ Dragon queried in her head.

‘I thought your remote was the only part of you accompanying me, but now I see that’s not the case.’

The snakes possessed cobra heads and, every so often, she saw a flash of sapphire. Dragon was extending a mass of pseudopods down this branch parallel to her own course.

‘You are incorrect,’ said Dragon. ‘To extend my pseudopods for the full distance you have to travel would be an unacceptable waste of my resources.’

‘So what are you up to?’

‘I am exploring this area - but I will accompany you for part of the way.’

It wasn’t much of an answer. Mika eyed the pseudopods and noted that a group of them, having gathered together for a moment, were now parting and sliding on, leaving some large object in their wake.

‘You’re extending your defences,’ she commented.

‘Astute of you.’

‘Against what?’

‘It is always sensible to take precautions.’

Was Dragon taking precautions against whatever might ensue once she reached her destination? That seemed possible, and Mika did not like the idea one bit. Nevertheless, she used the steering jets to line up her craft with that same destination again, feeling somehow unable to do otherwise.

The visual effects ahead were quite strange, rather like seeing a street light shining through a tree. The branches of Jain coral extended far ahead, her light beams seemingly straightening out their kinks, then seemed to terminate in a distant twiggy wheel. With her view much improved, she accelerated, taking the craft up to over seven hundred miles an hour before collision alarm icons popped up on her screen. She decelerated for a little while until the icons went away, then continued coasting in.

In the ensuing hour Mika managed to rig the autopilot and so was able to sit back and study her surroundings. She spotted another scout craft caught up in the coral. This one had been cut in two, its halves some distance apart and yet bound within the same branch - she had no idea why. Then, after her view had remained unchanged for some time, this weird environment lost its power to distract her, so she unclipped her notescreen from her belt and set to work categorizing all she had previously seen in the accretion disc. She made notes and ran modelling exercises -anything to stop herself thinking about why Dragon had brought her here.

‘Slow down,’ Dragon abruptly instructed.

In a panic Mika spun the craft with its steering thrusters then used the main engine to decelerate.

‘Coordinates on your screen.’

Mika peered down at a density map of her surroundings, her craft a winking icon amid translucent branches. On one of those branches a small square red frame was also winking. It took her some moments to orient herself, and then know to look up to her left. She could see nothing there so turned the craft to direct its lights that way, revealing some minuscule object secured to a branch. Firing up the steering thrusters again, she took her craft closer, soon seeing something orange resembling the blemish caused by a parasite burrowing into a plant stem. It was only at a distance of a hundred yards that she finally recognized its shape.

‘Oh hell.’

‘This is interesting,’ Dragon replied.

Mika slowed her craft but it continued to drift in closer. The Polity had been making spacesuits that particular shade of fluorescent orange for a long time, especially for those working on the outsides of space stations or ships, so that they could be easily seen or easily found - it was a safety thing. But she guessed the suit makers had never envisaged this scenario. When she was ten yards out from the suit she could see the mummified face behind the visor and the roots of Jain-tech that had punched through the fabric. Did they kill him - or her? Or had the decompression done that?

‘We know that some humans did accompany Trafalgar’s exodus from the Polity,’ said Dragon.

‘I bet they wished they hadn’t.’

‘One has to wonder why this one is stuck out here like this.’

‘Trying to escape?’

‘Most likely - but I will extend my pseudopods to here to investigate further.’

Mika backed up her craft and returned to her course. Now she felt tense, the leaden feeling returning to her stomach, perhaps because she was reminded of her own mortality. Jerking the joystick forward she ramped up the acceleration to get away from there as quickly as possible and for some minutes ignored the collision warning icons. Then she felt stupid and eased off, after a moment putting the craft back on autopilot. Glancing up she saw two blue eyes peering down at her. With concern maybe?

Over the next hour the regular beep of collision icons had the autopilot regularly knocking down her speed. Nearing the centre of the coral bloom, its branches were much closer together and in some cases even melded, with webworks of coral bridging the gaps. Eventually she reached an area that seemed all but impassable, until she checked her density map and found a way through. She carefully edged her craft up close to the mass of coral before her, then peered to one side. There. Turning she motored through a fork, then turned again, her craft bumping against something material nearby. Coral flaked off, frangible as charcoal, and tumbled through vacuum. A short twisting passage to worm through, then she was out the other side and into a wider space.

‘The Trafalgar,’ Dragon announced in her head, and Mika immediately felt her mouth turn arid.

It sat there in the centre space like a pinned bug, though a particularly large one, attached to the remains of the moon it had partly eaten. Numerous thick trunks of coral spread out from it, running straight for half a mile to the point she had just passed through, where they bunched together and then branched. Mika recognized the shape of the vessel, the nose a squat wedge with two enormous U-engine nacelles depending behind it, close together, and another jutting up above. Behind these lay a docking ring with a few smaller ships still attached, then its main cylindrical body, which sat in a huge square-section rectangular framework. The cylinder’s spindle doubtless ran in bearings mounted at each end of the framework. This was clearly a body fashioned for centrifugal gravity, which showed that the warship had been built long before the Prador war, then adapted when the conflict began. To the rear of the main body and enclosing framework jutted the engine section terminating in an array of fusion engine combustion chambers. All over the vessel were gun turrets, the throats of rail-gun launchers and hatches for missile racks, some open and with their contents poking out into space as if ready for an attack. The whole structure was tangled in Jain coral, however - in some places completely shrouded and in others with its hull broken open where trunks of the stuff had smashed their way out.

Beyond Trafalgar, tendrils were heavily entangled around a scattering of asteroids, rock that had melted and run and then hardened in vacuum into baroque shapes, hollow crusts of ash and tough volcanic glass. Debris floated free there, and numerous areas were dark with soot. These were the remains that active Jain technology had left behind, like discarded carapaces and rocky snakeskins - matter with the wealth sucked out of it.

‘So,’ she said, ‘the Jain AIs are the roots of Jain technology, yet here it seems to me that the technology is dead, so how can the AIs be here?’ Though she said these words, Mika really did not believe them, for she felt as if she had ventured into some haunted house where violent spectres were about to come crashing through the walls at any moment. Releasing the joystick, she studied her hand, expecting to see it shaking, but oddly it wasn’t.

‘There is little energy to be utilized here,’ Dragon replied. ‘Let me give you another analogy: trees.’

‘Explain.’

‘The most activity you witness in a tree is at the tips of its twigs where the leaves sprout and where it opens its flowers and sheds its pollen, where it grows its fruit, yet the trunk itself is not dead.’

‘How can you be sure this trunk is still alive?’

‘That fact was demonstrated as you travelled in here. I am seeing it now even as I reach the corpse you saw earlier. There is activity here now - though fed merely by the power of your ship’s lights and the heat from its engines.’ Dragon paused, and Mika looked up at the remote to see that its palp eyes were now directed towards Trafalgar. ‘Note the effect of your lights here.’

In an instant Mika saw it. For some minutes her lights had been shining constantly on Trafalgar, and now, over a section of its coral-encrusted hull, a shifting movement appeared like that observed in the skin of a squid when trying to camouflage itself. Mika quickly found a way to turn down the glare, then turned up the light amplification of her visor to its maximum. Though it would have been safer to kill the lights completely, she left them on because, right then, the dark scared her.

‘I see,’ said Dragon.

‘What do you see?’

‘I am examining our long-dead friend,’ Dragon replied. ‘And through my remote I am also seeing something rather anomalous.’

‘What?’ Mika peered at Trafalgar.

‘Attached to the rear of the nose section - on the docking ring.’

The vessels docked there were swamped in Jain technology, but Mika could not see anything more anomalous about them than in anything else here.

‘I see two small shuttles and an attack ship,’ she peered closer, ‘and what looks like some sort of EVA vehicle.’

‘Look closer at the attack ship.’

‘I’m looking but all I’m seeing is an attack ship.’

‘An attack ship like the Jack Ketch in its original form?’

‘Certainly.’

‘And not like the one you saw on the way in?’

‘No, not like that one. This one is more modern . . . Shit!’

‘Do you understand now?’

‘Tell me about the corpse,’ said Mika.

‘She wore an aug, but its contents are utterly scrambled. The design of the aug, and the design of her spacesuit, are as revealing as the design of that attack ship you’re now looking at.’

Mika was not entirely sure of what to make of any of this, but certainly did not like it. That attack ship down there, docked to the Trafalgar, was of a design that had not appeared until some time after the war, and some time after Trafalgar and the others had departed the Polity. It seemed that someone had run foul of this exodus of the dispossessed.

Or had been sent to seek it out.

* * * *

Knobbler’s not controlled, came Arach’s communication direct to Cormac’s gridlink. He’s letting me scan inside him and I can’t find any Jain-tech there.

Cormac allowed himself a tired smile - maybe he was making the right decision after all. He gazed at the mackerel-patterned back of the big drone as it propelled itself ahead of them along the corridor. He knew that drones like this one, who had been incepted during the Prador-human war, had been given their own choice of body form.

A spider shape, like Arach’s, was good design. His six legs gave stability for the Gatling cannons; in addition, numerous limbs allowed for fast manoeuvring, and sacrificing one or two of them wasn’t a problem. Anyway, choosing the shapes of known living creatures had a practical justification in that each one had been shaped by billions of years of competitive evolution, so many of them made for perfect war machines. Knobbler was therefore a little at variance to that norm but not greatly so.

As they reached one of the stairwells winding up out of this runcible buffer section and began climbing, Cormac saw the patterns on Knobbler’s back subtly shift and realized what had been nagging at his memory. At first sight Knobbler was little different from Arach, just an insectile monster created to fight. However, Arach did not possess chameleonware because, like most drones manufactured in the big factory stations during the war, resources could not be spared to apply such sophisticated technology to what was supposed to be a short-lived fighting grunt. The mackerel patterns evident on Knobbler were the effect of an old style of chameleonware, so it seemed likely that this ‘ware had gone in when the drone was built during the Prador war. The big drone had been fashioned to work in ship’s corridors much wider than those here aboard the war runcible, and his major weapon was perfectly designed for slicing through hard armour - or rather carapace.

‘You’re an assassin drone,’ Cormac announced.

Still clattering forward, though abruptly turning his viewing tentacle to face back, the drone said, ‘You’re observant. So what?’

‘They built your kind specifically to penetrate Prador vessels.’ Cormac nodded towards the pattern on the drone’s back. ‘You have your own chameleonware. You went aboard to turn Prador into sashimi.’

‘It was a living,’ said Knobbler, turning his viewing tentacle forward again.

Cormac had heard about drones like this but never encountered one before. This was worrying. Knobbler, and the others of his kind here, had deliberately opted out of Polity society in order to spend years guarding a war runcible. Cormac guessed that their being asocial, or even antisocial, had been built in. Knobbler did not have to like humans because he had been created to work alone or perhaps with only a few of his own kind - unlike Arach, who was a war drone constructed to fight beside humans in planetary conflicts. Drones like Knobbler had been terror weapons whose sum purpose was to terrify alien creatures who were nightmares themselves. And it was precisely those of Knobbler’s kind that had departed the Polity along with the Trafalgar. Might it be that Cormac was making a mistake here?

‘Are there many of your kind aboard?’ he asked.

‘A few still,’ Knobbler replied vaguely. ‘Cutter went with Bludgeon on the Heliotrope.’

‘The Heliotrope?’ Cormac queried.

There was a delay before Knobbler replied. Probably he was receiving instructions from Orlandine. ‘The Heliotrope is carrying a cargo runcible which will be used to feed this war runcible its ammunition. Even now it is moving into position.’

‘Where might that be?’

‘Now that I can’t tell you,’ said the drone. ‘Remote as that possibility might be, there’s still a chance you could escape with such information.’

Jain-tech was evident just about everywhere aboard this enormous weapon. Wherever there was a wall panel missing or a junction box open, stuff that looked like steel sculptures of vines and roots lay exposed. Where ceilings were missing, opening the view into other sections of the runcible, larger versions of the same tech, often less metallic and more coraline, could be seen wound around stanchions and I-beams. It seemed Orlandine had occupied this place thoroughly with her tech, and Cormac wondered if she was beginning to produce Jain nodes yet - if she was beginning to go to seed.

After some minutes they passed through a series of airlocks that Cormac realized must mark the division between two segments of the runcible. Then a few twists and turns further through narrow corridors brought them to a main one, which terminated against a drop-shaft. Before reaching the shaft, Knobbler halted by a side corridor.

‘You go there.’’ The drone extended one of his nightmarish limbs towards the shaft.

‘You’re prepared to let us go and see her alone?’ Cormac asked.

‘My presence don’t make a wit of difference. Orlandine can look after herself well enough.’ The drone gazed with evil squid eyes at Cormac. ‘Do you think she didn’t know about your CTD the moment you transported yourself aboard?’ With that the drone turned and rumbled away into the shadows.

‘Nice guy,’ said Arach.

‘Was that sarcasm?’ Cormac asked.

‘Y’ think?’

‘So Orlandine knew about the bomb I was carrying,’ Cormac mused. ‘She must have known that I could detonate it at any time, so our friend’s,’ he waved a hand towards the dark side corridor, ‘attack on us was not intended to succeed.’

‘So what was the intent then?’ asked Arach, as they continued towards the drop-shaft.

Cormac did not reply for a moment. Orlandine was in possession of some very dangerous technology - both Jain-tech and a war runcible - but she was no arrogant or fanatical separatist leader. Before acquiring her Jain node she had been an overseer of the Cassius Dyson Project and someone did not attain such a position without having a first-class mind. Just to check something he sent a test signal from his gridlink and then frowned at the result.

Aware that she was probably listening to what he was saying, Cormac replied to Arach, ‘I would say that within a second of my arrival here she had worked out both my abilities and my intent. She knew I could not get back to King of Hearts so wanted to push me.’

‘Push you to what?’

Cormac halted by the drop-shaft. ‘To transport myself somewhere away from the CTD in order to detonate it, because she knew she could block any signal I tried to send to it.’ Cormac paused for a moment. ‘Is that not so, Orlandine?’

‘Remarkably fast thinking for a non-haiman,’ Orlandine replied. ‘Are you coming up or are you just going to sulk down there?’

Cormac stepped into the drop-shaft, felt the irised gravity field take hold of him and drag him up, the steel spider visible between his feet below. He stepped out into some kind of control centre with a domed chainglass roof. Scooting out behind, then leaping to one side, Arach tentatively opened his gun hatches. A ring of consoles enclosed a scaffold in which had been mounted what Cormac guessed to be an interface sphere, that being the kind of technology a haiman like Orlandine would be used to. He waved a calming hand at the spider drone, and Arach closed down his hatches.

Walking confidently forward, Cormac said, ‘So what happened to my attack ship?’

‘It took the only option available to avoid destruction, and it U-jumped,’ replied Orlandine. ‘It is now some hours of travel away within the disrupted area - that much at least I was able to calculate by its U-vector. Doubtless its U-space engines are wrecked and it has sustained much other damage besides, up to and including the loss of its AI. Obviously I won’t know until the light of that occurrence reaches me here.’ It wasn’t just travel and communication that were slowed to the speed of light, or below, by U-space disruption, but observation too.

Finally the door to the interface sphere opened and Orlandine herself stepped out. Her holographic image had manifested aboard King of Hearts as an unaugmented female clad in a simple one-piece ship suit. Obviously that had been stock footage, for Orlandine wore a haiman carapace with the petals of a sensory cowl open behind her head, a heavy spacesuit and an assister frame that also provided her with two extra limbs. Capable of looking after herself indeed, but Cormac rather suspected her powers were not primarily those now visible before him. He had no doubt that one wrong move would result in all hell being unleashed from the Jain technology that crammed every nook surrounding him.

‘I see,’ he said.

He saw that his link to the CTD had been cut; he saw that his method of escape was now hours away, if it could even get back here to become effective. He was in a trap, and now the cherry on top of this shit-cake was standing up from where it had been sitting silently on the other side of the room. Even Arach was cringing down a little at the sight.

‘Fuck,’ Cormac added. ‘You.’

Mr Crane reached a hand up to raise his hat in acknowledgement.

* * * *

Her head heavy and her stomach tight, Mika felt poised between the two, stretched and almost on the verge of panic. She settled her craft upon a flat area of composite hull that was utterly free of Jain coral or any of those wormish growths, but knew she would not be able to avoid them so easily once she found her way inside. She did not relish the prospect.

‘Your suit lights will not be able to provide it with enough energy to attack you. That fact is plain physics,’ Dragon reassured her.

‘Yeah, but what if there are any caches of energy here?’ she said tightly.

‘There are,’ Dragon replied, ‘but my remote contains sophisticated scanning equipment, so I will warn you in plenty of time if there is any danger.’

‘Great.’

Mika checked through the screen display until she found ‘gecko function’, and then initiated it. As if it had descended with glue on its runners, the craft stuck in place. She killed its lights, the light amplification of her visor still providing her with an adequate view of her surroundings, though the ghosting effects were numerous. Using the controls at her belt, she called up the visor display and checked the options available. Her suit possessed its own lights, apparently, though she had not noticed them when putting it on. Complemented by the light amplification, they were very low intensity, which was just fine right now. She turned them on and immediately her surroundings became sharp and clear. It took her a little while to determine that the light was provided by photo-emitters located on her chest: a series of glassy discs which she had noticed earlier but assumed to be sensors of some kind. She inspected them, placing her fingers over their brightness and observing the shadows cast. Then abruptly she shook herself: no more procrastination.

Mika hit the door control and waited while the cabin automatically purged - blowing a cloud of vapour outside, which drifted off like a crippled spectre. The door then opened, and she unstrapped herself and stepped out, using her visor menu to again select ‘gecko function’, this time for her boot soles. Taking a few paces away from the craft, she felt as if she was walking through treacle. Halting, she gazed at a spot where Jain-tech had torn a hole through the attack ship’s hull from the inside and then slithered out to spread over the exterior. She could probably squeeze her way in through there but, no matter what Dragon said, she wanted to actually touch that stuff as little as possible. Mika started heading for the airlock situated further along the hull, then paused and turned upon noticing sudden movement.

The remote had eased itself down the side of her craft and, with a ripple passing through its body from nose to tail, propelled itself out into vacuum. Mika thought for a moment that it must have made some sort of mistake, for surely it now had no way of getting itself back to the attack ship, but it flapped its skate wings and changed direction, as if it was actually flying through air.

‘How the hell is it doing that?’ asked Mika.

‘Doing what?’

‘Flying.’

‘In the sense that you mean, it is not flying,’ Dragon replied. ‘For the duration of your journey here it has been converting much of its material structure to reaction mass, which it is now ejecting through numerous pores on its wing surfaces.’

Now Mika noticed the fog of vapour spreading out from the remote, and how the flapping of its wings did not seem to correlate with its motion. After a moment the flapping ceased as it brought itself to a full stop and focused its stalked eyes towards her. As she continued towards the airlock, it followed her like a pet bat.

No matter how modern a ship might be, airlocks were always provided with a simple manual option in case the power should fail. Of course, had there been air inside this ship it would have been impossible for her to open the inner, manual, part of the lock from the outside, for it hinged in and the air pressure would have held it in place. Judging by the holes she could see in the ship’s hull she very much doubted there was any air left, though there was always the possibility of some being trapped inside the lock itself.

The lock door was flush with the hull, and the manual lever lay underneath a cover that detached easily once she pressed in the catches either side of it. She tossed the cover away and watched it tumble towards the surrounding dark forest. Grabbing the handle she pressed in the safety release, which moved easily, then pulled the handle around the length of its traverse, and felt the clonk of the locking mechanism through her feet. She shoved against the lock door, but it would not move. Probably the seal was stuck. Standing upright, she stamped down on the door with one foot, being careful not to detach herself totally from the hull. The door hinged in enough to make it distinct from the rest of the hull. Another stamp dropped it an inch further. Crouching down, Mika lodged the fingers of one hand under the edge of the frame and with her other hand pushed down on the door. It resisted for a moment, then something ripped and it hinged all the way inside. She noted chunks of hardened breach foam floating about within the airlock and realized what had happened. The damage to the ship had distorted the shape of the door frame, so sealant had been automatically injected. That probably hadn’t helped those still inside the ship. Mika peered down further into the airlock and found confirmation of that last suspicion.

The orange suit was immediately recognizable since she had seen another less than an hour ago. It was stuck to one side of the airlock, bound in place by Jain tendrils. Mika pushed herself down inside the lock and took a closer look. Behind the visor the mouth of the mummified face was wide open as if frozen in a last scream, and inside she could see small spikes of Jain coral. She shuddered and moved on.

No problem getting through the inner door - it seemed the distortion that had caused her problems with the outer one did not extend here. Beyond was a small chamber for spacesuit storage and recharging. Mika pressed her gecko soles down against the floor and walked across the area to a sliding door. Again she had to pull the cover from a manual control - a handle that folded out to wind the door back on a rack and pinion. The remote drifted up behind her as she peered into the corridor this opened onto.

Jain growth crowded the floor, walls and ceiling as if this were some jungle cave filled with roots and lianas. She stepped through and, it being zero gravity in here, propelled herself along the corridor, trying her best to not bring a foot or hand down on any of this insidious stuff. However, she had to adjust her course slightly, and there was so much growth she could not avoid touching it. It did not react, however, and it was like pressing her hand against whorled stone.

‘Head for the bridge,’ Dragon suggested.

‘That’s what I am doing,’ she grumped back.

A few hundred yards along the corridor she halted her progress by grabbing a door jamb, and gazed inside at a macabre sight. Here stood a serpentine tangle rather like a fig vine, and bound within it was a freeze-dried woman. She was naked, indicating the Jain-tech had caught her by surprise. Mika moved on.

Eventually she reached a drop-shaft, which soon opened into a short corridor terminating against the doors accessing the bridge. Some minutes of hard effort started the double sliding doors opening, and air hissed out to fog the corridor around her. In this mist she noted black bits like flecks of soot. Reaching out she grabbed some out of the air and inspected them closely. Common houseflies. Dead.

When the doors were finally open enough, she entered the bridge and looked around her. It appeared some of the ship’s crew had fled here, for the bridge was an ossuary, with skeletons scattered across the floor. She inspected the dead with a critical eye. These were clothed, their envirosuits more durable than the flesh they had contained. It occurred to her then, by the position of the bones, that they had all died before the gravity failed, for they were stuck to the floor by a frozen grey adipocere thick with fly chrysalises, dead flies and even dead maggots. Obviously a few flies had managed to get aboard at some previous port of call and to survive, and this bridge must have remained warm and oxygenated for some time. The ship’s AI? All of the corpses here showed charred bone and burns through gaps in their clothing. Laser burns, probably from the ship’s internal defences. Either the AI itself had been killed and those defences taken out of its control, or it had been melded with Erebus, and carried out this slaughter itself.

‘I wonder why the life-support kept on running?’ Mika looked around for the blue-eyed remote and saw it stuck to the wall right above the doors. ‘You’re scanning?’

‘I am.’

‘What about this ship’s AI?’

‘Smashed - so obviously it wasn’t a willing participant in this.’ Dragon then added, ‘I see that it separated life-support here from itself and concealed a trickle feed to it from one of the reactors. It tried its best to hide these people. After taking control of internal defences and killing them all, Erebus must have missed the feed or just ignored it as of no consequence.’

So what the ship’s AI had done to try to save them had ultimately allowed them to rot away.

‘Is there anything here of use to us?’ she asked.

‘Perhaps something can be learned from their augs and grid-links,’ suggested Dragon.

Mika peered at the array of bones and saw one skull had a bean-shaped aug still attached behind where its ear had once been. She reached down and twisted the aug hard, snapping its bone anchors, then pulled it away. The skull shifted, its jawbone falling loose, and the aug came away trailing fine hairlike strands – the nano-filaments that had connected it to the brain inside. Mika collected four augs in all and dropped them into her belt pouch. Any gridlink would require her either opening up a skull to get to it, or carrying about with her the skull it was in. Both notions seemed too ghoulish.

‘I suggest you now head for the docking tunnel to Trafalgar? Dragon opined.

Despite her macabre surroundings Mika did not want to go there. While her own craft had been heading into this huge Jain structure, and while exploring this vessel and wondering what had happened aboard it, she had been struggling to keep from her mind the true reason for her being here. She had come here to wake up the Jain AIs and deliver to them the information inside her head. She could feel herself right beside where things got really thin and knew that somehow those AIs awaited her aboard Trafalgar.

* * * *

Orlandine eyed the spider war drone. Its antecedents were similar to those of the drones on this station, and as such it was damned dangerous. Having already scanned it carefully, she knew it was similarly packed with weaponry, but she had prepared programs to seize control of it the moment it tried to employ its hardware. Then she studied the man and the brass Golem in turn. She wasn’t entirely sure which was the more dangerous. This man, this Ian Cormac, was a tough-looking individual with cropped silvery hair, an olive complexion and sharp striking features. His eyes were noticeably grey and cold. He was an agent of ECS, so that certainly meant he was trained to kill - and fast - but he was also a human capable of doing something as yet unheard of: transmitting himself through U-space. And that wasn’t all, for Orlandine had scanned him too. Certainly he was a human being and not some kind of machine, yet the gridlink inside his skull was activating by some means she had not encountered before. It seemed to be connected to some sort of mycelium laced throughout his bones - a structure not dissimilar to Jain-tech.

‘I take it you two have met?’ she said.

Then there was this Golem. She knew the story of the prototype that was stolen from Cybercorp, even though the theft had taken place before she was born. She knew about the tapestry of legend that had grown up about this same killing machine. But the reality of it was even more worrying. Mr Crane was heavily armoured, and what lay inside him was mostly impenetrable to scan, but what she could see hinted that he had been severely remodelled and contained some kind of technology definitely not developed in the Polity. Then there was the other stuff she had received on informational levels. His communications were mostly machine code and almost incoherent in their brevity, yet behind that she got the sense that she was communicating with something as complex and powerful as a major AI, like Jerusalem, Geronamid or even Earth Central itself.

‘Yes, we’ve met,’ said Cormac, still gazing at the Golem. ‘Mr Crane was trying to kill me at the time.’

‘Then perhaps you know that Dragon helped repair his mind.’ Orlandine smiled at him. ‘He’s all better now.’

Cormac turned and focused on her, and something about his poise worried her. She knew she could move very fast, but wondered if she might be quite fast enough if he tried anything. Then she dismissed the idea: nothing could be that fast, here.

‘You broke my link to the CTD,’ he observed.

‘You won’t be needing it.’

He carefully reached into his pocket and took out the dart, and Orlandine felt her throat constrict. Earlier he had taken it out of his pocket and asked her about her brothers, and she had then instantly made the connection.

‘When my mother Ariadne and I were on Europa she missed Ermoon and Aladine a great deal. She saw two of the dart guns for sale in a shop - they use them there in the underground sea -and immediately bought them for my brothers.’

‘She then sent the guns to them on Klurhammon,’ Cormac suggested.

‘Yes.’

‘Where Erebus killed both of them?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I did not use the Jain node he gave me for the purpose intended - I fled with it both from him and from the Polity AIs.’

‘To cover your escape you murdered someone - a haiman called Shoala, I believe.’

‘I’m not proud of that.’

‘Continue,’ said Cormac, the tone telling her that she had been judged for that act and found wanting.

‘As I took the node apart I realized I was supposed to use it with less caution than I did use it. I was supposed to become a weapon that destroyed a large portion of the Polity.’ Orlandine paused, appalled at how much this was hurting her. ‘I fled and I continued to learn. I learned how to find Jain nodes and tracked the course of a node aboard one ECS attack ship of a fleet following a legate out of the Polity.’

‘I was aboard one of those ships.’

‘I see ... I followed and I got trapped by the same USER disruption that trapped your fleet. And, for the record, I destroyed that USER thus letting what was left of your fleet escape.’

‘How noble of you.’

Orlandine felt a surge of anger, then quickly repressed it. ‘I did not do what Erebus wanted me to do, and Erebus saw me destroy its USER. Erebus took revenge on me by killing my two brothers. I was sent a recording of their . . . deaths.’

‘So that’s the why,’ said the agent. ‘Now tell me the how.’

‘With the resources I now control it was not difficult to seize this war runcible.’

‘But how did you manage to put yourself here in Erebus’s path? To have done so surely means you knew something of Erebus’s plans.’

Orlandine decided to lie to him rather than get involved in explaining the complicated saga of Fiddler Randal. ‘When I returned to the Polity, I encountered one of Erebus’s wormships. I extracted information from it before destroying it.’

‘I see.’

But he had. She could tell he had seen right through her and knew that last utterance to be a lie. It didn’t matter, as she just needed him to believe that she was genuinely here to destroy Erebus. It then occurred to her to wonder why she did so much need him to believe. Certainly he, like that ugly little drone squatting behind him, was dangerous, but she felt confident she could wipe him out in a second. Then she understood what this was all about, what she was feeling here. She wanted absolution.

‘And now him?’ he said, raising a hand and pointing at Mr Crane.

‘A source of further information,’ she replied. ‘Ever since Erebus destroyed the hybrids on Cull, who were considered by Mr Crane to be in his charge, he has been Erebus’s enemy. He has supplied me with the ‘ware and recognition codes that now conceal this war runcible.’

Cormac nodded slowly, one hand now hovering over his other wrist. Orlandine had a laser pointed straight at his head from the ceiling. He would die if he threw that nasty little device on his wrist - just as the nasty little device would die too.

‘I must return to my interface sphere now,’ she said. ‘Erebus is coming and I have to be ready. So what are you going to do, Agent Ian Cormac?’ here.’

He took his hand away from his wrist. ‘I must wait and see what the outcome is Orlandine turned away from him and stepped back into her sphere, sweat slick on her back under her carapace. Her many eyes watched him from the ceiling, but he made no move. She guessed he would just wait for that outcome then. If she and he survived it, he would probably try to kill her. ECS agents never forgave murderers.

* * * *