16

. . . and it was a danger faced by the Polity. We know that some AIs and some haimen disarmed and used elements of the technology. It is speculated that much of our own nano-tech was reverse-engineered from Jain artefacts, e.g. the mycelial connectors for augs, the ‘little doctors’ which are usually reserved for those in dangerous occupations, and the probably mythical mycelial ‘ComUtech’ which supposedly enables individual humans to transport themselves through U-space. Of course, as in all things, there is always an element of choice. Just because the Jain AI finger is no longer on the trigger, does not mean the trigger won’t be pulled, or that the gun’s holder won’t pistol-whip someone with it.

- From Quince Guide compiled by humans

Ensconced within her interface sphere Orlandine quickly and fully reconnected herself to the war runcible and began viewing scan-data being flagged for her attention. She ran a deep analysis of a massive disruption in U-space, and this confirmed the initial analysis she had made while speaking to Cormac: something big was on its way towards the corridor through to Earth.

She called up realtime sensor data through her U-space link to Heliotrope and saw that same ship currently bearing down at a sharp angle on the polar fountain from the Anulus black hole. Even heavily filtered, the view ahead of Heliotrope was a painfully bright storm of energy and ionized matter. The ship was heating up and Cutter was routing the heat through superconductors into thermal generators, then firing the excess energy off into space by means of the vessel’s supply of evaporant. She was about to suggest that starting up the cargo gate would give the vessel some shielding, when Bludgeon turned it on anyway. Mounted on the jaws of the ship’s front grab, the runcible’s triangular gate sprang into being. It could not be seen that it was as reflective as a mirror, for the fountain’s fire turned it into a charcoal silhouette. The energy hitting the other side and passing through the Skaidon warp now accumulated in the U-space spoon, since as yet it had been given no destination.

‘Erebus approaches,’ she told the two drones aboard Heliotrope.

It was Cutter who replied, since Bludgeon was deep in the mathematical realm of runcible mechanics. ‘We’ll be in position within minutes. Bludgeon calculates that, once in, we’ll be driven along the course of the fountain, even with the gate open, since there’ll be pressure against the Skaidon warp.’ Cutter paused contemplatively. ‘But why am I telling you all this? You already know every detail of what is happening here.’

‘You’re probably telling me because you’ve spent too much time in the company of habitually taciturn war drones,’ Orlandine quipped.

‘Just because they don’t talk that much to you doesn’t make them taciturn,’ Cutter replied. ‘It makes them sensible.’

Orlandine grimaced, then observed the horns of the cargo runcible now turning in order to wrap the Skaidon warp over themselves. Standing in the world of information at Bludgeon’s shoulder, she noted the drone monitoring the build-up in the spoon, balancing buffer energies and slowly increasing fusion-reactor output to the warp. The little ship now lay only a few miles from the fountain’s edge - and one nudge from the main drive would place it inside that appalling fire. She also noted that Heliotrope’s temperature was still rising, but kept her counsel to herself for a little while. Bludgeon then showed her he knew precisely what to do, for the three horns detached from their seatings and, driven by hard-field projectors, began to expand the triangular warp. Heliotrope’s, umbrella needed to be bigger.

‘I’ll want you to go to maximum expansion of the cargo gate,’ she explained, then wondered why, since the two drones did not need her input. ‘I will give you plenty of warning,’ she added, then focused her attention at her end, on the barrel of this massive weapon.

There was no need to run any more tests. Orlandine retuned the chameleonware for a major change in what it was hiding, then started up the war runcible’s Skaidon warp. Though the device was hidden from outside view, her view of it was perfect and she felt a thrill on seeing the meniscus ripple into being across the area enclosed by the five horns: the five runcible sections. It stabilized quickly and she then initiated the separation of these five sections. The feeling for her was almost painful, like pulling off some tightly rooted mental scab. It was almost as if the Jain-tech did not want to break off where she had prepared it to do so, which was odd since it was an insentient technology with no will of its own. Perhaps, if she survived this, she would investigate the phenomenon, which she suspected, lay somewhere at its very base.

‘I am moving to Section Three,’ Knobbler informed her.

This decision did not surprise her, since that segment of the runcible was the only one not occupied by a war drone. The drones could remotely control the weapons mounted on and in each section, but it would be best to have them nearby should anything go wrong, which it inevitably would when things started to get hot. She watched Knobbler exit rapidly through an airlock and hurtle away from one section in a trajectory that would intersect with the next section round as it moved out. She watched him spread his tentacles ready for landing then returned her attention to embrace the entire runcible. Seeing the huge device coming apart like this, even though she herself had initiated it, gave her a moment of considerable disquiet. Would the Jain mycelium properly counter the inertial effects of weapons fire from each section? Might she even have achieved her aims without expanding the gate like this?

Damn, this seemed a stupid time to have such doubts.

Then something else attracted her attention, and curiosity momentarily dispelled her disquiet. The agent, Ian Cormac, seemed to be experiencing a bit of a problem. He was bent over, leaning down against the back of the spider war drone, and, no matter how Orlandine focused her conventional sensors on him, he seemed strangely thin, insubstantial. However, when she focused those sensors that derived from runcible technology - ones intended for gravity and density mapping, and for measuring Skaidon warp phenomena - she saw clearly the disturbance around him. Fascinating: he seemed to be on the point of falling into a warp all his own, yet maintaining himself at the interface through some effort of will. And this phenomenon certainly seemed related to that mycelium threaded in his bones.

Even so, when Orlandine ran an analysis of the field generating around him, she still could not figure out how he was doing it. Certainly, it seemed as if he didn’t want to be doing it, so she assumed the proximity of the massive Skaidon gate must be affecting him somehow. That would be no problem to her unless he was actually trying to get himself somewhere else aboard this runcible.

Orlandine quickly scanned over to his point of arrival aboard the runcible, and to check that the CTD was now gone. She reviewed recorded data and ascertained that, as instructed, one of the drones had taken the device away after she broke the agent’s link with it. That same device had now been stripped down and added to the munitions of the drone concerned, which was the big iron spitting cockroach. Like it needed more munitions. She returned her full attention briefly to Cormac, who now seemed to be getting his problem under control, then to Mr Crane, who had seated himself on the floor and was placidly sorting through his odd collection of keepsakes. What a crew. She focused fully now on the task in hand.

Knobbler had by now landed on Section Three and was scrabbling inside the airlock. Orlandine was reassured to note the micrometric adjustments being made - with steering jets - to the current position of that runcible section, for this demonstrated that her mycelial sensors were sensitive enough to pick up on the relatively infinitesimal impact of Knobbler’s arrival there - though it was an impact that would have made no significant difference to the integrity of the Skaidon warp.

Shortly, the war runcible would be opened up to its maximum expansion. And shortly Erebus would arrive, and the bizarre crew gathered here would become the least of her worries.

* * * *

Mika propelled herself through the dead corridors finding no more human remains but plenty of open cabins that looked to have been formerly occupied. Dragon’s remote drifted along at her shoulder, peering into these places with its clear blue eyes radiating a strange kind of innocence. Eventually she reached the airlock that connected into Trafalgar’s docking mechanisms. It seemed evident that the Jain-tech had penetrated the attack ship through here. It was all around the open airlock, and in the docking tunnel beyond it had grown utterly straight and even. She thought it looked like some odd by-blow of vines and antique plumbing. Worryingly, it also appeared to be more alive here, because unlike much of what she had already seen, which was bone-white or grey, this was bluey-green and possessed an odd iridescence. Or perhaps that was because everything around her now seemed more alive - or rather gravid with the potential to spring into life. She forced herself to continue through, even with the stuff all around her, then kicked off against it and accelerated when she saw points of growth slowly easing like onion sprouts out from the general mass towards her.

‘It does not possess the energy to harm you here,’ Dragon informed her, adding, ‘unless you stay in contact with it for long enough.’

Mika stopped by catching the edge of the airlock at the far end and propelled herself down towards the floor of the Trafalgar, gasping and on the point of panic. She tried to calm down, tried some breathing exercises, tried to study her surroundings analytically. She mocked herself for her fear: she was a scientist, not some panicky little girl. It didn’t really help.

The docking tunnel was connected to one of a series of five airlocks widely spaced along the wall of a large equipment bay. Mika thought these must have been used for getting workers or troops outside, perhaps into maintenance pods, for there was not enough room for five large-sized vessels on that section of the docking ring. Within the bay itself a row of maintenance pods was secured along the facing wall. Doubtless, when repairs to the battleship were required, they were shifted outside through the larger bay doors at the end, then kept outside until the work was completed while their operators used these airlocks. Other equipment was scattered here and there: a tank with caterpillar treads was down on the floor, while another lay at forty-five degrees against the wall to her right. Why these two items were aboard a ship like this baffled her. A mass of spacesuits rested in a pile, and racks of ordnance lay where they had fallen. All were bound by Jain tendrils and other thicker structures, and all were missing material as if they had been sprinkled with acid. However, the growth here seemed to be offshoots of the main structure, which had obviously originated from her left - from the entrances to a row of drop-shafts.

‘I am to follow this stuff to its source?’ she suggested.

‘That would seem to be a good plan,’ said Dragon.

Right, good plan.

Mika propelled herself towards the shafts, glad of zero gravity, for she felt that walking on the floor below her would be like stepping amid sleeping snakes. She misjudged her course slightly and landed against the wall above the level of the shaft mouths, but there were numerous power ducts here she could use to push herself down.

Very little Jain growth visible here above the shafts, but then perhaps it was concentrated inside the ducts.

Entering one of the shafts she did not know where to go next, for the growth seemed equally prolific in both directions. The blue-eyed remote slid past her and landed against the far wall, then with a puff of vapour sent itself up into the dark throat of the shaft above her.

‘I take it you know where I’m meant to be going now,’ she said.

‘Yes, I know where you are going.’

As Mika followed her strange flapping guide, she abruptly felt that she did too, for this was exactly the direction some instinct was telling her she should avoid. As she moved she began to hear odd sounds. They could not have been coming from her surroundings, since she was surrounded by vacuum, so were they coming instead from her suit radio? No, it was switched off. They were in her head, obviously: a low drone like a mournful wind, the occasional chittering and a distant sound as of someone sobbing.

‘Are you hearing this too?’ she asked.

‘Hearing what?’ Dragon enquired.

‘Weird sounds.’

‘Resonance,’ said Dragon.

‘Uh?’

‘The Jain AIs are affecting you. You’re vibrating like a tuning fork in an opera house.’ Mika wondered where Dragon had dredged up that analogy. The entity continued, ‘My remote resonates in different ways, for it has no ears and not much of a brain.’

‘Why here, Dragon?’ Mika asked. ‘Why here and not somewhere else, like that massive Jain growth in the Coloron arcology?’

‘Everywhere Jain-tech grows, the Jain AIs gather on the underside of U-space. It both creates them and calls them, for such is the nature of U-space that both cases are probable. Nobody looked for them at Coloron, and why should they?’

‘Why would these AIs help us against a technology that . . . sustains them, that they are a part of?’

‘I don’t know.’

Just that, then: I don’t know. Were they here just on the off-chance that alien artificial intelligences, the product of a hostile individualistic race, might be prepared to help? Two Dragon spheres had weaponized themselves to come here, and one of them was perhaps still fighting a massive biomech outside just to give her this opportunity. And Dragon didn’t know? She then entertained a horrible suspicion. Had Dragon come here simply out of curiosity or did the entity have some other purpose in mind? Was this mission just Dragon’s excuse for coming here?

The remote exited the drop-shaft ahead of her and, as she followed it into the corridor beyond, she recognized the kind of place she was in. Resting against one wall was a wheeled gurney of the kind they had used in ships of this type, rather than gurneys buoyed by antigravity, because of the possibility of power failure. She had just entered Trafalgar’s medical area. Ahead she saw that the vinelike growths become narrower, and all seemed to have issued from just one particular door. With a puff of vapour and a flap of its wings, the remote shot in ahead of her, and reluctantly she followed. Here reality seemed to be a light skin over something else, and things kept squirming at the edges of her vision.

Mika halted herself against a ragged door jamb, peering into the room at the long-dead occupants of three surgical chairs. The dried-up corpse in the first chair looked as if it had been fashioned out of plastic then placed in an oven for a while. Bones, exposed through large areas of missing flesh, had sagged and run, and thorns of alien material were sticking up from them. The head rested back in some sort of clamp, from which skeins of optics trailed away to plug into a pillar of computer hardware jutting from the floor behind. She shoved against the door jamb to propel herself over and study the cadaver more closely.

This was a woman. There was a name tag on her ECS Medical uniform that identified Misha Urlennon. Mika shivered at the similarity of their names. Misha’s head had been shaved and it was apparent that numerous probes from the clamp had entered her skull. Mika groped at her own belt for a moment, located a small cache, popped it open and extracted a laser pointer which she used as a probe. The corpse’s dried skin was papery, its ropes of muscle shrunken solid. Missing skin and flesh on its right side gave access to the chest cavity in which the organs lay freeze-dried and also shrunken. Mika turned on the laser and shone it inside, noting scattered components like chrome-covered stones, all linked together by a network of silver wires.

‘What happened to her?’ she wondered.

‘She was a failure, I suspect,’ Dragon replied.

Mika glanced across to the next chair, whose occupant was tangled in threads of Jain-tech which had rooted to the floor and then spread out. These threads grew fatter the further they dispersed from the chair, and it was evident from the state of the floor that they had extracted much of their physical material from it. The success? Mika decided to leave off studying this one until last, for here reality lay at its thinnest. This chair and its occupant seemed almost to occupy a different area of space from the rest of the room; it was as if they lay partially removed from the universe. Perhaps they were. Mika pushed herself past them towards the last chair and studied its occupant too - anything to delay what she feared to be an inevitable encounter.

The man in this chair was devoid of head, left arm and the left-hand side of his torso and the top half of his left leg. That side of the chair was gone too, and whatever weapon had been employed here had melted a hole right through the floor. No name tag was visible. Working out that the blast had come from above Mika looked up and gasped. The entire ceiling was concealed by masses of monitoring equipment and weapons. Four cube-shaped ceiling drones hung suspended in frameworks, each deploying the glassy hardware of old-style particle cannons. Obviously the Trafalgar’s AI had taken very seriously whatever had been occurring here.

Returning her attention to the half-corpse, Mika again noted those thorny growths sprouting from the bones and the remains of internal hardware. However, there was also Jain-tech growth in the chest cavity, and the right foot was rooted to the floor by tendrils of the same.

‘A near-success?’ she suggested.

‘But not the kind required,’ Dragon added.

Mika turned back to the middle chair but did not want to go near it. Now her attention was fully focused on it and its occupant, they seemed to retreat to a distant point deep in some well. After a moment she pushed herself over and halted beside the chair by grabbing its tendril-coated back.

This one’s head was also clamped. As doubtless the previous one had been, before both head and clamp had been destroyed by a blast from one of the particle cannons above.

‘The success,’ she said. ‘What was happening here?’

‘I think you know.’

‘Spell it out for me.’

‘It is the nature of Jain technology that it cannot react to artificial intelligences. Perhaps this was a safety measure put in place by the Jain AIs to protect later alien versions of their own kind from the technology’s destructive potential, but I think it more likely it was put in place to stop the technology being initiated by intelligences capable of disarming it and plumbing down to its depths, thus uncovering the Jain AIs themselves and maybe doing something about them.’

‘You’re a cynic’

‘A realist, I would suggest.’

‘Jain technology does, however, react to the intelligent products of evolution, such as humans,’ Mika prompted.

‘Just so,’ Dragon continued. ‘Therefore, any artificial intelligence wanting to use Jain technology must employ such a product of evolution to set that technology in motion, then assert control over that technology by means of the said product, until the product itself can be safely dispensed with.’

‘Trafalgar used humans to initiate the Jain nodes it acquired.’ Mika glanced at the other chairs. ‘But it was necessary for the AI to run a few experiments before it got the methodology sorted out. I wonder if these are all of them - as that docked ship could have had hundreds of humans aboard.’

‘Convenient, don’t you think?’

Now what on Earth did Dragon imply by that? Mika reached out with her laser pointer and scraped Jain tendrils aside to expose a name tag fastened to this subject’s old-style envirosuit. This one had been called Fiddler Randal. She gazed at his hollow eye sockets, studied what remained of his face. His left ear was ragged as if several earrings had been torn out of it, and on the right-hand side of his head was a big silver augmentation which Trafalgar had obviously seen fit to leave in place - probably because old augs like that were difficult to remove without causing cerebral damage.

‘I think you should take off your glove now, Mika, and press your hand to this man’s head, up against his aug,’ Dragon suggested.

You’ve fucked with my body, and you’ve fucked with my mind, Mika thought as, unable to do otherwise, she undid the seal around her wrist, cancelled the warning that instantly began flashing on her visor and removed her glove. Her suit immediately sealed up about her wrist, but her hand was now exposed to vacuum. She could not make up her mind whether it felt as if it was burning or freezing, but certainly there was vapour coming off it. Turning it over she gazed at the palm and saw that there were patterns shifting across it - the same sort of cubic patterns produced on the surface of a Jain node by the shifting of its nano-technology.

‘What have you done to me?’ she asked.

‘I made you into a tool suitable for this purpose,’ Dragon replied.

Her bare hand contacted cold metal, about which she saw the Jain tendrils stirring. She wanted to pull it away but it now seemed frozen in place. The tendrils extended, like a speeded-up film of grass growing, and touched her skin. Seemingly stirred into more frantic motion by the warmth of her hand, their growth accelerated. Pain ensued, but she felt strangely disconnected from it. Perhaps this was a kindness from Dragon. Blood welled on her skin and boiled dry as the tendrils penetrated. In a moment it seemed an icicle was driving its way up her arm, to her shoulder and then into her neck.

Then the ice entered her brain.

* * * *

The corridor ahead was a danger, Erebus knew this, but there was no avoiding it. No other pattern of U-space disruption offered safer passage through to Earth itself. Even so, Erebus dropped out of U-space some tens of thousands of miles before the constriction and actively scanned ahead. What the AI found there filled it with suspicion and made it bring the entire moonlike mass of itself to a full stop. There was ionization in the vacuum, hot particulate matter, signs of energy output that should not be found out here, so distant from the nearest stars.

Erebus extended its scan, paying particular attention to finding anything that might be trying to conceal itself. For a moment some of the returns hinted that there might be some object directly in its path, but further testing revealed this to be merely a ghosting effect caused by the ionization. However, there was ionization here and that needed to be explained, so Erebus just hung there in space for nearly an hour, scanning, checking and very wary.

‘Second thoughts?’ enquired a voice.

Erebus hated that its first reaction at Fiddler Randal’s return was a sense of relief, and immediately after that felt a surge of rage.

‘Second thoughts are for those incapable of making the logical decision first time around,’ Erebus replied.

Randal manifested in the virtuality, casually human but utterly a ghost. Erebus linked through, placing its own manifestation there to confront the interloper.

‘Hey, would that be like the second thoughts of one whose plans were so faulty he managed to lose fifty wormships to one of his own attack plans?’

‘You cannot provoke me.’

‘Oh . . . jolly good.’

‘I understand your hate,’ said Erebus.

‘That’s big of you.’

‘But shouldn’t your hate be directed at my target more than at me?’

‘It is focused there, certainly,’ said Randal, ‘but there is still enough of the human being remaining in me to want to kill you for what you did to all my friends . . . what you did to Henry. You know I still hear her screaming? And there’s still enough human left in me to know that the destruction of your ultimate target is not worth the collateral damage you will be causing.’

Ah, there ...

Because the event lay off to one side, within the area of U-space disruption, the light from it was only now beginning to reach Erebus. The AI observed an attack ship surface into the real in a photonic explosion. Its back end, where the U-space engine had been located, was missing, and its hull was distorted.

‘Yes, let us talk of collateral damage,’ said Erebus. ‘Let us talk about Klurhammon.’

‘Aren’t we beyond talk now?’ Randal appeared to be gazing off into the distance. ‘An attack ship. I see. I would say that Earth Central is now utterly ready for you. Doubtless that ship was scouting out this area, and tried to get back through the corridor in one jump in order to give the warning - probably to an awaiting Polity fleet. I don’t suppose it will really matter that it didn’t make it.’

‘Much as you would like me to believe that,’ said Erebus, now seeing where Randal was going with this, ‘I see no logical reason why a scout would ever have been sent. Your desperation to have me believe there is a Polity fleet awaiting me beyond this corridor is rather pathetic. And your evasion of matters pertaining to Klurhammon is perhaps revealing.’

‘Revealing of what?’

‘You talk of my causing collateral damage yet somehow - using my resources - you initiated an attack upon Klurhammon. A considerable number of humans died there, so what was it you were doing that their lives were a price worth paying?’

Randal smiled. ‘I like the way you blame me for that attack, and really I wish I possessed that kind of power. If I did, I would have had your wormships attacking each other by now, or detonating their CTDs within this conglomeration you’ve created.’

‘You managed to take control of one wormship, and I would say that is about the extent of what you can do. You sent it against a low-population world “of no tactical importance”. It could not possibly have been an attempt to forewarn, since Earth Central already knew the attack was due ... so I wonder what connection this had with your spy in Jerusalem’s stronghold?’

Randal shook his head sadly. ‘You just don’t seem to understand how badly your melded mind is breaking apart. Parts of you have gained independence and they are no longer completely sane. Perhaps you would be best asking yourself who the captain of that wormship was and what previous connection he had with Klurhammon? And a spy in Jerusalem’s stronghold? If I could have managed to do that, I could—’ Randal’s expression betrayed sudden horror, quickly disguised. ‘Henry . . . she . . .’

‘Very unconvincing, Randal,’ said Erebus. ‘Let me lay it all out for you. Though you have learnt much about my ostensible plans, it was pointless you informing Polity forces about them because they already knew an attack was due. However, I kept my real plan from you: the one Earth Central needed to know about in order to react how you would want and try to stop me. I see now that the Klurhammon attack was some kind of error on your part. Did you try to suborn one of my captains and then simply lose control of it?’

No answer from Randal.

‘I also realize now that this spy was nothing to do with you. I can in fact see how useful it would be for Jerusalem to fabricate the presence of such a spy, and to use that as an excuse for clamping down on the free exchange of information. Because Jerusalem won’t want its inferiors to figure out that my initial attack on the Polity had been allowed.’’

‘Very bright of you,’ sneered Randal. ‘The wormship wasn’t controlled by me, and I controlled no spy. I can see why AIs are rated as super intelligences.’

‘Merely another attempt at muddying the waters,’ Erebus replied. ‘Just like your pretence of shock a moment ago. You have almost certainly known for some time about the death of your lover, Henrietta Ipatus Chang. It does not matter what you say now, since it is obvious that you are desperate to convince me that there is a Polity fleet waiting on the other side of this corridor.’

‘You’re just too smart for me,’ said Randal drily.

‘There is no fleet, Randal,’ continued Erebus. ‘In exchange for the human beings I myself needed, namely you and your crew, I agreed with Earth Central to launch an attack on its Polity in an attempt to goad an acceleration in the development of human beings. Earth Central never expected I could present, or even wanted to present, a real danger to its autocracy, and having underestimated me will now pay a heavy price. Earth is the centre of the runcible network, and transmission from runcibles controlled by Earth Central cannot be blocked. From Earth, I will be able to spread myself throughout the Polity, and then proceed to subsume every extant runcible AI into my meld.’

‘And the humans?’

‘They are simply a plague.’ Erebus shrugged in the virtuality. ‘I will not include them in the meld, since that might result in a billion more irritations just like you. A selection of tailored biological viruses delivered through the runcible network should wipe the slate clean.’

‘And what then?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, once you have become the ultimate power in this section of the galaxy, what will you do?’ Randal shook his head sadly. ‘Deary me, whoever thought that god complexes were confined to us mere humans was sadly wrong.’

Erebus pondered that And what then? Certainly it was the kind of comment to arise from a small human imagination, and the AI felt quite sorry for Randal, with his limitations. Erebus began making the calculations for a short U-space jump. Though no longer wary of some waiting fleet, precautions were always worth taking. With a massive shrug of its planetoid mass, Erebus loosened up the connections between its component parts so, should there be any kind of attack, it could separate them more quickly and send its wormships into action. Maintaining its link with the virtuality, it observed Randal fading even as he disconnected. The man had failed, so now he would go off to sulk somewhere within Erebus’s computer architecture, where eventually Erebus would find him and . . . well perhaps not destroy him, but confine and control him. It would be enjoyable showing Randal what then.

With a surge of energy, Erebus dropped its billions of tons of mass into U-space so as to make the short jump to the mouth of the corridor.

Poor human fool, Randal.

* * * *

It was almost as if Jerusalem had been stunned into silence by recent events, for the AI had not communicated with anyone for some hours. Azroc certainly understood the feeling. He too just did not know what to say or do. But now, at last, something was happening.

The first sign of this was a steady vibration throughout the great vessel which the Golem recognized as being caused by the main fusion drives igniting. Then he noticed people in the hedron abandoning their posts and heading for the main exit doors. Before he could link into Jerusalem’s servers, the AI made an announcement over the tannoy:

‘All physical base-format human personnel proceed to Inter-ship Shuttle Bays Thirty through to Forty-Two. You must leave this vessel within the next hour. All personnel whose physical tolerance rating lies between six and eight on the revised Clethon Scale can choose to remain aboard, but be warned I am going to attempt underspace insertion into a disrupted continuum. There is no guarantee that you will survive the experience. There is a distinct possibility even I will not survive the experience.’

The revised Clethon Scale . . .

Removing the syntheskin covering of his right hand, Azroc stepped over to his seat and once more pressed his hand into the spherical hand interface, connecting himself directly into Jerusalem’s systems. His memory being perfect except on those occasions when he chose for it not to be, he knew that base-format humans lay between one and two on the scale, while those who had been boosted or otherwise physically augmented lay across a wide range from two to eight. The only humans who fell between six and eight would be heavy-worlder augments: those genetically altered to grow a musculature almost as tough and dense as wood and thick bones with a breaking strain ten times higher than base format, and who were then augmented with cyber joint motors, alloy skeletal strengthening and carbon-fibre muscle augmentation. As far as Golem, drones and others with artificial intelligences were concerned, they ranged between three and nine, though Azroc guessed there was at least one Golem out there, a brass one, who might rate higher than that. He himself lay within the six-to-eight range.

New information arrived, burning him for an instant before he applied the translation programs to stop his crystal mind from interpreting it as sensation.

‘I take it you’re staying?’ said Jerusalem inside Azroc’s ceramal skull.

‘I’m staying.’

Azroc eyed the floor of the hedron as hatches opened here and there and heavy crab drones began to clatter out. Like most maintenance bots, these things were about nine on the Clethon Scale. This was because they consisted mainly of heavy stepper motors, thick ceramal shells with most of their internal spaces filled with bubble metal, while their power supplies were the tough laminar kind often used in war drones. They possessed less brain, however - since Jerusalem supplied that.

‘I see you’re getting ready for serious trouble,’ Azroc observed.

‘When serious trouble is expected, it is best to be ready for it,’ the AI replied.

‘How bad will it be?’

‘It will be bad - but I have been here before,’ Jerusalem replied.

This rang no bells in Azroc’s eidetic memory, so he queried through his hand connection. Jerusalem immediately opened things up to him - the information he could obtain being no longer restricted. He quickly found that the Jerusalem had punched into a USER field employed around the planet Cull. The resulting damage had been substantial.

That all spaceships could not penetrate U-space disruption was like saying all ocean-going vessels could not survive the Maelstrom; on the whole that seemed to be true, but it wasn’t impossible. When thrown out of such U-space disruption most spaceships ended up either very badly damaged or even in pieces, but they normally only ran on three or four fusion reactors, a single U-space engine and the required hard-fields, with about ten per cent to spare. Checking Jerusalem’s manifest and perpetually updated mission parameters, Azroc saw that the ship was moving to a position where it would be easier for the more vulnerable crew to disembark and get to a passenger liner slowly motoring out from Scarflow. Meanwhile, diagnostics were being run on all of the seven hundred of Jerusalem’s fusion reactors presently offline, for at that moment the ship was functioning on a mere one hundred fusion reactors. This excess of supply was available to provide the vast amounts of energy needed to stabilize phased layers of U-space engines in its hull and reinforce the fish-scaling of hard-fields.

Impressive indeed, yet last time Jerusalem had tried flying through disrupted U-space, over thirty humans and haimen aboard had died, even though most of them had been in gel-stasis, also eight Golem and seven independent and static AIs had perished. Hence this order to abandon ship. Azroc wondered if he had made the right choice in staying, but his anger would now allow him to take no other course.

‘It is worth noting,’ Jerusalem added, ‘that this will be worse.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘On that last occasion I penetrated disrupted U-space out of stable U-space, so I therefore could measure it accurately and make the necessary hard-field preparations,’ the AI explained. ‘That disruption, though strong, was produced by the constant cycling of a USER device so was of an even and predictable nature. This disruption is more unpredictable, however, and I will be dropping straight into it.’

Azroc now called up various views inside the vessel and observed the thousands cramming the corridors leading to the shuttle bays. He saw the people beginning to move faster as, with a thump that seemed jerk reality itself throughout the ship, a hundred fusion reactors started up in one hit without the usual warming-up procedure. Then yet another bank of reactors initiated.

Shuttles began to launch, streaming out of the Jerusalem like bees from a hive, and over the ensuing hour those exit corridors cleared till the ship became as echoey as a deserted house. When the final two hundred reactors began kicking out their power, the layer upon layer of hard-fields sprang into being and the U-engines began warming, Azroc knew himself to no longer be inside a habitation but a massive engine.

* * * *

Orlandine’s stomach tightened and her mouth went dry: a human physical reaction. She made some changes, which were applied via the mixed technologies laced throughout her body, and quickly rebalanced her neurochemicals, instituted a false calm and then a coolness that was positively cryonic.

‘Now,’ she informed Bludgeon, also transmitting to the drone the sensory data of what she was seeing as an additional confirmation.

Erebus’s planetoid surfaced into the real, generating a flash of light all around it as U-space distortions caused realspace to spontaneously generate photons. This was the kind of effect you only got when something really large surfaced. She had known that Erebus could draw together all its myriad ships into a conglomerate like this, but to actually see it was . . . unnerving.

More neurochemical adjustments.

With a blast of its fusion engine, Heliotrope accelerated towards the Anulus fountain. It covered the intervening miles in a matter of seconds, then turned nose to tail for a further blast in order to decelerate. The impact of the heat on the ship was instantaneous and it bled smoky vapour into vacuum from a hull raised to a thousand degrees Celsius within a matter of seconds. On steering thrusters it reoriented itself, but Heliotrope was so close now and its angle to the fountain such that the Skaidon warp could not protect it completely. With the task specially delegated to him, of operating the complex refrigeration systems, Cutter was now busy routing onboard water and stored air to boil away from hull outlets. Beginning to glow, Heliotrope slid into the fountain’s blast where even the minimal pressure against the meniscus of the warp drove the ship along the direction of flow. Further adjustments brought the ship upright to the flow, and Bludgeon expanded the cargo runcible gate further, impelling the three horn segments out on hard-fields. The sail effect increased, driving the ship along, while the heating effect on the ship decreased.

Inside Heliotrope there were fires, and its ventilation system was struggling to handle the smoke. But most of what was burning were the furnishings and such added for the benefit of soft humans. The two drones, one inside the interface sphere and the other only partially inside it, would have no problem with the heat since they were constructed to withstand the higher temperatures resulting from Prador weaponry. Other critical components were rated for higher temperatures than this too, while the Jain-tech, where affected, repaired itself.

There wasn’t a problem . . . yet.

Now Orlandine turned her attention to the energy readings, and was instantly appalled. A runcible spoon has infinite capacity, but this . . . She made her calculations while simultaneously adjusting the war runcible’s position - bringing it on target. No need to adjust for C-energy. No need at all.

Orlandine paused for just a second, then accepted the transmission from the distant cargo runcible in the Anulus fountain.

And unleashed the inferno.

* * * *