20

Lung Bird: this creature seems to be an abortive attempt by the life of Spatterjay to get into the skies. They appear to be perpetually on the point of coming apart and possess a sparse covering of long oily feathers, between which is exposed purplish septic-looking flesh. Seen stationary on a branch, a lung bird looks like a half-plucked crow that has been dead for a week or more. But they are a fascinating oddity. On close inspection it can be seen that their beaks are extensions of a light carapace that entirely covers them, as are their feathers, for these birds have no internal skeleton. They are in fact closely related to the glisters, being crustaceans that took to the air. However, close inspection of lung birds is not something to be enjoyed by any human, and most investigation into these creatures is conducted by telefactor or by the planetary Warden, for the creature’s body is heavily laden with putrescine, which comes from their main diet of putrephallus weeds—

Erlin gazed back at the Prador spaceship, hovering just out from the island which the Sable Keech was now rounding. It was itself a metal island, clouds forming around it as sea water boiled off hot cowlings then recondensed in the air.

What’s it waiting for? she wondered, and as if in response to her silent query its fusion engines sputtered and sent the leviathan slowly drifting away. She pursed her lips. At least now, with every second that passed, the chances were reduced of them being caught in the middle of some bombardment from orbit.

‘Look,’ said Sable Keech himself, now standing beside her.

‘I see it,’ she replied.

Lowering his monocular, he caught her shoulder. ‘No there.’ He pointed towards the island shallows where a Hooper ship was making its way out to sea. Its progress was necessarily slow because its rear mast was missing and it was sailing under some temporary rig manipulated by its living sail. Erlin took the monocular Keech passed to her and studied the vessel. At first she did not recognize it, because of its current rig, then realization hit home.

‘The Treader,’ she breathed, then directed her attention to the deck. There seemed a lot of Hoopers aboard, and she wondered what Ambel had got himself into now.

‘Why’s it here?’ Keech asked.

Abruptly Erlin felt guilty, understanding that the Old Captain may have come in pursuit of herself. There seemed no other explanation for him to be way out here, and she wondered if she deserved such concern.

‘Perhaps we should tell . . .’ she began, but there was no need. The Sable Keech was slowing and turning. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Right.’ She turned and pushed back through the door leading into the Tank Rooms. She headed over to a nearby restraint table and rested her bottom against it. Looking mildly puzzled, Keech followed her in. She did not want to deal with what she was feeling at that moment, and did not want him asking her questions. Instead she eyed the new occupants of the restraint tables: six Hoopers—dosed up with Intertox but still fighting their bonds—and three others.

‘Maybe we should just drop him over the side,’ she suggested, eyeing the closest to her of the latter. That was not an acceptable Polity approach, but certainly how Captain Ron would like to deal with the problem.

Strapped naked to his table, Bloc showed no sign of movement. She studied his exposed injuries with belated interest, wondering what the hell had originally killed him. Aesop and Bones also lay immobile on tables nearby.

‘Were I not an Earth Monitor, I would tend to agree,’ said Keech. ‘But I want to take him back with me. Would that be possible?’

‘Aesop and Bones, too?’ she asked.

‘Certainly,’ he replied. ‘Tell me, why did Bloc just collapse like that?’

Erlin glanced at the status lights on Bloc’s cleansing unit, which was positioned on a tray folded out from the restraint table. All showed red, and one of the pipes connecting into the reif’s body was black with fouled balm. She then picked up a palm console, connected via an optic cable into the cleanser, and studied its readout.

‘He seized up—not enough memory space for all the information he was processing.’ She gestured at Aesop and Bones. ‘Rather than use one unit to control one thrall, as do the Prador, his unit is partitioned. The readings I’ve been getting show three main partitions, and I’ve been able to assign two of these to Aesop and Bones. The third one is wide-band, its channel operating twenty-seven thralls in parallel. I thought at first this was to control twenty-seven reifs, but that could not possibly work. Again, checking dates, I found that eleven of the thralls went offline while Bloc was on Mortuary Island, before I arrived. Then a further seven of them went offline at just about the time the hooder lost its head.’

Keech grimaced. ‘The figure twenty-seven tells me all I need to know. The number of the beast, you might say—that’s how many body segments a hooder possesses.’

‘He obviously controlled it, though I’d question the extent of that control with him needing to use grazer pheromone to mark out its victims. Anyway, as those eighteen thralls were destroyed, they scrambled formatting in his memory space. Then the Prador somehow linked through the remaining hooder thralls, thereby controlling him. It also used him as a conduit for a while in order to run some sort of mathematical program in the minds of those other two. But that alone wasn’t what pushed him to the limit. His viral infection was causing more and more diagnostic programs to run in his reification hardware, and as a result more error messages kept coming up, taking up more memory space. Then I think the sight of you pushed him over the edge.’

‘Is that mathematical program actually running now?’

‘It did shut down, but out of interest I recorded some of it. Now I’m running it cyclically with some strong memory he has retained, to keep him locked in a virtual loop.’

‘How’s his viral condition now?’

‘Pretty far gone—at about the stage you were at when you resorted to using your nanochanger.’ She gestured to the others. ‘Aesop over there is nowhere near as bad. In fact there are many in a worse state aboard this ship, and,’ she gestured, ‘already in these tanks.’

‘Bones?’ Keech asked.

‘He’s beyond infection. Take a look.’

Keech moved over to Bones and pulled back the reif’s hood. A bare skull grinned up at him, its lensed eyes shuttered and the tip of a metallic tongue protruding between the teeth. He opened the reif’s jacket for further confirmation, and eyed the bare ribcage exposed.

‘He was called Bones when he was still alive,’ Keech noted.

‘Perhaps it amused Bloc to have him resemble his name. I wouldn’t be surprised. So, what about Bloc? What do you want me to do with him?’

‘Can you shut down his control unit? I’d rather he retained no control over these two.’

‘Doubtful. I’ve had a look and it’s closely interfaced with his memory crystal, so one mistake might wipe him out’—she shrugged—‘which would be no bother to me, but is obviously not what you want. How did you know about it anyway? Forlam said you already knew about the thralls.’

‘Bloc was a student of esoteric or alien technologies even before he died. I found that out when I was researching him, just as I found out that some time back he had purchased spider thralls through an agent on Coram. That he had already used the technology seemed the only proper explanation to account for Aesop and Bones. Altering a Prador thrall to control memcrystal would have been no problem to him.’ Keech walked back and stood looking down at Bloc again. ‘Would our best option be him shutting down his own hardware?’

Erlin stared at Keech for a long moment, running her fingers across the scar tissue on her neck. She frowned, then realization dawned.

‘My recent problems must have scrambled my brain,’ she said. ‘It happened to you: the changer rebuilds the organic brain and then the program causes a complete download to it from the memcrystal before shutting the whole memplant down. Of course, this is presupposing the organic brain does get rebuilt fully.’

Keech shrugged. ‘It is a risk, agreed.’

Erlin nodded, then unplugged the optic cable from Bloc’s cleanser, wrapped it round her palm console, then put the console aside. From a table nearby on which she had piled Bloc’s clothing prior to examining him, she retrieved his nanochanger. On pressing an inset button on top of Bloc’s cleanser, a lid nipped up exposing a recess for the lozenge-shaped changer.

‘Well, here goes.’ Erlin pressed the changer into place, while Keech moved over to stand beside her. The lozenge clamped down and from all around its edges extruded small golden tubes which mated into sockets in the cleanser. The status lights then turned blue. ‘Okay, let’s get him into a tank and all connected up. He’ll have to forgo his intended prior visit to the Little Flint.’ She glanced around at the other tanks in use. ‘He won’t be alone, anyway.’

Half an hour later as Bloc was floating in his tank, autodoc clinging to him and optics plugged in through his suppurating flesh, the door banged open. Glancing past Keech while she wiped her hands, Erlin observed a crowd of Hoopers dragging in other Hoopers bound up squirming in sail cloth.

‘Looks like my workload just increased,’ she muttered.

* * * *

The body of her rapist assuaged her hunger for a little while, but her insides processed his meat like a combined waste compactor and acid bath. Her guts bubbling and squirming, she crashed through the forest sending lung birds honking from their perches in the branches. Then, encountering a stand of putrephallus over which more of those horrible baggy birds squabbled, she turned and made her way down to the shore and into the sea. She could feel the organ he had penetrated expanding in slow pulses within her. Her ichor was thundering in her veins. Sometimes it became difficult to think.

Bloated and heavy she no longer floated, and had to push herself off the bottom again and again. Her hunger returned with confusing speed so, moving deeper, she began feeding upon negative-buoyant masses of young rhinoworm corpses. Then a hint of a taste permeated the water, and with it the slow return of vague memory. Yet it was a difficult memory to hold onto, since eating and that growth inside her now seemed so much more important. Bouncing aimlessly along the seabed she tried to regain her earlier sense of purpose, and to recall how it had felt to swim. It was only happenstance that took her to where that taste in the water grew stronger. And her intellect made another bid for freedom.

Something huge churned the water directly above her, as a shape, vaster than any heirodont, turned. Gazing up at the enormous hull, she tried to control her fear, her overpowering urge to return to feed in the island shallows and . . . something else. Then recognizing the smaller hull being dragged around in the wake of the larger one, she threw all her effort into launching herself from the bottom, using her skirt of blow-water jets to force herself higher. She was thirty metres down from it when the smaller hull began to draw away. With one more jet, she snaked out her longest tentacle and snagged the ship’s rudder. Then, her grip failing, she pulled quickly closer and whipped out another tentacle. Now the sea was roaring past her and she could not understand how the ship could be pulling away with such force. Another tentacle, then another two. Drawing herself in, utterly exhausted, she clamped her skirt around the hull and sucked down to stick there. In a moment she would reach up to see what she could find. In a moment though, after just a little rest. . .

* * * *

Sniper observed that Vrell’s ship was taking the slowest route into orbit, climbing steadily around the planet rather than going straight up. The Warden’s sat-eyes were everywhere above the ascending ship, and above them Vrost maintained position. The ship came lumbering up out of the well, its gravmotors continually going on and off, sometimes dropping it back many kilometres, and the fusion drive partially igniting then extinguishing.

‘Does he think Vrost is going to believe that wounded bird act for even a moment?’ asked Thirteen. The little drone had purposely fused itself into place on Sniper’s armour, and now resembled some baroque marine encrustation.

‘There’s a double bluff here somewhere,’ Sniper replied. It was all an interesting game with ostensibly only one outcome. Once clear of the planet, Vrell’s spaceship would be obliterated. Sniper, staying low over the sea just behind the escort of drones and armoured Prador surrounding the ship, was trying to fathom what was really going on.

‘Then perhaps he thinks he can manage a U-space jump before Vrost gets a chance to smear him across the sky?’ Thirteen suggested.

‘Vrell’s options are limited. More likely he hopes to ram Vrost’s ship—to go down fighting. That’s what an adolescent Prador would do,’ said Sniper.

‘But Vrell is an adult.’

‘Take a look at this,’ said Sniper, transmitting some image files across to Thirteen. The little drone fell silent, its coms shutting down as it applied its system space to study the images. Could Vrell properly be described as an adult, or even a Prador at all? Thirteen could decide that for itself after viewing what Sniper had obtained from the camera in the drone cache of Vrell’s ship. Sniper felt the images indicated otherwise, just as they had for these armoured creatures ahead, for one of them had been driven from its armour in that cache. Sniper tried some more surreptitious scans, but again could not penetrate their defences. What was going to happen here seemed almost foregone, and it seemed his prime task now was to gather intelligence by whatever means.

‘Sniper, what are you doing?’ the Warden abruptly asked.

In reply Sniper sent the images to the AI as well.

After a pause the Warden replied, ‘I see, you wish further confirmation. My own attempt to probe that Prador armour resulted in the destruction of both it and its occupant. What are you hoping to achieve here?’

Sniper now sent a snippet from a lecture he had recorded several centuries ago. ‘During any conflict, combatants tend to drop their guard in matters not directly related to that same conflict.’

‘Yes, Sniper, I have fifty thousand hours of recorded intelligence briefings available to me. Why do you think I now have every one of my sat-eyes deployed in the area?’

‘It’s not just that,’ the old drone finally replied. ‘Something else is going on here. And when I’ve figured out what that fucking Vrell is up to, I might be able to find some further opening.’

‘Very well. Keep me informed.’ The Warden withdrew.

Sniper continued cruising behind the pack, trying every subtle scan he could manage. He began to wonder if, for the benefit of ECS Intelligence, he should bring one of those armoured Prador down once the shooting started, and squirrel it away for later examination. Analysing recorded events, however, he realized that was not viable. As well as the one indirectly caused by the Warden, similar minor fusion explosions had occurred both under the sea and in the air during the earlier attack upon Vrell’s ship—doubtless the result of armoured individuals getting damaged beyond hope of recovery, and therefore self-destructing. Vrost would not be leaving any of his troops behind intact, not even as anything more than radioactive gas.

It was while he was running a narrow-beam microwave scan that Sniper incidentally noted a disturbance in the water below him. He peered down to see something speeding along underwater. At first he suspected a heirodont, but it was travelling too fast. Just as he redirected his microwave scan downwards, the object broke the surface, revealing itself as one of the armoured King’s Guard. It had probably just self-repaired on the ocean bed and was now hastening to rejoin its comrades. Suddenly he realized that his scan was not being blocked, so redirected all his scanning gear downwards just as the Prador emerged from the ocean. Sniper found he was getting everything. The images from the camera in the drone cache had provided much information, but now scanning across the spectrum gave him so very much more. Momentarily shutting off his AG, he dropped down beside the armoured entity and probed deep, mapping the architecture of the armour and the entire external and internal anatomy contained within it. His recording of its brain structure would surely be invaluable to forensic Polity AIs. He then recognized scan returns similar to those obtained from Spatterjay wildlife. This Prador was infected by the virus, which had wrought its evident mutations.

Suddenly the Prador turned towards him, then like a woman realizing her blouse is undone, began buttoning up its screens. Too late. Sniper now knew the shape of the beast. And the physical sample he retained inside himself from the drone cache gave him its genetic blueprint. The secret was out.

It was only as the armoured Prador sped away that Sniper realized something else about that individual, and he began laughing to himself over the ether.

‘What’s so funny?’ asked Thirteen, reopening com.

‘Yes, do tell,’ interjected the Warden, rather sharply.

‘In good time,’ said Sniper. ‘In good time.’ Then he locked the Warden out.

* * * *

As she sat viewing the comscreen on her desk, Olian Tay felt more than pleased with her new incarnation as president of the Bank of Spatterjay. The huge wealth she was accumulating enabled her to pursue her life’s work; her museum. It just kept on growing as new evidence of Hoop’s rule here was unearthed. Items were also turning up on other worlds, for which mostly she was able to outbid the competition, and now, with the recent detente between the Polity and the Third Kingdom, she was able to purchase some things directly from the Prador themselves. Currently her bid for a man-skin coat once worn by Jay Hoop’s wife, Rebecca Frisk—who was floating in her preserving cylinder just outside the door—was the highest. She was also very excited by the possibility of actually travelling to the Kingdom to view at first hand Frisk’s erstwhile home on a Prador world. Everything was going wonderfully well. Till she heard the sawing explosions.

Olian stood up and walked around her desk. At that same moment the two skinless Golem currently serving out their Cybercorp indenture with her, and whom she had named Chrome, both of them, because she could not tell them apart, pushed themselves away from their normal stance at the walls.

‘What was that?’ she wondered.

‘It sounded like the blast of an energy weapon,’ one of the Golem replied succinctly.

‘Then I suggest you both arm yourselves. We’re closed to any withdrawals at present and I would like us to remain that way.’

One of them palmed the lock to a wall cabinet and opened it. He took out a riot gun and tossed it to his companion, then selected a Batian carbine for himself. As the two of them headed out into the foyer, Olian followed just in time to hear a hideous shrieking from beyond the twin doors accessing the museum. The Golem paused and glanced round at her; at her nod they opened the doors and went through. After a moment she stepped after them, then quickly to one side where she groped back to thumb the touch-plate right beside the pillar containing David Grenant. The lights came on.

The far doors into the museum were still closed, but there was obviously something wrong. By the statue of the Skinner loomed what appeared to be some metallic edifice, and the floor all around it was scattered with debris. She looked up and noted a large hole through the ceiling, then down again as that edifice screamed and extended wide metallic wings. Turquoise fire flashed between it and the statue. Olian threw herself to the floor as a boom resounded, followed by the sound of something collapsing.

Blinking to clear her vision, she looked up to see the Skinner statue was now a pile of smoking rubble. The other thing turned—and she now recognized the Golem sail whose arrival on Spatterjay had been the source of much speculation. One of her own Golem zipped back past her, and back into her office, returning with a heavy-duty laser of the kind normally mounted on a tripod.

‘We may not be able to stop him,’ the Golem warned, before darting off back into the museum.

At that point the other skeletal guard stepped out from his hiding place behind a thrall display case and started firing explosive shells at the Golem sail. Hitting one after another, his shots drove the sail gradually backwards but seemed to cause no damage. The intruder’s eyes glowed and then a particle beam swept across the room, chopping off the Golem’s legs before striking the display case. The Golem collapsed. Nothing happened to the display for a moment, but even tough chainglass could not withstand such abuse. It emitted a screeing sound escalating out of human hearing range, then flew apart in a glittering explosion. Olian quickly crawled backwards into the foyer, closing the doors behind her. Flinching at the sound of another case getting wrecked, she returned to her office and took a seat behind her desk.

Punching controls on her console she said, ‘Warden, I seem to have a little problem here.’ When there came no reply, she tried routing through the planetary server, then glared at the holding graphic on her screen. It meant the Warden was not answering calls.

From inside the museum, closer now, came the thrumming snap-crack of a laser firing. Olian closed her eyes and shook her head. This made no sense at all. What would a Golem sail want here? She began to stand up, then checked herself. If two Golem guards could do nothing, then there was nothing she could do either. Sitting down again, she grimaced upon hearing the foyer doors being ripped off their hinges, then ducked down as her own office door exploded inwards. She peered up over her desk just as the Golem sail loomed through, sat upright, flicking smouldering splinters from her jacket, then finally looked up.

‘Yes, what can I do for you?’

The sail just stood there, half extending its wings, then drawing them back. Its mouth opened and closed as if it had lost the power of speech, and that dangerous glow advanced and retreated in its eyes.

‘Olian Tay,’ it finally said.

‘Yes, I am. You do realize we are closed today?’

‘Olian Tay . . . open the safe.’

Oh right, Olian thought, a bank robbery.

* * * *

Erlin had learnt that the Sable Keech’s engines were steam-driven—the steam pumped directly from fusion-powered water purifiers—and, being Polity tech, could run at full speed almost indefinitely. The ship would therefore reach the Little Flint far ahead of schedule. Even so, she wondered if any of the reified passengers would survive to see that place.

Stooping over one tank, she observed its gross contents, studied readouts and sighed. Some of the reified passengers would never again inhabit their own bodies, and others were irretrievably dead. This one, for example, had just been turned into an organic broth by his nanochanger. Even his bones were gone. All that remained were his reification hardware and memcrystal, and even they were under attack.

Erlin keyed a certain sequence into her console, and watched as the opaque fluid began to swirl, then bubble. It was risky to just dump the contents of a tank like this, as though it was unlikely the nanites could survive in the surrounding environment—being specialized and with special requirements—some of them might. The liquid began to steam, the smell of it horribly like cooking stew. When she was finally satisfied, Erlin keyed in another instruction and the tank began to drain. But even now the liquid was still dangerous, which was why it drained into a purification plant in the bilge, where the water was evaporated off and the residue treated with diatomic acid.

Erlin had drained three similar tanks only this morning, and retrieved three memcrystals. The crystals themselves she externally flash-sterilized before scanning them for active nanites. One was corrupted—some mutation of the nanites from the individual’s nanofactory eating into the crystal. Fifty-seven reifs had gone into the tanks, and thus far not one of them had attained resurrection. Fourteen in fact had been flushed into the purifier, and only nine of their memcrystals remained intact. Were she a reif herself, she would not think those good odds at all.

Erlin looked around. Forlam was still here—a Hooper with whom she felt a reluctant kinship—and she recognized Peck and one or two others of Ambel’s crew scattered about the large room, carrying out tasks she had assigned to them. Still no sign of the Captain himself, though.

She walked over to Bloc’s tank and peered inside. There was a lot of detritus floating around in the water, even more lying in a silty layer at the bottom, but she could see fresh new skin down one leg, where one large sludgy scab had fallen away, and a flexing pink hand. She checked the displays and confirmed that Bloc was undergoing download. He was near to resurrection now, and his memcrystal downloading to his organic brain. His control unit, attached to that crystal, was no longer within his mental compass. It seemed doubly ironic to Erlin that the one here most deserving to remain dead looked the most likely to live. Turning away she spotted a certain individual entering the Tank Room, and suddenly felt horribly guilty—a child knowing she has done wrong. He crossed the room and loomed beside her.

‘An interesting and adventurous rescue attempt, I hear,’ she managed, her mouth dry as she turned to him.

‘It had its moments,’ Ambel replied. He studied her closely. ‘Did you need rescuing?’

‘A sail performed that task when the danger was greatest to me.’ She shrugged. ‘Subsequent dangers were not so immediate. Bloc had no wish to harm me, just control me, and I doubt there was much even you could have done about giant waves and Prador spaceships.’ She knew she was avoiding his implicit question.

‘I asked you if you needed rescuing,’ he said again.

She turned back to him. ‘I don’t think so.’ She waved a hand at the chainglass tanks all around them. ‘I am busy now, and will be busy for some time to come. Who can say what will happen then? As you once told me: I need to accumulate years.’

Ambel nodded thoughtfully. ‘Ron tells me there’s a nice bar just forard of here. You’ll join me there later?’

‘I will.’ Erlin returned to her work and he moved away, calling out the occasional question to those of his crew who were scattered about the room. His implicit question had been, ‘Do you want to die?’ She felt she did not, realizing that a giant whelk had taught her that lesson, and that her time here aboard the Sable Keech had only confirmed it. But she knew that such a feeling could be deceptive. Was her unconscious even now planning her next suicide attempt, or had she at last, having passed her quarter millennium, crossed some watershed?

* * * *

Janer smiled to himself as he brought the submersible up against the jetty. Wade, moving slowly across the sky suspended from his grav-harness, must have been experiencing some difficulties for Janer to overtake him. That was good, for Janer could now do what he suspected Wade would not. Ahead, just before pulling in, he had observed Zephyr spiralling down to Olian’s island. Now, staring at the screen, he registered expressions of confusion from Hoopers peering down at the vessel in search of its mooring ropes. He touched the anchor icon on the control screen, and heard the double thumps of four harpoons, trailing anchor wires, fired from the sub to the left and right, angled down into the seabed. Four reel icons then appeared, with an overlay of a top view of the submersible and the nearby jetty. He ignored the icons, touched the sub picture and dragged it across to the jetty. The anchor wires adjusted themselves accordingly, slackening on one side and pulling taut on the other, drawing the vessel up against the adjacent support beams. Janer then abandoned his seat and climbed out.

Now the Hoopers appeared to be less interested in finding mooring ropes than in something else that was happening inland. Others were emerging onto the decks of their ships to peer in the same direction.

As he stepped down onto the planking, Janer queried the nearest of them: ‘What happened?’

The Hooper, a bulky woman who had lost all her hair and compensated for that with a white skull tattoo of writhing snakes, glanced at him. ‘Explosion, back at Olian’s.’

Janer immediately broke into a run.

‘Wait a minute!’ the woman called, but he ignored her and kept going.

Wade would be setting down on the island very soon, but what would the Golem do then? Zephyr had already killed two organic sails, and was now blowing things up. That meant the time for negotiation and metaphysical discussion was over. Janer did not want to bet Spatterjay’s whole economy and biosphere on Wade’s reluctance to act. Entering a street lined with stalls, he drew his gun. All around, Hoopers and a few Polity citizens were stepping outdoors to see what all the commotion was about. He dodged between them and soon caught sight of the entrance to Olian’s museum. Hoopers were gathered there around the closed, and firmly bolted, doors. Janer ran up behind them and pushed through.

‘Can you get in?’ he asked of those Hoopers right next to the doors.

‘I don’t think so,’ said a figure standing beside him—he smelt the pipe tobacco before he recognised Captain Sprage. ‘These doors were made to keep out Hoopers, including even us Captains. Not very trusting, Olian.’

Two others stepped up beside Sprage. One, tall and long-limbed, bore a disconcerting similarity to the Skinner, the other was red as chilli pepper and built like a barrel.

Sprage introduced them: ‘Captains Cormarel and Tranbit... I don’t think you’ve met them, young Janer.’

Janer glanced at them, then around at the crowd. If he fired his weapon here, people could get hurt—and annoyed. And these were not the kind to have annoyed at you. ‘I can’t explain now—it would take too long. Sorry, but I have to get inside.’

He turned and hurried away, hearing the squat Tranbit say, ‘Hasty lad, there.’

Janer pushed back through the crowd and around the corner of the museum. The ground here was covered with modified grass, greenish purple, stretching back a hundred metres towards the dingle. The long stone side-wall of the building was unrelieved by windows, and Janer ran along it to where it abutted Olian’s bank itself. Stepping back five metres, he knocked his gun to its non-standard setting, pointed and fired.

A large section of stonework, all of three metres in circumference, disappeared with a screaming crash, thenreappeared as an explosion of dust and compacted stone shrapnel. Janer hit the ground, hot flakes of stone dropping all over him. Then, with his ears ringing, he shoved himself up again and groped forward through the thick cloud to find the hole created. Visibility inside the museum was as bad, but at least he had some idea of the direction he must go. He stumbled on something, glimpsed a Golem metal skull amid the debris, and moved beyond it to a chainglass cylinder lying on the ground. Inside this he observed Rebecca Frisk writhing slowly and dragging her fingernails down the glass. He shivered and stepped over her towards the wrecked door.

Then suddenly a figure was standing beside him.

‘This is not your concern,’ said Isis Wade.

Janer turned abruptly, bringing his weapon to bear on the Golem. But he was far far too slow—Wade’s hand snapped down, caught his wrist and squeezed. Janer yelled as his wrist bones ground together. As he dropped his gun, Wade kicked it clattering into the settling murk.

‘I’m sorry,’ the Golem murmured, then almost in an eyeblink, was gone.

‘Fuck,’ said Janer, rubbing his wrist. He stumbled off in search of the singun. Without it he could do nothing.

* * * *

‘Open the door or I will remove it,’ demanded the Golem sail.

Olian decided it was pointless to pretend she could not get them inside. The wreckage behind her ably demonstrated the sail’s lack of patience. She took a big iron key from her pocket, twisted it in the lock, and pushed the door open. The space beyond used to be her house’s main living room. Now it was clear of all furnishings, which had been relocated to her new home built to one side of the museum. Stepping in, she glanced up at the security drone suspended from the ceiling, and quickly stepped aside.

‘Intruder, identify yourself! Verbal permission not—’

The sail’s eye’s flashed, and the drone exploded into molten slag that spattered right to the far windows. Olian ducked, her arms over her head, as five more explosions ensued. When she looked up, she saw the five weapons pits in the walls had been turned into smoking cavities.

‘Open the false wall,’ the sail instructed.

Olian considered her rehearsed line: ‘The security system has now put a five-hour lock-down on the safe. I cannot open it’ but she doubted this one would have any truck with that. The creature had just demonstrated a surprising knowledge of what this room contained.

‘House computer, open false wall,’ she murmured reluctantly.

The wall seemingly holding the two windows began to slide sideways. Their view of distant dingle blinked out, revealing them as screens. A large, utterly smooth, oval door came into view behind.

‘Open the safe,’ the Golem sail ordered.

Olian paused, remembering the last time she had been forced to do so—by Rebecca Frisk and her Batian mercenaries. On that occasion, Olian had duped them, managing to slip into the safe and close it again from the inside. Even so, one of the bitch’s mercenaries had still managed to shoot her in the leg. And this Golem sail, with a particle cannon under its mental control, would possess reactions a hundred times faster, so attempting a similar ruse would be futile.

‘House computer, cancel lock-down and open atmosphere safe,’ she said flatly.

With a deep clonk and a clicking hiss, the door—a great bung of Prador exotic metal—swung open to reveal a highly polished spherical chamber. In here Olian had once kept her prized possession: David Grenant. Now it contained stacks of brushed-aluminium boxes.

‘Aaah,’ the sail hissed.

It advanced with its waddling sail gait and ducked its long neck inside the safe. After peering at the boxes for a moment, it struck down like a snake, catching the boxes in its teeth and ripping them open, and slinging them around the interior of the safe. Chainglass vials spilt out, their stoppers coming loose, till sprine spread over the floor like red sand.

What’s this?

Olian backed away as far as she could get—breathing sprine dust could be fatal to her.

Satisfied with the chaos it had made, the sail backed out. Stretching out its wing like a cloak, it coughed up a small polished sphere and spat it into one of its spider-claws. It then swung round on Olian with its back to the safe. Dipping its head towards her, it blinked and said, ‘You can go.’ Then it turned to face the door through which they had entered. Olian got out of there just as fast as she could.

* * * *

Aesop stared up at the pipework on the ceiling, and felt some species of joy. He was free, he could feel it: Bloc no longer controlled him. And he had survived: he had not been eaten by a hooder, nor destroyed in some mad scheme of Bloc’s. Here, now, strapped to a table, he was freer than he had been in years. But what had happened?

Vaguely he recollected the fight in the bridge, then some kind of mad revelation and an overloading backlash from Bloc. He realized that his current vagueness about it all was because he could not connect his previous actions while under Bloc’s control to the self he felt now. A face loomed over him, peering down.

‘You’re not too bad,’ said the woman, Erlin. ‘But, like them all, you’re infected with the Spatterjay virus. What are we to do with you?’

Another face then appeared. It was familiar, but for the moment he could not place it.

‘Under Polity law, no guilt attaches to him for everything he did while under Bloc’s control,’ said the man. ‘But he and Bones probably killed Bloc before that.’

‘Debatable,’ said Erlin, turning to the man, ‘what with Bloc coming back to life. Would the charge be assault?’

‘They almost certainly killed others before Bloc.’

‘Yes, I imagine they did,’ Erlin replied. ‘But you realize that you might not be allowed to take any of them back?’

‘Yes, I understand that. Polity law is not the only law.’

Suddenly Aesop realized who the man was. It was Sable Keech. He felt a surge of some unidentifiable emotion, then wondered why. Such would be the reaction of a cultist, or one of Bloc’s Kladites—but it was not for Aesop. He began thinking hard about his present situation. If Keech took them back, they would be AI-probed and all their crimes revealed. No possible plea would then prevent their complete erasure from existence.

‘I won’t cause any trouble,’ he said to Erlin.

‘And what about your friend?’ she asked, looking to one side.

Aesop glanced over and saw Bones, also strapped down, watching them.

‘He’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘He’ll do what I tell him.’

Erlin gazed down at him and gave a tight little smile he very much did not like. ‘Neither of you will cause any trouble.’ She turned aside and crooked her finger. Aesop raised his head in time to see four Hoopers approaching. He started to wonder if his earlier happiness had been a little premature. Then Erlin reached down and began undoing his restraints. Once she had released his hands, he began to free himself. While the Hoopers looked on, she walked over and began to detach the restraints from Bones, too. Keech did not look at all happy about this.

‘Where’s Bloc?’ Aesop asked.

‘Bloc is in a tank, and it looks likely he’ll come out of it alive,’ Keech replied. ‘I’m confident he’ll be coming back to the Polity with me to answer for his crimes.’ He glanced at Erlin and grimaced. ‘Old Captains permitting.’

‘He could answer for them here.’ Bones now sat up.

‘We leave him,’ Aesop said, studying his companion, though there was nothing to see. A skull could wear no expression.

‘Why?’ asked Bones.

Before anyone else could reply, Erlin interjected, ‘There’s no need for threats or for discussion.’ She turned to one of the Hoopers. ‘Forlam, you have your instructions?’

Forlam nodded.

‘What are you going to do with us?’ Aesop hurriedly took off his last restraints and removed himself from thetable. He then glanced round at the other tables, most of whose occupants seemed to be Hoopers—there were just one or two who might be successful resurrectees. He knew that many had gone into tanks and that there had been many failures.

Erlin eyed Bones as he too stood up, then turned to Aesop. ‘You’ll be confined in Bloc’s stateroom until some decision is made about you. If you attempt to leave that room, Forlam will then follow his Captain’s instructions. What were they, Forlam?’

Forlam smiled. It was not a nice smile. ‘Tear off their arms and legs and chuck them over the side.’

As two of the Hoopers took Aesop and Bones by the arms and led them to the door, Aesop experienced startlingly clear memories of the crimes committed by himself and his partner before their reification. Bloc’s murder had been just one of many—but no one here knew that for certain. Keech might have some intimation, but as yet no proof. He and Bones were culpable of nothing they had done while under Bloc’s control. If the Old Captains decided against them being extradited under Keech’s custody, it was just possible they might survive this. Then he realized all his hopes were based on a simple premise: that, like Polity AIs, the Old Captains would consider them innocent of crimes committed while under Bloc’s control. He glanced aside and tried to read the expressions of those Hoopers close around him—probably men whose companions had been killed by the hooder he himself had led into the encampment on Mortuary Island. Only Forlam showed any sign of emotion, and what Aesop read in his face was not at all reassuring.

* * * *

‘Who are you?’

The woman stumbling towards him he immediately identified as Olian Tay.

‘I have come to stop this,’ said Wade.

She eyed his APW, naturally coming to the wrong conclusion. That was a last resort for him. He and Zephyr could resolve this between them.

‘But what are you stopping?’ she asked, as he moved past her.

Wade winced on experiencing a sudden doubt. He was not sure if he knew.

Out at sea, he had opened his internal hivelink via the runcible back to the planet Hive, but had found no reassurance there, and no advice. He had sensed only deep confusion, fear, anger, with an undertow of fractured and contradictory instructions:

Destroy Zephyr—destroy yourself—flee—load to crystal—lie—live.

Faced with this coming from the mind from which he had earlier been copied, Wade had become increasingly reluctant to face Zephyr, until at one point he found himself just hanging motionless in the sky. He realized that the conclusion to his and Zephyr’s long-running debate might be no resolution for either of them. It was the sight of the submersible moving on ahead that had finally jerked Wade into motion again. That was Janer, almost certainly, and the man would have no reservations about using the weapon he carried. Arriving at Olian’s and descending through the damaged roof, Wade had felt he might be too late, even though he could still hear the mad mutter of Zephyr’s mind. Stopping Janer had been necessary—the man just did not grasp what was at stake, and would strike even though it might not be necessary.

The door into the vault room was open. Wade paused to one side of it and sent, ‘I cannot allow you to do this.’ But no reply returned over the ether. Wade stepped round the door jamb, abruptly squatting and levelling his weapon. Sprine was scattered all around inside the open vault. Zephyr stood there, holding a pressure grenade certainly full of the virus—seemingly waiting for something? Obviously Zephyr wanted to be dissuaded from its present disastrous course. He opened his mind to the Golem sail, totally, and began transmitting all that he knew, all he had recently learned. He replayed all the arguments at high speed, created and then collapsed all the relevant logic structures, laying out his final case. This could bring about their resolution, in this moment of the sail’s crisis. The surge of information would overwhelm its confused mind, and then it could do nothing but agree.

But the information he sent just seemed to drop into a black pit—and Wade recognized despair. He understood then just what his other half awaited: the enemy. Death. He increased the pressure on his weapon’s trigger, but found he could not pull it back all the way, because then the irrevocable decision would have been made. The pause lasted only microseconds—but an age in Golem terms. Then Zephyr’s agonized cry filled the room, and the Golem sail fired its particle cannon. The turquoise blast struck Wade in the chest, hammering him back against the wall.

I’m going to die, he realized, I waited too long.

* * * *

On the planet Hive, up on its promontory, the building resembled a World War II concrete pillbox, with horizontal windows gazing slit-eyed across the lowlands. Beyond the bare and mounded earth surrounding it, which further lent the appearance of a recently installed machine-gun post, lay dying algae gathered in green and yellow drifts amidst the vines, wide-leafed rhubarbs and cycads. Snairls, ranging from the size of a man’s head to creatures as large as a sheep, grazed on this abundance. The air immediately around the building seemed filled with smoke, but closer inspection revealed this to be clouds of hornets, killing each other.

Physically infiltrating the ancient mind’s redoubt had been impossible at first, so the young mind’s only means of access had been either by conventional inter-hive radio or by intercepting and interpreting spillover transmissions between individual hornets. The former means had slowly degraded—the ancient mind’s communications becoming increasingly contradictory and opaque—and the latter was swiftly following the same course. The old mind was clearly fragmenting. But now that very fragmentation offered an opportunity to actually get inside both the redoubt and, by intercepting direct hornet-to-hornet transmissions, the ancient mind itself.

The six hornets did originally belong to the old mind, but the youngster had isolated them, shutting off their radio communication with the rest of the mind, then inside them installed transmitters tuned to his own mental coding, but also linked to their original transmitters. Such a ploy could never work on a guarded mind, for such minds constantly monitored their own function. The six of them flew into the swarm gathered around the redoubt, and through their faceted eyes the young mind observed hornets attacking each other in mid-air, chewing in with mandibles or stinging each other to death. Now entering this swarm, the youngster began to pick up straight-line neuro-radio transmissions between hornets, and found that the mental coding of the old mind was beginning to vary. The young mind identified six variations: five still very close to the original, but one that was wildly astray. He lost four of his own six hornets to attacking insects before confirming that the attackers all used that disparate code. The old mind was now fully divided into two parts: one finite and hostile, the other in the process of breaking into yet another five. The surviving two spies finally entered the redoubt.

Inside it, paper nests grew like bracket fungi from the walls, layer upon layer of them, shelf upon shelf. In here the battle was horribly intense and the floor piled deep with dismembered hornet bodies. The young mind noticed that the hostile hornets were all issuing from one particular conglomeration of nests and, though they were the aggressors, they were losing because the defending nests contained five times their population. But the place contained not just paper nests and drifts of hornet corpses. Fluorescent nano-circuitry adorned the walls, linked to various machines scattered here and in the labyrinth of rooms beyond: furnaces, U-space transmitters, self-contained robotic laboratories and manufactories.

The young mind lost another of its two remaining spies, chopped to pieces by two attackers, that hornet’s vision fading as its severed head fell to the crowded floor. The surviving one, settling on the curved cowling over a manufacturing unit for hornet crystorage boxes, he now fully opened to the surrounding neuro-radio traffic. Insane screaming fed through, along with a viruslike mental program aiming for division, for partition. The youngster swiftly realized this program was no new creation, but in fact one older than the human race. Trying to hold his own sanity together, the young mind attempted to withdraw, tried to shut down the terrifying link. Underneath the screaming he detected a deep sadness—and a decision being made. From one of the slitted windows, a communication laser swivelled on gimbals and began firing. Also, an enclosed lens-shaped autofactory developed hot spots as contained furnaces were deliberately overloaded. Paper nests began to burn. The last com the young mind received from its spy in the bunker was the feeling of mandibles closing between its thorax and its tail, and a wall of flame falling towards it. Meanwhile, from other eyes at a distance, the young mind watched smoke and flame belch from the redoubt.

The old mind had chosen death rather than dissolution.

* * * *

Wiping dust off his gun against his shirt, Janer tried to study its displays even as he ran. He passed Olian Tay, who was leaning against a wall and gazing back towards the vault room, raised a hand to her, then nearly fell flat on his face as Zephyr’s particle-weapon fire lit up ahead of him. No time to pause. He reached the vault room door and stepped through, aiming his gun at Zephyr, looming upright with wings fully spread, turquoise flame blazing from its eyes. He glimpsed Wade over to one side, pressed up against the wall and burning. Then the fire suddenly ceased.

Janer pulled the trigger of his weapon; everything seeming to happen with nightmare slowness.

Too slow.

The Golem creature could move just as fast as Wade, yet it chose not to. Zephyr’s head was turned slightly towards Janer as the singularity generated, encompassing the sail in a collapsing sphere. Then, a light as bright as the sun, a wash of heat, and a blast that flung Janer back out into the corridor. He was slammed against the wall and began to slide down it but, his body already toughened by the Spatterjay virus, he remained conscious.

Why such a blast?

Then he realized: power supplies inside the Golem sail for itself and its weapons. He was lucky the explosion had not taken out the whole building. He lay there for a moment feeling dazed, then reached up tentatively to touch the burns on his face, and to check if there was still any hair on his head. Within the vault room he observed falling ash and gleaming fragments of ceramal scattered across the floor. One distorted claw, which had obviously been outside the sphere, now rested on a pile of charred sprine crystals. He was still staring at that when some blackened object dragged itself slowly around the door jamb.

‘I should not have been fast enough,’ Janer said. ‘It was Golem.’

Wade was missing everything from below his sternum, and his metal bones still glowed at that severance point. His remaining syntheflesh was blackened to a crisp, and fell off in smoking chunks as he moved. He paused, made some clicking and buzzing sounds.

‘You—should—not – havebeen,’ Wade finally agreed, tiny embers glimmering in the air before his mouth, his skeletal jaw making chewing motions.

‘Then why was I faster than a Golem?’

‘Zephyr—wanted – todie.’

‘Seemed reluctant to let you provide that service.’

‘Icould—notkill—me.’

Janer absorbed that and let it go. He realized he was still holding his singun, which he pointed at Wade. ‘Do you want to live?’

‘I—haveto—thereis only—me.’

Janer supposed this was about as much sense as he was likely to get. He holstered his weapon and heaved himself to his feet.