Line War

6

Cormac stepped carefully down onto the boggy ground. The vegetation bore some resemblance to clumps of heather, and at first he had assumed this a natural landscape — that was until they overflew an enormous balloon-tyred harvester. A subsequent gridlink query to the as yet quite unstable computer net re-establishing itself planetwide informed him that these little red heathery flowers produced one particular type of bio-module essential for building nerve tissue in Golem syntheskin and syntheflesh.

‘We won’t be able to get anything from the Jain technology now,’ warned Smith.

Cormac looked up from the sodden ground. ‘I think it highly unlikely we would have been able to get anything at all… other than a Jain infection of our own equipment or even ourselves.’

Still, it was puzzling.

He nodded to the others and they spaced themselves out, then as an afterthought he instructed the shuttle’s turret gun to aim at the thing ahead. He used his other perception to gaze into the earth and noted how in many places the Jain-tech roots were now broken and losing definition, as if dissolving, then returned his gaze to what lay on the surface above them. It was another of those rod-forms, which had grown in the ground and then attempted to heave itself into the light.

He glanced at Arach, who seemed to be having trouble negotiating the land surface. Having to support the weight of his densely packed body, his sharp feet kept sliding into the ground like daggers into butter. After a moment the spider drone found the solution: turning inward the extremities of his limbs so that he was effectively walking on his shins.

‘Arach, hit that thing once — but not too hard.’

The drone opened an abdomen hatch and folded up one of its Gatling-style cannons. One of the eight barrels stabbed a blade of red flame, punching some projectile through the centre of the rod-form. With a sound like a bomb going off in a truckload of glass, the ensuing detonation flung fragments in every direction. Cormac shielded his face from the flying debris, then after a moment was peering through a spreading dust cloud.

‘I said “not too hard”,’ he observed.

‘Was only a point-five shell,’ Arach grumped.

Cormac knew that Arach’s primary munitions were P-shells: bullets packed with a powerful liquid explosive compressed to a hundred atmospheres inside a chainglass case. Ignition of the shells was controlled, on each bullet, by a microdot computer that possessed a molecular key to cause chainglass to unravel. A point-five shell would have been a fraction of an inch long and shouldn’t have caused so much damage to an object of this size. In fact a point-five shell was merely enough to disable a Prador by blowing off limbs or to turn a human being into flying sludge.

The dust quickly settled, pieces falling out of it to frost the surrounding boggy ground with a micalike glitter. The rod-form was now mostly gone, just its lower half remaining like part of an eggshell. The tentacles spreading from it to penetrate the surrounding earth still remained, but even some of these were now missing chunks and exposed hollow interiors. Cormac walked over to the nearest tentacle and peered down at it cautiously.

‘Are you sure about this?’ he said through his gridlink, directing his query towards the attack ship far above.

‘Absolutely,’ King replied.

Cormac pressed his enviroboot down onto the tentacle, and it collapsed like burned cardboard. A kick aimed at the remains of the central rod-thing caused a yard-wide section of its remaining outer skin to fall in and shatter. Now, beyond that, Cormac could see something else.

‘Stay with me, Arach,’ he said and, drawing his thin-gun, walked slowly around this seemingly dead artefact of Jain technology. The others circled it with him, carefully keeping their distance and their weapons trained.

Face down on the ground lay a man in ragged clothing, the fingernails bloodily torn away from one extended hand. Cormac gazed inside him and observed there a colony of dead snakes. He prodded the body with the toe of his boot, nudged harder when there was no response, then abruptly squatted and flipped him over. He saw no exterior evidence of this individual being one of those hijacked by the Jam technology that now seemed to be falling apart all across Klurhammon — until he used his gun barrel to push aside a flap of torn shirt. This exposed a large triangular wound filled with pink brainlike convolutions. He tapped them with the end of his gun barrel and found they were hard. A more substantial jab punched a hole through the surface and stinking pus welled out. Cormac wiped off his gun barrel on nearby vegetation.

‘Utterly dead, it would seem,’ he decided, standing up. ‘Let’s head back.’

What now? A wormship had been sent here and a legate travelling on it had specifically targeted two human beings and utterly erased them. Finding evidence of who exactly those two victims were and why they had been killed was not something he was presently equipped for. It struck him that finding any evidence now would require a meticulous search of both surviving data and physical artefacts, starting beyond the crater where that ranch house had once stood and, if need be, extending ever outwards to cover the entire planet. This search might well be a task ECS could not at present afford to squander resources on, for even now squadrons of wormships were appearing near inner Line worlds and beginning to attack them. Reaching the ramp, Cormac halted and removed the Europan dart from his pocket, and inspected it again.

‘Any results on the dart number?’ he enquired of King.

‘It was one of a batch originally sold on Europa nearly twenty years ago,’ King replied instantly. ‘Those who bought darts from that same batch by electronic means are currently being located and eliminated from the inquiry. However, more than half of the eight thousands darts involved were sold for cash. Jovian AIs are running traces on those who possess guns suitable for firing such darts but, again, ownership or change of ownership of such sporting weapons is not always electronically recorded.’

‘What about a simple trace of any Europans who visited here?’

‘It is not necessarily the case that the two humans killed were themselves Europans. However, checks are being made across the entire Polity. Had the records here not been destroyed, that would not be necessary. It will take some time.’

‘And the traces of matter on the dart itself?’

‘They were alien genome: ground skate.’

‘Fuck,’ said Cormac out loud. ‘That scrap of skin?’

‘Virally corrupted — so nothing there.’

Cormac looked up to see the three human rescuees gazing down at him from the top of the ramp. Carlton, the elder of the two brothers, unfolded his arms and started down, his brother trailing behind him.

‘I understand that all the Jain technology here is dying,’ he began.

‘So it would seem.’

‘Do you require anything more of us?’

Cormac considered that for a long moment, as it seemed evident that the two of them now wanted to be on their way. The image files and other evidence Cherub had provided had been very useful, and he was loath to let such a vital witness go, but really he could think of no reason now to detain them.

He nodded. ‘You’ve both been very helpful.’

Carlton gestured over to his right. ‘Our home lies about ten miles from here. We would like to head back there now, to see what can be salvaged… start putting things back together again.’

‘Your companion?’ Cormac nodded towards the woman. Despite the loss of her arm, she now seemed in rude health after Smith’s ministrations. She just looked lost and miserable.

‘Jeeder will come with us,’ said Carlton. ‘Her lover and many of her friends are all dead.’ He paused contemplatively. ‘There is, I believe, an ECS Rescue ship on its way.’

‘There is.’

‘They will help, I’m sure, but meanwhile we can’t just sit in the ruins and wait.’

‘I understand,’ said Cormac.

The woman now came down the ramp to join the other two. ‘Thanks for saving my life,’ she said, though she did not sound entirely sure about it.

‘Yes, thank you,’ echoed both Carlton and Cherub.

Cormac watched the three set off. He could have taken them to their home but suspected they wanted to make the break now and rediscover their independence. The people of this world, apparently, had always been big on independence.

‘So what are we to do now, boss?’ enquired Arach.

Cormac looked round at his companions: Arach squatting at Smith’s feet like a nightmare pet, with Scar standing to one side, essentially unknowable. He wasn’t sure how to answer, but King whispered a reply in his ear.

‘I’ve been ordered to join ECS forces who are now attacking fifty wormships that have launched an assault on the world of Ramone.’

‘Well, that’s a ship-to-ship fight so we won’t be much help there.’

‘I’ve questioned the orders and they have been confirmed.’

‘Really?’ Cormac was puzzled to be diverted away like this but had to assume that Jerusalem knew what it was doing.

King continued, ‘There has been a wormship landing on Ramone. You are to liaise with the commander of groundside defence of Megapolis Transheim. Apparently your mission will be to capture a legate.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Ours is not to reason why—’

‘Yeah, no need to go on.’

‘It seems,’ Cormac now replied to Smith, ‘that we’re just about to get bloody.’

Once the two spheres had again dropped into U-space, Dragon retreated into itself and refused to communicate. Mika tried accessing the memstore recounting the Atheter story but found it kept knocking her out of the circuit… almost like it resented her intrusion. Instead, she returned her attention to the data being collected by the probes deep inside Dragon. As she had noted before, there was something going on here that went beyond Dragon’s control of its U-space engines.

Her screen now showed the shifting of large amounts of material, massive energy surges and a great deal of computing… of thinking. Perhaps Dragon was busy doing things it felt constrained from doing while it was under direct Polity observation. The alien entity had, after all, broken its Maker programming and was now free to do and be whatever it wanted, but what did it want? She began running analyses to try and make some sense out of all she was seeing. After a few hours she had worked out that Dragon was building numerous additional layers of skin below its scales — layers of super-conducting meshes and all sorts of complex metallic compounds — and that it was also constructing large tubes that ported at the surface all about its equator. That was as far as she got in her quest when abruptly the entity surfaced to the real.

‘Are we at our destination?’ she asked.

There came no reply. However, the journey till now could not have taken them that far, and somehow she felt that Dragon’s journey would be a long one. Exterior view was still available, but all she could see was star-flecked space and the other Dragon sphere rising over a scaled horizon. Turning the scanners outwards rewarded her with more detail. They were in orbit about a dead sun: there were no planets here, just a massive ring of asteroidal debris. The scanners revealed that the two spheres were closing in on an asteroid shaped like a mile-long chicken egg with a large chunk excised from one side. The images were not particularly clear, for this asteroid lay on the other side of her own Dragon sphere and the scanning equipment had been designed to scan the sphere itself rather than anything beyond it.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.

Still nothing.

‘Well, screw you,’ she said. ‘If you won’t tell me, then I’ll just take a look.’

She had hoped this at least would elicit some response, since the idea of taking her intership craft out did not appeal to her, especially since last time it had nearly resulted in her death. However, she was uncharacteristically feeling pissed off and stubborn so, closing up her suit, she headed for the exit and was soon outside.

Halfway over to her craft she suddenly wished she’d stayed safely inside, for, just a few paces out from her, she glimpsed a flicker of movement. Concentrating her gaze she watched a hemisphere of smoke, or dust, expand and disperse. At its central point, on the surface, she saw one large scale with a glowing crater in it measuring about a foot across. A line of similar hemispheres then bloomed in the distance. Meteor activity. Mika knew that even something the size of a sand grain, travelling at the kind of speeds materials could attain in vacuum, might easily cut her in half. She had two choices now, get quickly into the intership craft, which, like all Polity craft, would have some kind of anti-meteor laser, or return to the unit, which would have even better defences. She chose the craft.

Even as she launched from Dragon’s surface, a screen display warned her, ‘Travel at present is inadvisable due to increased meteor activity.’ A few tens of yards up from the surface something puffed to dust over to one side of her craft, then she glimpsed the green bar of a laser picked out by that same dust. She tried to ignore it and concentrate on flying the craft to a point where she could gain a better view. As a precaution she avoided the area directly opposite the other sphere, since there lay the gravity phenomenon that kept the two spheres linked together like barbells. Suddenly it felt as if the craft’s steering had failed for now it seemed to be wobbling its way through vacuum. She closed her eyes for a moment and then, when she reopened them, focused only on the instruments before her. No variation in her vector. Now looking down, she noticed the Dragonscape was heaving like the torso of a woman in labour.

Soon the asteroid rose into view, but it took a moment for her to realize why it seemed so familiar. Then she saw it looked a little like Deimos — though of course this object was bare of the mining facilities that covered that moon of Mars. She swung her craft high and, seeing the gap between Dragon and the asteroid was still closing, positioned herself for a better view of the contact point. Some frustrating work with the controls finally enabled her to start autopilot, the craft maintaining its position relative to her own Dragon sphere’s centre point. When she eventually looked up, what seemed like a shadow was now growing at the contact point, until she eventually discerned an asterisk-shaped break in Dragon’s surface. As she watched, the legs of this thing extended and extended to cover nearly one full hemisphere of Dragon, then great blades of thick skin began to fold out like the sepals of a flower. From this cavity rose a massive trunk, hundreds of yards wide, tangled all over with pseudopods. Mika had seen this thing before when the two Dragon spheres had connected to share their knowledge — before trying to kill each other. The sight frightened and awed her.

Nearly reaching the asteroid, the trunk abruptly divided at its end into six enormous branches. The sight reminded her of a Terran tubeworm spreading its fronds to feed, and she thought maybe that wasn’t such a bad analogy. These six branches eventually closed on the asteroid and began drawing it in. Mika returned her attention to Dragon itself, and saw that the cavity was now about a mile wide. She could just see inside, where massive ribs rimmed a huge chamber like the ridging inside a reptile’s gullet. There were snakish things moving there, and great veined organs pulsing and shivering. Gleams of blue and red were scattered throughout it, like the lights inside the huge bay of some industrial ship. Yet this cavity still did not seem big enough to swallow the entire rock but, even as she watched, it shuddered and expanded further, then the surface of Dragon rippled as the whole entity expanded too.

Dragon drew the asteroid right inside itself, where bands of red flesh swiftly drew over it and things like living drill rigs, uncoiling masses of umbilici as they descended, dropped to the rock’s surface. The sepals closed across, but they did not meet each other. Even while Mika watched, pseudopods began sprouting around the edges of the star-shaped cavity and extended themselves across the intervening gap, joining together like webs cast by a spider, gradually stitching it all together. Then her craft accelerated. Dragon was moving again — that centre point had shifted.

Over the next hour she watched as skin was stretched and drawn together, leaving a star-shaped hole some hundreds of yards across. After a further hour, debris began geysering out from this aperture: boulders, flakes of rock at least a yard wide, amid lumps of conglomerate and dust. Dragon excrement. A little while after witnessing this, she noticed another asteroid drawing near, then gradually her view of that was occluded by the other sphere. A rock each then.

‘So you stopped off for lunch then,’ she commented, as a giggle ejected itself from somewhere below her sternum.

The hauler Clarence Bishop was a brick-shaped craft a mile long, most of its hull taken up by a series of massive square cargo doors. To the rear, separated from the bulk of the ship by bubble-metal pylons, was a massive ion drive. Manoeuvring thrusters jutted from the main body wherever they would not interfere with the smooth opening of the cargo doors. In a small rear hold sat a U-space engine added fifty years before, when the ship’s captain, Hieronymus Janger, had accrued enough wealth to move from insystem to interstellar hauling. In such a large ship one would have expected a large complement of crew, but most of the vessel was taken up by numerous holds packed full of cargo. Janger himself and a bolshy AI called Clarence were the only occupants.

‘I think we’ve been here before,’ remarked Janger.

The ship AI’s remote was a Golem chassis clad in syntheskin up to the neck, above which a gleaming skull was exposed but with the rear of its cranium missing, and from there optics sprouted, trailing across the floor to plug into a nearby console. The Golem placed the queen back down on the board and tentatively moved a finger across to tap it on a castle.

‘Approximately thirty-two years, seven months, two days, fourteen hours, twenty-two minutes ago, as I recollect.’

‘I thought you just said “approximately”.’

‘Yes, I didn’t count the seconds.’

‘Smart arse.’

The Golem withdrew its fingers from the chess piece and scratched its metal chin. ‘If you want me to play to my fullest capacity, I’ll do so. However, the last time I did that, you discharged the chess set through the airlock and got the yahtzee out again.’

Janger sighed. It had always been a source of annoyance to him that Clarence needed to handicap itself so as not to thrash him at every game. Also, though he vaguely recollected a game quite similar to this, he wasn’t sure who had won on that occasion. Of course Clarence, if it allowed itself, would remember every detail. He glanced across at the storage cabinets lining the living area and wondered if now might be a good time to get the yahtzee out, or even the playing cards, but then Clarence, working through this Golem, possessed the perfect poker face. Just at that moment the big hauler seemed to lurch underneath him, and he experienced that definite feeling of transition that told him the ship had just come out of U-space, and in this case none too gently.

‘That damned U-engine shouldn’t need servicing for another twenty years,’ he grumbled.

‘Nothing wrong with the engine,’ Clarence replied.

The ship shuddered massively, enough to skitter some of the chess pieces across the board and topple a king onto the floor.

‘Give me visual,’ said Janger, stooping to recover the chess piece. He felt a sudden crawling sensation up his spine. As he understood it, there was something occurring near the Line, but that was far from here. Surely he was well out of it?

‘Pirates?’ he suggested, only half joking.

‘I am somewhat bewildered,’ Clarence confessed.

A virtual screen cut down from the ceiling, right through the living accommodation, so it now seemed as if half the entire ship had been sheered off at that point and he was now gazing straight out into vacuum.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said.

There was something sitting out there, something massive: a pentagonal frame structure. The space the pentagon enclosed was one the Clarence Bishop could easily pass through, for the structure was some six miles across.

‘It’s a war runcible,’ Clarence observed.

‘It’s a fucking what?’

‘They started building such devices towards the end of the war for transporting things not equipped with their own U-space drive — fleets of ships, war drones and weapons. That would have saved on the manufacture of such drives. There was even talk of using the runcibles as accelerator weapons too.’

‘Uh?’

‘Perhaps you recollect hearing about the Trajeen incident.’

‘Chucking moons about?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Okay, so what is it doing here now, and how come it knocked us out of U-space?’

‘Anyone in possession of such a device would have no problem causing sufficient underspace interference to knock a ship into the real. Why it is here and why it has targeted us, I can only speculate.’

‘Speculate then.’

‘Pirates,’ the ship AI replied.

‘We’ve got lasers,’ said Janger.

‘They’ve got particle cannons, rail-guns, multispectrum EM weapons. Frankly, they could turn this ship into a wisp of vapour in less than a second.’

‘So resistance is futile.’

‘In my estimation, yes.’

The view now swung round and Janger observed some sort of spaceship docked alongside his own vessel. It looked fairly modern: a sleek craft with a pincer grab extending from its nose. Even as he watched, vapour puffed out from below it as one of the Clarence Bishop’s massive cargo doors began opening.

‘I take it you’re recording all this, and transmitting it?’ Janger enquired.

‘I’m recording it, but the U-space disturbances are preventing me from sending out a distress call.’

‘Right… give me an internal view of that hold.’

A rectangular frame drew itself into existence in the virtual screen, blanked for a moment, then as the camera adjusted light amplification, an image slowly resolved of a huge darkened hold. The space was packed with crates and large oddly shaped objects covered in crash-foam, all of them suspended in a quadrate scaffold. Janger detected movement and the camera swung to track it, then the view flickered and changed as another camera picked up that same movement from a different point of view.

‘Um,’ said Janger, not quite sure exactly what to make of what he was seeing.

‘Mantis religiosa,’ said Clarence.

‘Uh?’

‘The praying mantis — though this one appears to be fashioned of metal and is about eight feet long. I would suggest that what we are seeing here is an independent drone and, considering where it came from, that means a war drone that once fought the Prador.’

‘What’s it doing, anyway?’ Janger wondered.

‘Stealing our cargo?’ Clarence suggested.

The mantis drone appeared to be all sharp edges, which Janger could now see were perfect for cutting through the webbing security straps. Within a moment it had released a crate from the supporting scaffold and sent it drifting along towards the hold door. The camera followed the crate’s progress to where a horrifying-looking beetle of some kind diverted its course slightly, to another point where it was then fielded by what looked like a ten-foot-long aluminium scorpion. Panning back, Janger now saw a whole line of crates had already been set on this course.

But what could he do? He was outgunned by the war runcible and outgunned by those things stealing his cargo. He wondered briefly what his insurance position on this loss would be.

‘What are they stealing?’ he asked.

‘The components of a cargo runcible.’

‘What the hell do they need a cargo runcible for, when they’ve got that massive thing out there?’

‘A runcible is both the entrance and exit of a tunnel, but employing it to end up in exactly the same place might not be very useful. Beyond that I have no idea,’ replied Clarence. ‘By the way, the airlock into this living accommodation is now being used.’

‘And you didn’t stop that?’

‘I am impotent now. Something has seized control of me. That we can even look into the hold is either because we have been allowed to, or because the cameras were overlooked as being of little importance.’

Janger pushed his chair back, got up and rushed forward, straight through the virtual screen. On the other side of it he skidded to a halt by a row of lockers and yanked one open. From inside he pulled out a pulse-rifle, then an energy canister which he inserted into the gun’s stock. The rifle whined up to charge, yet showed a zero on its digital display. Janger swore and pulled out a second container, which clipped in place underneath the barrel. The display immediately shot up to 150.

But what now?

If it was a drone now coming through the airlock, he realized that a pulse-rifle would be about as effective as throwing gravel at an elephant — just enough, perhaps, to piss it off.

‘Shut off the screen,’ he said, backing towards the table. He then glanced at Clarence. ‘Can you help?’

‘I am at present paralysed from the neck down,’ the ship’s avatar replied.

‘Great.’

Janger returned his attention to the corridor leading to the airlock just as he heard the inner door closing. A shadow loomed up of a figure swiftly moving down the same corridor. Janger drew a bead on the doorway and waited for whatever nightmare was to appear.

‘Captain Hieronymus Janger,’ said a mildly authoritative female voice.

Janger wasn’t fooled by that, since a drone could put on any voice it so chose. However, it was a real woman who stepped through the doorway. She was wiry and tough-looking, her head bald and her skin the purplish black of those possessing a degree of physical resistance to hard ultraviolet. Her eyes were icy blue, and her face attractive in a rather inimical way. She wore a spacesuit, but only as she stepped fully into view and opened the petals of a sensory array behind her head did he see she also wore a carapace and an assister frame. She was haiman.

‘That’s me,’ he replied. ‘And you are a thief.’

She nodded and seemed to look somewhat ashamed. ‘I am sorry to say that I am, but to achieve my aims it has become a necessity. I can assure you, however, that the ultimate good I achieve will negate the crime.’

‘Yeah, right,’ said Janger. ‘The protest of moral criminals all across the Polity.’

‘It’s the truth,’ said the woman, but she looked to one side and added, ‘Though there are crimes for which there is no restitution.’

‘What about me?’ Janger asked. ‘What about my loss?’

She looked up. ‘You will make no loss at all. Your insurance is under AI guarantee and there is a clause in there about piracy — perhaps included because of its utter unlikelihood.’

Clarence turned his Golem head. ‘What about kidnapping?’

She gazed at the Golem. ‘What about it?’

‘The runcible you are stealing includes an as yet somnolent AI.’

‘My drones will leave the AI behind.’

Ah, thought Janger. My drones.

‘So you yourself would be in charge of this act of piracy?’ She just stared at him. ‘Then you made a mistake in coming up here.’ He took a step forward. ‘You are now my prisoner.’

‘You mean because you are pointing that thing at me.’ She nodded to the weapon he held.

‘Yeah, that about covers it.’

‘Not really.’

A flicker of movement caught his eye and he looked down to observe the digital display of the rifle rapidly winding down to zero. Swinging the weapon to one side he pulled the trigger. Nothing. How the hell did she do that?

‘Now,’ she continued, ‘I could have stolen that cargo runcible without even coming here to talk to you.’ She walked forward, using one of her auxiliary assister-frame arms to remove a box from her belt pouch. Janger meanwhile stepped back, still holding the weapon. Perhaps he could overpower her, but, being haiman, she would inevitably have nervous-system augmentations and could probably run fight programs in an instant. She could probably flatten him. Was it worth trying? Well, probably not, if what she had said about the insurance was true.

Using her human hands the woman opened the box after placing it on the table. She took out a translucent red orb and four metallic stones smoothly rounded as if taken from a beach. ‘This here is a natural star ruby, from Venus, and the others are ferroaxinite stones with weak monopole characteristics.’ She glanced across at him. ‘But for one other item that is no longer intact, they were once the most valuable objects in my collection. I believe I don’t have to tell you how much they are worth.’

She didn’t. The ruby alone, if it really was natural, would pay for a refit of his living accommodation — something long overdue — and even the AIs themselves had yet to figure out how to manufacture monopole axinite. Such stones were one of the few natural objects that could not be reproduced and, as such, much sought after by rich collectors who wanted something virtually unique.

‘Still not enough to pay for a cargo runcible,’ Janger insisted.

‘Your insurance will pay for that,’ she replied. ‘This is merely to compensate for the trouble I’ve put you to — for which I also apologize.’

Abruptly she turned away and headed back towards the airlock.

‘Does this salve your conscience?’ was Janger’s parting shot.

She paused for a moment. ‘There is no salve for my conscience,’ she told him, then stepped out of sight.

Vulture longed for a return to the omniscience of being a ship AI, but the best he could attain was a narrow link to the ‘Prador control system’, from which he began incorporating fragments of astrogation and library data. And gazing through the eyes of the Harpy, Vulture watched the fifty wormships orbiting almost nose to tail — if such could be an apt description of objects that looked like balls of iridescent millipedes as they writhed in orbit around a small hot planetoid close to the nearby sun. This was in fact an inhabited system, with the main human population crammed on to two small worlds both orbiting on the inner edge of what might be described as the green belt. Both of them were also fairly hot, though not as hot as the planetoid, and followed orbital paths mere hundreds of thousands of miles apart, but presently they were on the far side of the sun. Orbital mirrors reflected a lot of heat away from their surfaces to numerous power stations, which converted that sunlight into other forms of electromagnetic radiation and sent it out through a collection of space-based runcibles. This place was one of the power stations of the Polity runcible network.

The inhabitants of the two worlds worked in high-tech industries or research, and were involved in the mapping and control of the solar energy being injected into the runcible network. However, it was still not the plum target it might have appeared, for really, if these worlds went down, it would take but a moment for some other energy source to take up the slack. Knocking out the Caldera worlds would do no more, tactically, than blowing a few fuses in a country’s power grid. Besides, this was a dangerous place to assault, for, like the solar system the devastated Polity fleet had retreated to, a lot of the energy being thrown about here could be employed aggressively. There were obviously many more vulnerable and potentially damaging targets that Erebus could attack. Coming here made no sense at all.

‘Okay, we’re here, and I see that your fifty wormships are nearby,’ said Vulture. ‘So what’s the plan — you going to board them one at a time and kill all their captains?’

Vulture expected no reply as he turned to look at the brass Golem. Mr Crane began picking up his toys from the console, one at a time, and dropping them into his pocket. Once he had finished that, he quickly input a course change and initiated it. The two mated ships abruptly slid sideways.

‘Where the fuck are we going?’ Vulture enquired of his Prador friend.

There came no reply, but somehow Vulture located coordinates. There had been some decidedly odd code coming from the ship AI lately, and Vulture reckoned that Jain-tech, spreading through this ship from the legate’s vessel, had finally reached its frozen brain. Of course, they were now heading straight for the wormships. The main screen greyed a little, and bands began passing across its surface, meaning chameleonware was engaged, for what good it would do them.

‘You said to me that “He must pay,” and I thought he did when you tore him apart, but you weren’t really talking about that legate, were you?’

Crane stared at Vulture for a moment, then tilted his head as if listening to something only he could hear. For the first time Vulture felt really annoyed with the Golem’s reticence. He shrugged, stretched out one wing and pecked at its oily feathers, then stamped up and down his bit of console for a moment.

‘Look, I know how you don’t like talking, but I really need some sort of explanation.’

Crane seemed to ponder this request for a moment, then abruptly he turned his chair and reached out with both hands. The action was so smooth and quick that Vulture had no time to react. The metal hands closed round his body, clamping his wings to his sides.

‘Hey! I was only asking!’

Crane stood up and carried Vulture from the cockpit along a short tunnel leading to a refectory area where the remains of the previous occupants’ last meal mouldered on a table, then down a short zero-G drop-tube and through another tunnel in which the Golem was forced to stoop. A circular hatch sprang open to the left, and Crane ducked through it into a cramped chamber beyond, most of which was occupied by a large steel sphere from which extended masses of optic cables. Woven amid these were the vinelike growths of Jain technology — some of them still moving. Crane set Vulture down on a power conduit, where the bird edged sideways away from a tangle of grey growths gathered like fungus around a junction box.

‘How can you ever trust this stuff?’ he asked.

‘Because I control it,’ Crane replied.

Vulture was so shocked at actually receiving a verbal reply, he completely lost track of what he was going to say next. Crane undogged numerous catches on the sphere, then pulled out a thick round hatch. Watching this operation, Vulture began to realize that this sphere was in fact a Prador war drone, wired into the ship itself. He peered into its interior and saw masses of optics, discrete components like metallic organs, and also Jain-tech. The last was most heavily clumped around the remains of some liver-shaped metal canister. A smell like something rotting on a seashore rose from there.

‘No wonder it’s not talking much now,’ Vulture quipped, for this then was all that remained of the Prador first-child’s frozen brain. So what did Crane want with… Vulture abruptly understood just what the Golem might want and tried to launch himself for the door. Crane spun and caught him in mid-air, turned and inserted him into the sphere, down amid the first-child’s remains.

‘Hey! You can’t do this!’

Tendrils immediately sprouted from the surrounding components, as Vulture struggled desperately for freedom. Crane ran a finger over the vertebrae at the base of Vulture’s long neck, then pressed, hard. Something crunched and Vulture’s struggles died, instantly.

‘You broke my fucking back,’ the bird cried.

Crane removed his hands and stood back, while the tendrils groped between feathers and, with the sound of skewers going into kebab meat, penetrated Vulture’s body.

‘Dragon intended only a temporary arrangement,’ explained the Golem.

Vulture shrieked as the hatch fell back into place, locking him into total darkness. Tendrils rustled around him and, though numb below the break in his spine, Vulture could still feel his body being jerked about. A feeling that was both cold and burning rose up through his neck and into his small avian brain. Sound then stopped. An even blacker night descended. All sensation utterly disappeared.

Then came the light.

Vulture suddenly found himself gazing out with full-spectrum vision across the immensity of space, felt vacuum like the wind underneath his wings, and sensed U-space just below him. His comprehension of his world, and the tools he could use to measure and describe it, expanded in an eye-blink. He felt himself, and the ship about him, grow as sensitive as fingertips. The legate vessel was also part of him, but one he could separate away at need. He accessed the ship’s library — a hundred-terabyte crystal store of technical data, multimedia fiction, historical non-fiction and a massive encyclopedia — and incorporated it. He found the Prador first-child — a semi-rigid mind capable of processing the esoteric maths of U-space, but way below the latest revision of the Turing threshold — and selectively incorporated data from it, ignoring the detritus of organic being, the suppressed hate and feelings of ancient betrayal. Only once that data was incorporated did Vulture realize that the first-child had resided in the Jain structure spread throughout the conjoined vessels. Programming links to cabin consoles provided him with access to ships’ logs as well as private journals and sites. He incorporated them for their data and just out of interest, and only then discovered that his compass was now so much larger than it had been when he was an AI aboard a vessel named Vulture.

Then, after the few seconds this all took, the new ship AI rested.

In retrospect, Vulture realized how in his avian form he had been unaware of his limitations. Dragon had deliberately whittled him down to fit into a bird brain, and then made him comfortable in that abode. Now, returned to his previous AI state, and also much expanded, he knew he would never want to go back, and so felt a grudging gratitude for what Mr Crane had done, though some resentment at the Golem’s rather direct approach. Inside his new ship body he sought out the Golem, and found Crane had returned to the console. Using internal scanners Vulture probed and analysed whatever he could of the Golem, which wasn’t a lot. However, it was immediately evident that the inside of Mr Crane looked nothing like it should. There had been major structural alterations and various other alterations to the Golem’s motors and power supplies. Vulture put that down to what Skellor had done to the Golem with Jain technology during his rebuilding process. Skellor had subsequently removed that technology while turning Crane into an envoy to Dragon. The rest of the stuff inside him, currently filling every gap with laminated layers sliding together in ways that did not impede movement and defied analysis, Vulture reckoned derived from Dragon itself. Mr Crane, it appeared, was now solid alien nano-technology from head to foot.

‘Well, thanks for that,’ said Vulture, speaking from the console.

Crane nodded an acknowledgement.

‘You still didn’t answer my original query of why are we here,’ Vulture added.

A wide-band link abruptly established, and through the scanners Vulture traced its source to somewhere inside the Golem itself. Information became available and, though Mr Crane did not care to use human speech, he certainly knew how to talk at this level. Vulture realized that the Golem was rather like those Polity AIs — usually assigned to some esoteric task — who did not employ human words, in fact needed to create sub-minds for that task, since they found it needlessly tedious and vexing. Crane was something like that. Something like that…

‘I see,’ Vulture said. ‘Why you?’

Crane shrugged.

‘Reparation?’ Vulture suggested. Then, feeling Crane’s rage through the link, he added, ‘And revenge?’

Another shrug.

‘Yeah, why not, if you honestly think you’re capable,’ Vulture conceded.

Crane opened a little — allowed Vulture access down that wideband link to glimpse the being that lay at his core. With confident precision the AI reached into a universe of mind to try and assess its potential, its power — but soon retreated in utter confusion and panic.

‘Yeah, I guess you are capable,’ said Vulture, before asserting control of the engines in his body, but not changing his vector. They were going where they needed to go.