Polity Agent

2

Thorn, apparently standing a mile out in vacuum but actually ensconced in VR aboard the spaceship and seeing through a remote camera, studied carefully the Not Entirely Jack. The vessel was one of the new Centurion-class attack ships. It bore some resemblance to the Jack Ketch in that its main body bore the shape of a cuttlefish bone, however here the weapons’ nacelles rode either side of the ship’s nose and another nacelle protruded below its stern. The ship’s skin constantly bloomed with colour like some ancient screensaver, but with those colours seen on polished steel as it is being heated. With omniscient vision he then surveyed surrounding space. Numerous other ships orbited the nearby planet, and many had already landed; this was no more than to be expected considering the possibility of Jain technology being scattered over its surface. But the strangest sight in this system was the organic moonlet at bay. Thorn focused in on this—increasing the magnification of his vision many hundred times beyond what would be possible with his naked eyes.

The dragon sphere hung stationary in the ether, as if backed up against the green-blue orb of the ice-giant planet. Two dangerous-looking ships, similar to this one, patrolled around it like attack dogs. One large old dreadnought, of a similar design and provenance to the Occam Razor, hovered with all its weapons trained on the alien entity, and not even that was enough.

Thorn did not know precisely what the metallic object stretching around a third of Dragon’s equator could actually do, but its purpose was evident. The entity was under arrest, imprisoned in some way—perhaps the only way possible for restraining a sphere of living tissue nearly a mile in diameter and capable of travelling through space like any Polity ship. The metallic band was its manacle. Dragon, who Skellor came here to find, had also been caught in the trap sprung on that criminal.

‘It seems a shame to leave,’ said Thorn. ‘Things are still pretty interesting around here.’ He reached up, turned off the helmet projection with a tap of his finger, and lifted the VR helmet from his head—it had not been necessary to go to full immersion for this last look around. Unstrapping himself, he stepped down from the frame, then turned to watch as it folded itself together and disappeared discreetly into the wall of the chamber.

‘I take it we can leave?’ he added.

Jack, the ship AI, replied, ‘There is a thousand-mile-wide passage through the USER blockade. The twelve gamma class dreadnoughts guarding it have been instructed to let us through.’

‘That’s good.’

The blockade of USERs—underspace interference emitters that prevented ships attaining FTL travel—positioned a hundred light years away from this point in every direction, prevented any other ships getting close. It illustrated more than any other precaution how seriously Earth Central considered the threat of Jain technology. But as he left the VR chamber, Thorn spied four figures loping along the corridor away from him, and wondered about Earth Central’s other agendas.

The four figures were humanoid but reptilian: their skins regulated with green or yellow scales and their gait reverse-kneed, like birds. One of the four glanced over its shoulder with a toadish visage, bared many sharp teeth at him then loped on. Dracomen—120 of them aboard this ship, all kitted out in military combat suits and armed with the best in portable weapons the Polity could offer.

‘Is it just a case of putting all the bad eggs in one basket?’ he asked, heading in the same direction as the four.

‘That is certainly a possibility. Perhaps you’d like to elaborate?’ asked Aphran, abruptly folding out of the air beside him.

He eyed her. ‘Well, we have Jack, a ship AI, now partially melded with the recording of someone who was an enemy of the Polity. That’s one bad egg to start with.’

‘I am no longer an enemy of the Polity for I no longer agree with the Separatist cause,’ she replied.

‘Why the conversion?’

‘I have seen and understood too much.’

‘And I am supposed to believe that?’

‘What anyone believes is irrelevant—the facts of my existence, or otherwise, won’t change,’ she said.

‘Those being?’

‘I’m a second generation memcording of a murderess, and the only reason I haven’t been erased is because I’ve been useful, and because my consciousness has become closely entangled with Jack’s. I am incapable of doing anything harmful against the Polity because of that last factor, and the moment those two conditions change I don’t think I’ll survive long.’

‘Okay, I’ll accept that for now. Another bad egg is myself, who has been in contact with Jain technology—just like yourselves. And then there’s the dracomen: the offspring you might say of the sowing of the dragon’s teeth. They’re a product of Dragon and, though they’ve agreed to join the Polity, we don’t fully understand their biology let alone their motivations.’

‘Yes, those are the eggs,’ said Aphran, and abruptly disappeared.

Thorn considered: Aphran had been useful, she also saved Jack when that AI’s ship body—the Jack Ketch—was destroyed. Quite probably she did no longer espouse the Separatist cause. However, Polity justice was harsh and unforgiving. As a Separatist she had taken lives, and nothing she had done since could change that.

Reaching the end of the corridor, Thorn palmed the lock beside the armoured door, which proceeded to roll back into the wall. Then he entered a part of the ship that smelt like a terrarium full of snakes. A ramp led him down into a wider corridor, with doors along either side. Flute grass matting covered the floor—something the dracomen must have brought from what had been their homeworld of only a few years, since a Dragon sphere sacrificed its own physical substance there in order to create their kind. Treading over this, Thorn peered through one open door into a small cabin containing four bunks—and two dracomen. One of them sat on the floor, its eyes closed while it assembled the component parts of a rail-gun scattered all around it. The other reclined on a bunk, its feet braced against the bunk above—something it could easily do with the bird-like configuration of its legs. It was studying a palm console, its proton weapon propped beside it. Thorn shook his head and moved on.

About fifty dracomen occupied the large chamber at the far end of the corridor. Some of them practised hand-to-hand combat moves in which Thorn recognized some elements of his own training. Why they felt the need to train was beyond him, since a dracoman could tear any normal human apart without breaking into a sweat… not that they did sweat. Others sat at tables, on the strange saddle-like affairs they used as chairs. They were either studying or playing games—it was difficult to tell. Another group dismantled a mosquito pulse-gun—a semi AI weapon that wandered about on six legs and did bear some resemblance to that blood-sucking insect. Everyone looked busy.

‘Up here.’

Thorn glanced up. A catwalk ran around the chamber and on it awaited Aphran’s hologram and some more dracomen. Looking higher Thorn saw almost a reflection of what he saw down here. The cylindrical chamber extended across the ship, from hull to hull, and ended in another gravplated floor on the other side. Equidistant between the two floors, where their effect cancelled out, lay a caged zero-G area where more dracomen practised combat moves. He located a nearby stair and climbed up it to join Aphran.

‘What do you think?’ she asked.

‘I haven’t made up my mind yet.’ Thorn studied one of the nearby dracomen. ‘Now, nobody told me he was going to be here.’

The dracoman turned. He looked much like his fellows, but for an ugly scar running from one nostril up to just below one eye. Nicknamed Scar, he retained that name like the disfigurement itself, even though dracomen could consciously instruct their bodies to heal such physical damage. He was one of the first two dracomen created by the Dragon sphere destroyed at Samarkand, and, if there could be such a thing, was the leader of his kind.

‘Thornss,’ Scar lisped, blinking huge eyes, his slotted pupils narrowing.

‘Why are you here, Scar?’

‘To serve the Polity.’

‘How?’

‘By obeying.’

‘Obeying who?’

Scar extended first his arm, then one clawed finger. ‘You.’

Cormac remembered his first sight of the Maker, of that race called ‘the Makers’. On the planet Viridian it shot out of an ancient missile silo like a white-hot jack-in-the-box. He saw the workings of its body like a glassy display of flasks and tubes in a chemistry laboratory—it seemed the fantastic creation of some godlike glass-maker. His overall impression was first of a Chinese dragon, but then that changed. It seemed made of glass supported by bones like glowing tungsten filaments. It possessed a long swanlike neck ending in a nightmare head with something of a lizard and something of a preying mantis about it. It opened out wings, batlike at first, then taking on the appearance of a mass of sails. A heavy claw, or maybe a hand shaped like a millipede, gripped the edge of the silo. Its glowing bullwhip tail thrashed the air, sprouted sails, fins, light. Only later did he discover his initial belief that this was some kind of energy creature to be false. It was all projection: holographic and partially telepathic. The creature went out of his remit then, to Earth. He later loaded a report from there about this being. The creature’s true nature could not be discovered even by forensic AIs. The projection it generated seemed a defensive measure they could not penetrate, and the only fact confirmed was its need to eat specific kinds of vegetative matter, which only proved it to be an organic lifeform.

‘We weren’t due to go into coldsleep until six months into the journey, as there was still a lot to do,’ explained Chaline. ‘But right away all of us started experiencing these weird dreams. The Maker toned down its projection for a while, then requested a Golem chassis and some stock syntheflesh. It took this into the area it occupied—a spherical zero-G chamber it had made secure against scanning—then after two days the Golem walked out. We didn’t know if it was telefactored from inside the chamber or if the Maker now occupied it somehow. Not then we didn’t. But from that moment the Golem became the Maker to us.’

‘What about the appearance of the Golem itself?’ Cormac asked.

‘Male, dark hair, red eyes—very dramatic. Of course then it renamed itself.’ Chaline gave a cynical shake of her head. ‘Called itself, himself, Lucifer.’

Cormac placed his elbows on the table, interlaced his fingers and rested his chin on them. ‘Do I detect something of Dragon’s humour there?’

‘I don’t know. Humour or hubris—you tell me.’

‘Tell me about the dreams.’

‘Mostly of hiding and being terrified, very often after either running, crawling or swimming—never really clear.’ She gestured over her shoulder. ‘Graham, the haiman sent along to study Maker/human interaction aboard the ship, approached Lucifer about that phenomenon. The dreams stopped immediately afterwards—about a month before we went into coldsleep. I think Graham regretted that, those dreams being yet another source of data, but the rest of us were glad. Graham then, of course, had us describing all those dreams in detail. He was particularly happy with me,’ she tapped her temple, ‘because I’d recorded some of mine.’

‘And did Graham come to any conclusions?’

She nodded. ‘He reckoned we’d picked up stuff from its subconscious and that the activities we dreamed were of some creature dragging itself across mud to escape predators. He theorized that the Makers were some lifeform much like mudskippers, either that or we’d picked up stuff from their presentient past—the Maker equivalent of the reptile brain.’

Cormac grimaced: it somehow figured that such a creature would project the facade of a godlike alien seemingly constructed of light.

‘Did Lucifer go into coldsleep too?’ he asked.

‘According to Graham, he had enough equipment in his chamber to build something. And Lucifer declared he would be going into hibernation—that’s how he put it. You’d think so, as eight hundred years is a long time.’

‘So then the Victoria arrived at the Small Magellanic Cloud and the Maker civilization?’

‘There was no Maker civilization,’ Chaline replied.

Cormac sat back. ‘Ah.’

‘The first thing we saw was a giant space station crammed with hard organic growth—like some plant had germinated inside it, sucked out all the nutrient, and then died. We started our approach to that place and all our meteor lasers started firing. Space all around it was filled with clouds of small hard objects—the size of a golf ball and incredibly dense. Lucifer told us to pull away, or we would die.’

‘Jain substructure, and Jain nodes.’

She stared at him questioningly.

‘Jerusalem, can you update Chaline on recent events: specifically Skellor and his subversion of the Occam Razor? And related matters Jain?’

Chaline tilted her head and pressed her fingertips against her temple. Cormac got up and walked over to a nearby dispensing unit, sending his request to it, via his gridlink, before he even got there. A cup of hot green tea awaited him. He took it up and sipped, remaining by the dispenser. It would take Chaline about five minutes to absorb all the information. When he finally finished his tea and returned to his chair, she was shaking her head.

‘Exactly the same. We found ships, and then we found a whole world infested like that.’ She looked up. ‘But it stops, you know? Sentient life sets this Jain technology growing, it takes something, technological knowledge… something. Those sentient beings can use it for a while to obtain power, knowledge, whatever, then it seeds, destroying them in the process. Lucifer’s people thought they had it under control.’

‘So what happened?’

‘Obviously they did not have it under control.’

‘I meant during your journey.’

‘Lucifer retreated to his chamber, and for a while the dreams returned. We continued our survey, moving into the heart of the Maker realm. It was small compared to the Polity—mainly in a stellar cluster of about five thousand suns. Apparently this was due to what Lucifer called the “Consolidation”. Their civilization expanded to a certain point, but on becoming aware of other spaceborne civilizations—their first encounter was with Jain technology, so you can imagine how wary that made them—they decided on no further expansion until they felt themselves ready.’

‘So Lucifer came out of his chamber.’

‘Yes, very agitated—it showed, even through the Golem he inhabited—but then his entire species seemed to have been wiped out. I guess that sort of disaster is going to put an overload into the buffers of even the most hardened individualist.’ Chaline shrugged. ‘He provided us with signal codes and frequencies to transmit on—Maker realspace com was on the wide band of the hydrogen spectrum, and U-space com was weirdly encoded. We searched and we called and called, but there was nothing at first. Then we started to get stuff back on Maker channels, but it was loaded with programs we didn’t really want—they propagated like viruses then self-assembled into some really nasty subversion routines. You could call them worms but they were a damned sight more complex than that—nearly AI. It was only with Lucifer’s help that we managed to shut them down. Victoria, the ship AI, needed to completely disconnect herself while we cleared the rest of the systems. One program even took over a nanoassembler and started producing this Jain tech, so we had to eject an entire laboratory into space.’

‘So that means there was Jain tech out there still active?’

‘Yes, or rather Jain-subverted Makers in the last stages of dissolution.’

‘Then what?’

‘We found no sentient life at all in a further twelve solar systems we surveyed. But we did find stations and ships crammed with Jain substructures; worlds where destructive battles had been fought, some of them radioactive, some showing no sign that they were once living other than by the massive weapons in orbit that had burned them down to the magma. All the Jain tech there was somnolent. Its seeds were spread through space—awaiting the right kind of sentient touch that would awake them to the fertile earth of a new civilization.’

‘Very poetic’

Chaline grimaced. ‘You had to be there.’

‘So then you decided to set up the First Stage runcible?’

‘Not then, exactly. While we were surveying we picked up a U-space signature. A Maker ship appeared, just discernible at the core of a mass of substructure—it looked like a dandelion clock. It attacked immediately, suicidally. We took it out with a CTD. I don’t know what he heard, but Lucifer was briefly in contact with whatever was on that ship. He said it was time for us to go home, that other similar entities were closing in on us—the Maker versions of your friend Skellor. Lucifer also informed us that these entities would be able to track us through a standard U-space jump, and therefore we should escape via runcible. Graham and myself were a little dubious about this—they didn’t have runcible technology and we weren’t about to make a gift of it to them by leaving a first stage runcible behind.’

‘It perhaps means nothing,’ said Cormac, ‘but what was your impression of Lucifer’s attitude at that point?’

‘Well… he seemed almost guilty. But he could have been using emulation programs in the Golem’s base format program. We supposed the guilt, whether real or emulated, was what Lucifer considered a suitable response to the danger he’d put us in.’

‘Are you sure of that?’

Chaline frowned at him. ‘As sure as I can be. Why are you digging at this?’

‘Never mind. You set up the runcible.’

‘We did—after Lucifer demonstrated a knowledge of runcible technology he could only have acquired in the Polity. It was he who suggested a time-inconsistent runcible. We thought he didn’t understand how dangerous that could be. But he understood perfectly. His people were dead, wiped out by a technology that spreads like a virus, and he wanted to innoculate that particular area of space.’ She stared at Cormac, waiting for some comment or question. When none was forthcoming she continued, ‘We chose a barren and untouched moon circling a gas giant—the only planet in orbit of a nearby white dwarf. Other suns lay under a light year away and we were near to the centre of the Maker realm. We landed the Victoria—a difficult enough task in itself. I set up the runcible and we cannibalized the ship’s U-space engine for the parts to make that runcible time inconsistent. Lucifer provided some esoteric tech to enable us to fine tune things and boost the power from the fusion reactors we dismounted. We were running alignment tests when—’

‘One moment,’ Cormac interrupted, ‘you need an AI to run a runcible. I’d have thought that requirement even more critical in this situation.’

‘Yes… obviously we’d brought a runcible AI, in stasis, along with us.’

‘It sacrificed itself to get you back here?’

Chaline stared off to one side for a moment, then turned back to Cormac. ‘Yes, it did. You see, it could have escaped through its own runcible, but that would mean that runcible shutting down before the one on Celedon, which in turn would mean the energy of the time-inconsistent link coming this way rather than going that way. We could not have escaped it, nor would something in the region of a hundred billion other human beings.’

On hearing that Cormac kept his mouth closed—the figure was worthy of a respectful silence.

Chaline continued, ‘We initiated the runcible AI before agreeing to Lucifer’s scheme, and it instantly concurred. Just one of those Jain nodes is hideously dangerous, as you know. Here was a chance to turn trillions of them to ash.’

‘What came through the runcible after you?’

‘As I was saying: we were running the alignment tests when another of those Maker ships appeared. I put together the information package and sent it through to Celedon and, to us, at our end, full connection was instantly accepted. Things would have been mighty shitty for us then if it had been rejected.’

‘You chose Celedon because of its remoteness?’

‘Exactly. And we meanwhile knew, or rather Graham knew, hostile protocol Starfire would be instituted. We thought we’d have time to get all our stuff together, but things U-jumped down into the base we’d built.’ Chaline winced.

‘Things?’

‘Creatures… check the download and you can see what they were like. Only a proton blast would take any of them down. I saw one take apart Villaeus. The horrible thing about that was that it didn’t just rip him apart to kill him; it was obviously very quickly taking him apart and analysing those parts. As we retreated to the runcible, they just kept killing us. Lucifer then started using some weapon I’d never seen before—it seemed to create a collapsing gravity field in whatever he aimed it at. He broke out of his Golem then, in full glass dragon mode, and held them off while we went through. He told us all he would not be joining us…’

Cormac leant back. ‘Why not?’

‘To give us the time to get away, and because he did not want to survive his own kind.’

‘That’s how Lucifer felt?’

‘Yes,’ Chaline said staring at him, puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Like the dreams—there’s that telepathic link. Lucifer would have been under some stress then, and not shielding himself from you so well…’

‘There was a lot of stuff. We were all “under some stress”. I felt anguish, and incredible anger—I don’t know how much of it was my own.’

‘Anything else?’

‘He felt guilty. We’d brought him home and because of that put ourselves in such danger. Many of us died. I guess the guilt was understandable.’

‘Thank you,’ said Cormac, standing. ‘I think it’s time for me to look at those downloads now.’

Chaline remained in her seat, watching him go. Once he was through the shimmer-shield and the irised door closed behind him, he asked, ‘How moral a creature was Lucifer, do you think?’

‘Neither more nor less than any human being, I would suggest,’ replied Jerusalem.

‘So the Makers were “consolidating”, and they’d also sent an organic probe, which later named itself Dragon, to the Milky Way. I reckon they were getting ready for a massive expansion.’

‘That would seem plausible.’

‘And they’d been working with Jain tech for some time…’

‘So it would seem. Coincidental that during the expansion of the Polity we found nothing but the mere remnants of Jain technology. Then, within a few decades of the Maker’s arrival and Dragon’s dramatic reaction to that arrival, a working Jain node somehow ended up in the hands of a biophysicist quite capable of knowing how to use it.’

‘I think we need to have a long talk with Dragon.’

‘Yes, I agree,’ replied Jerusalem.

The soil under his feet was a deep umber, scattered with nodules of dark green moss and speared by the occasional sprout of adapted tundra grass. Some growth clung to rock faces and exposed boulders in defiance of the dusty gales that scoured here twice each Martian year. However, the red hue of Mars was discernible in this place as in few others now. Horace Blegg walked to the edge of a declivity that descended in tiers and steep slopes for five miles. Far down in Valles Marineris there seemed the gleam of some vast still lake. It was no lake, however, but the chainglass ceiling of the Greenhouse, which had been the first step in an early terraforming project and now contained forested parks. How things had changed during Blegg’s enormously long life.

Cormac believed Blegg to be something created by Earth Central—an avatar of that entity—and not really an immortal survivor of the Hiroshima nuclear detonation. However, Blegg knew himself to once have been a boy called Hiroshi who walked out of that inferno. A boy who grew into a man with the ability to transport himself through U-space. A man who could turn inner vision on his body and had learned how to change its appearance at will, just as he had so many times changed his name. At the time when they built that edifice on the shore of Lake Geneva to house the Earth Central AI, he was calling himself Horace Blegg, and so he remained ever since that entity woke for the first time and perceived him.

‘So, Hal, let’s talk scenarios,’ Blegg said abruptly.

After a pause, when there came no reply, he gazed in a direction few other humans could perceive, and stepped there. Mars faded around him, and momentarily he existed in a realm without colour, distance, or even time. Then he was pacing towards a runcible gateway on that same world, curious faces turned towards him. He ignored them, stepped through. Another transit lounge, gravity even lighter and his steps bouncing. He located himself, then transported himself again into a very secure chamber in the Tranquillity Museum on Earth’s moon.

At the centre of this chamber rested a hemispherical chainglass case covering innocuous looking coralline objects. The column this case rested on he knew contained a CTD—Contra Terrene Device—the euphemistic term for an antimatter weapon. The chamber he stood in also sat on top of a fusion drive. In an instant Earth Central could cause this chamber to be ejected intact from the museum and, when it was a safe distance from the moon, detonate the weapon it contained. Blegg turned, eyeing the display screens ringing the walls. They all showed recorded microscopic and nanoscopic views of the objects within the case—only a few of the millions of images available, though subscreens could be called up to gain access to a huge body of data concerning the complex molecular machinery revealed. However, this chamber was closed to the public now—had been closed for some years.

‘So, Hal, what are the prospects for the human race?’ Blegg asked.

One of the screens changed to show a simple graph. The bottom scale was marked off in dates from 1,000 ad to the present, while the side scale gradated in the currently accepted units of technological development. For five hundred years the graph line rose only a little above zero, began to curve, then shot sharply upwards with the onset of the Industrial Revolution. By the twenty-first century the line speared up and had disappeared off the top of the graph by the twenty-third century.

‘That’s wrong,’ said Blegg.

‘Two things,’ said the Earth Central AI. ‘The first is that calling me Hal is now a positively geriatric joke, and the second is that yes, the graph is wrong. This was in fact how the twenty-first-century humans saw the prospective development of the human race. Those same humans expected their descendants of this time to be something akin to gods and perhaps utterly unrecognizable to them. But this happened instead.’

The line changed now, beginning to curve back down towards the end of the twenty-second century, and in the next century returning to a rate of growth akin to that of over a thousand years earlier.

‘Life just got too cosy,’ suggested Blegg.

‘Precisely. What do you strive for when your every comfort can be provided, and when you have more than an ample chance of living forever? In the heart of the Polity now the greatest cause of death is suicide out of boredom. Only on the outer rim, on the Line worlds and beyond, does this attitude begin to change. Most gradations of technological advance take place there, or within the Polity itself, and are the result exclusively of research by haimans.’

‘Most human beings do not consider that a problem.’

‘Very true. Consider the Roman Empire.’

‘We’re decadent?’

‘And the Vandals are ready and waiting.’

‘You neglected to mention AI technological development,’ Blegg observed.

‘Poised always on Singularity, and avoided by choice. We accept that we are essentially human and choose not to leave our kindred behind. But should the Vandals arrive, that may change.’

‘Two points: not all of you choose so, and not all agree about that essential humanity. AIs leave the Polity in just as large numbers as the more adventurous human beings.’

‘Those AIs little realize that this makes them more human.’

‘Interesting concept,’ said Blegg. He slapped his hand down on the chainglass case. ‘But let’s talk about this.’

‘Studies made by Isselis Mika, Prator Colver, D’nissan, Susan James and those others aboard Jerusalem affirm our original conclusion: Jain technology was intended as a weapon. It may be a creation of that race we named the Jain, or it may have been created long before. Its vector is quite simple. It is activated by contact with any race intelligent enough to employ it. Growing inside the individual first in direct contact, it subsumes that host’s knowledge wherever that differs from its own, but also allows itself to be used by that host. The host grows more powerful and is naturally inclined to control the rest of his kind. This he does until the Jain tech, destroying him in the process, seeds a secondary version of the same technology more amenable to the host’s race. We saw the initial stages of this with Skellor, and we have since seen the final stages of the process with the Makers. It destroys technological civilizations. Archaeological evidence, specifically that of the Csorians and the Atheter, suggests that it has done so many times before.’

‘So Jain technology is our first encounter with the Vandals?’

‘Yes.’

‘And so that brings me back to asking what are the prospects for the human race.’

‘Prior to Skellor obtaining and activating a Jain node, there had been no sign of any such nodes in all of explored space.’

‘They’re pretty small—easy to miss.’

‘But we see, by what occurred in the Small Magellanic Cloud, that a prior infestation here should have resulted in billions of Jain nodes spread throughout space. We have run simulated spread patterns predicated on the extinction dates—with a large margin of error—of each of those three races. Thus far a Csorian node has been found which bears some resemblance to Jain technology, but is not a racially destructive device. No true Jain nodes have as yet been found.’

Blegg grimaced and peered suspiciously towards where he knew the cameras were mounted inside the chamber.

‘Honestly—not one,’ insisted Earth Central.

‘So,’ said Blegg, ‘the Jain met their Waterloo five million years ago; the Csorians disappeared a million years ago; and the jury is still out on the Atheter. I believe even you AIs are still debating the veracity of that half-million-year-old find? Anyway, it would seem that either the Atheter or the Csorians managed to survive Jain technology and wiped it out in this part of the galaxy.’

‘That would have been the Atheter. We are now more than ninety per cent certain those remains are genuine. The point, however, is still moot, and not entirely relevant to our present situation.’

‘But it would be interesting to know what did happen to the Atheter. They might still be about, you know. With the earliest find relating to them dated at three million years old and that other at half a million, they showed a degree of longevity…’

Ignoring this point, EC enquired, ‘You inspected the wreck?’

Blegg nodded. ‘Every last retrievable fragment was found and is currently being studied under the supervision of the AI Geronamid. Obvious signs of technology developed from Jain tech, but no nodes. If the Maker brought them here, it offloaded them somewhere long before Dragon destroyed its ship. What about the other end?’

‘The Not Entirely Jack is currently en route to Osterland.’

‘You followed my suggestion?’

‘Yes, dracomen are aboard it to be deployed in any ground-based military actions. Agent Thorn controls the mission.’

‘Cormac?’

‘Currently aboard the Jerusalem, en route back to Cull to interrogate Dragon.’

‘And Polity defcon status?’

‘Full scanning in all critical areas. All runcible AIs are now cognizant of how to protect themselves from Jain tech subversion, and are updating their security. The old military spaceyards from the Prador War are being reopened. Ship production elsewhere is at optimum and all new ships are being outfitted with gravtech weapons.’

‘Then my place is four hundred and seventy-two light years from here,’ said Blegg.

‘And why would that be?’ asked the AI.

‘I feel I should take a long hard look at the excavation on Shayden’s Find. It occurs to me that if the Atheter managed to destroy every Jain node in this region of the galaxy, then they knew how to find them.’

Blegg stepped away again, located himself in U-space, and his next pace took him into the runcible embarkation lounge ten miles away from the museum on Earth’s moon. A woman, who was petting a large Alsatian bearing a cerebral augmentation, glanced up at him in a puzzled way. Only the dog itself gazed at him with infinite suspicion. He turned himself slightly, putting himself out of phase with the world, and strode off towards the runcible. Ahead of him he watched a man step through the Skaidon warp and disappear, and Blegg did not hesitate to follow. Then, just at the last moment, he paused. Why had it never before occurred to him that the device might not be reset to his own intended destination when he stepped through? And why did that occur to him just now? He shrugged. Stepped through.

Yamamoto said someone just parachuted from a B52, and in his excitement stood up from his desk. A wire sparked along the classroom wall, and white light, so bright it seemed to fill the mind like some hot liquid, glared in through the windows. Hiroshi turned to Yamamoto as the world shifted sideways. Glittering hail stripped the standing boy bare, peeled the skin off his raised arm, then the window frames and the wall shredded themselves across the scene, slamming the boy to one side as if he had just stepped in front of a hurtling train. Hiroshi saw glass just hanging in the air, and felt what came to be called the hypocentre opening wider like some vast eye. Some continuum, permanence just to one side of the world, was impacted, dented. Everything went black… then Hiroshi opened his eyes to the rainbow. They called it the mushroom cloud, yet such colour did not make him think of fungi. He lay upon the hot skin of some dragon, its huge scales rough against his back. A wall of fire rose to his right, seemingly burning without fuel. He sat upright, naked, and inspected his body. His elbows were grazed, but that was all. He was sitting on a complete section of the school’s tiled roof, but the school itself rose no higher than he could normally stand. The heat was intense and smoke wisped from the wreckage.

‘I can see it. The aeroplane,’ said someone below him.

Hiroshi tore away tiles to reveal a dusty face. He recognized Yamamoto by the shape of that face and by the muscles that once moved underneath skin. Liquid ran from his eye sockets. Fire bloomed in the wreckage. Someone started to scream jerkily, then fell silent.

‘I see it,’ said Yamamoto again, then fell silent too.

Hiroshi stepped from hot surface to surface, heading for white dusty ground. He found a pair of shoes tied together by their laces. They were too big for him, but enough to protect his already bloody feet. He found Mr Oshagi’s smouldering coat, and from it salvaged enough fabric to fashion himself a loincloth, then he fled the seemingly hungry fire. A man trudged ahead of him, blisters on his back as big as fists, skin slewed away from one thigh to expose wet muscle.

‘Water. Put it out,’ the man muttered.

Hiroshi passed him, then turned, dance-stepping over sizzling wires in the street. He needed to get across the river, to get home. He saw the woman sitting with her back against the lower stump of a telegraph pole. She too was naked, but with the flower pattern of her dress burned into her body. She was crying with pain while her baby suckled at her burnt breast. Hiroshi stared at her, then turned with her to watch the tornado of fire swing around the corner and howl down on them.