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  ‘I reckon they’ve been instructed to keep their hands off you,’ he decided. ‘You gave them a Jain node when they asked for it and they know that irking you wouldn’t be the greatest idea.’

  Secretly Vulture reckoned that the Polity survey and clear-up teams would at some point be given the go-ahead to intrude here, but at least Earth Central was holding them back just for now. Mr Crane and the creatures living in the weird village scattered at the base of this lump of sandstone were an imponderable that should not be left alone. Would not be left alone.

  Almost as if he read Vulture’s thoughts, Mr Crane abruptly rose to his feet and peered out in the direction the bird had approached from. He strode over to the edge of the monolith and, with an agility that belied his weight, heaved himself over the edge and began to descend using handholds cut into the stone. Vulture waddled to the edge and peered over, observing how one of the sleer-human hybrids was clinging to the rock face beside the android’s route down. This disconcerting creature resembled an eight-foot scorpion with a human face where its mandibles should be. Its facial features seemed frozen in a permanent scream.

  As Mr Crane’s boots finally clumped down heavily into the dust at ground level, Vulture launched himself into the air and descended to glide low over his head. The Golem reached up a hand to prevent his hat being displaced by the sudden draught, pausing to peer up at the bird before he strode on.

  All about them lay the homes of the hybrids: the results of Dragon’s experiments in combining the genome of the sleer — a native arthropodal creature — with that of humankind. Their dwellings were like giant hollowed-out gourds, but constructed from sand bonded with a natural glue that sleers could emit and which some of these hybrids could also still produce. Through the circular entry holes could be seen chitinous activity — the snap of a pincer or the flexing of an armoured insectile leg — combined with elements of bastardized humanity like a face or an arm, and sometimes from those dark interiors could be heard voices muttering rudimentary language. How these creatures had become Mr Crane’s charge Vulture could not fathom, just as he could not see how they communicated with him, yet somehow they did.

  As Crane reached the far edge of the village, two of the hybrids began to follow him out. One looked quite like a young girl except for her multifaceted eyes and the pincers that protruded from her mouth. The other was a centaur-boy: the upper half of a male human child seemingly grafted on a sleer body. The brass Golem halted, stared at them, then inclined his head slightly back towards the scattered dwellings. The two children hung their heads in disappointment, then traipsed back disconsolately the way they had come.

  ‘They like you,’ said Vulture, settling in the dust beside the Golem.

  Crane looked at him but made no comment. Since their partnership began — Vulture liked to think of it as a partnership — Crane had said just a total of twelve words to him. There were other communications: a small gesture of the hand here, a slight inclination of the head, maybe a blink. Mr Crane was what Vulture liked to describe as a conversational minimalist.

  Half a mile on from the hybrids’ village lay the beginning of a sandstone labyrinth of buttes and canyons. Following sometimes along the ground and sometimes in the air, Vulture observed scattered lumps of carapace lying on the ground and the body of a huge third-stage sleer draped over a rock nearby — ready for the hybrids to dismember. Many of these vicious creatures came in looking to dine on their more vulnerable hybrid kin but, after Mr Crane had ripped their heads off, became dinner themselves.

  Crane halted, also surveying his surroundings, before gazing pointedly at Vulture as the bird landed on the dead sleer. Vulture stretched out a wing towards one of the nearby canyons. ‘That one.’

  Giving a slight inclination of his head in acknowledgement, Mr Crane trudged on. Within an hour they came within sight of one of the Polity survey teams that usually preceded the clear-up teams. Their large treaded vehicle was parked below a sandstone cliff, the base of which was pocked with numerous holes. A woman held up some sort of scanning device to these holes in turn, while peering closely at the device’s screen. Her male companion spotted Crane and Vulture first, and grabbed the woman’s shoulder to drag her round to see. He looked scared; she looked fascinated. Though Mr Crane had not made any effort to show himself to the inhabitants of Cull, the story had spread of his involvement in recent events here. Also, rumours were heard of the atrocious things he had done in the Polity, admittedly while under the control of various big-time villains. Vulture doubted if Mr Crane even cared that he was now a legend.

  ‘How can we help you?’ the man quavered as Crane strode over.

  The Golem ignored him and marched right on past.

  ‘I think you’re getting a little bit too close to the hybrids’ village,’ suggested Vulture, from his new perch on top of the ATV.

  ‘What?’ The man looked up.

  ‘It doesn’t do to annoy him, you see.’ Vulture gave a lugubrious shrug. ‘But why should I care? I’m a carrion eater and I’ve been getting mighty tired of sleer just lately.’

  ‘I think it might be a good idea if we left,’ murmured the man.

  ‘You do?’ said the woman.

  Mr Crane had meanwhile reached the cliff face and, stooping down from his eight-foot height, was peering into each of the holes in turn. After a moment he plunged his arm up to the shoulder in one of them, groped around for a bit, then pulled out something looking like a dead and shrivelled cobra. He turned round, strode back to them, and offered his find to the woman. She seemed reluctant to accept it.

  ‘Dragon pseudopod, Deena,’ observed the man. ‘That’s what you were detecting here.’

  ‘Really,’ Deena replied, eyeing Mr Crane.

  Mr Crane relinquished the object to the male surveyor, who took it over to a nearby plasmel box and coiled it up inside before slamming the lid.

  ‘Shall we go now?’ the man asked.

  Deena, however, did not seem inclined to leave. She surreptitiously peered down at the screen of her scanner, then abruptly raised it and directed it full at Mr Crane.

  ‘I’m getting some really queer—’

  Crane reached out, plucked the scanner from her hand, crushing it up with his fingers and scattering the bits like he was strewing herbs on some tasty dish.

  ‘That was Polity property!’ she yelped indignantly.

  Crane leaned forward, tilting his head slightly as if he was very interested in what she was saying.

  ‘We should really go now,’ said the man, grabbing her arm.

  Vulture was wondering if this might be about to turn nasty when Crane abruptly snapped upright and gazed towards the sky. Turning to look also, the bird witnessed multiple flashes, muted through the overcast. Maybe lightning, but judging by the Golem’s interest Vulture thought not. Next came a rumbling as of thunder, then a sawing-crackling noise Vulture instantly recognized as the sound of a particle weapon burning through atmosphere.

  ‘What the hell is that?’ wondered the woman.

  Two rod-shaped objects emerged from the clouds, tumbling at first then correcting and arrowing towards the ground, right towards the hybrids’ village. Crane broke instantly into a loping run, one hand clamped to his head to hold his hat in place. The turquoise flare of a particle beam stabbed down blasting one of the rod-shaped objects to fragments. It stabbed down again to hit the other one, but not before its target had spat out some missile. Vulture launched off, keeping pace above the Golem’s head. But from the direction of the village there came no expected detonation, which seemed puzzling. As they finally emerged from the canyon, the bird climbed skywards to get a better view. The monolith and the houses seemed perfectly intact, but something was belching a pale pinkish smoke. Survival instincts kicking in, the bird slowed and deliberately flew higher, gazing down as Mr Crane finally entered the village.

  Those hybrids not actually still within their dwellings lay sprawled everywhere on the ground. Crane halted and peered a
bout, then strode over to the missile — still belching smoke — and stamped it into the ground. Then he stood utterly still for some minutes, before jerking into motion again. Walking over to the nearest prone hybrid, he removed his hat, got down on his knees, placing it on the ground beside him, then plunged his brassy hands into the dirt and began scooping out a hole. Evidently the hybrids would not be getting up again.

  Vulture circled for some minutes, before observing the ATV heading out of the canyon. He flew down and settled on the ground directly in its path. The vehicle ground to a halt and its two occupants climbed out.

  ‘What’s going on?’ asked the man.

  ‘Some kind of poison gas.’ Vulture gestured back with one wing. ‘He’s now burying his dead.’

  ‘Maybe we can help?’ she suggested.

  Vulture could see right through to her motives: here was her ideal chance to get hold of one of the hybrids for her sample boxes.

  ‘If you really fancy going in there and trying to breathe that stuff?’

  She grimaced.

  Vulture added, ‘You probably weren’t in that much danger before, when he pulled out that pseudopod for you, but I don’t know what he’ll do after this. He’s never been what you might describe as a balanced personality.’

  ‘We’re getting out of here,’ said the man, grabbing his colleague’s arm and dragging her back towards the ATV. A short while later the vehicle disappeared between the sandstone buttes.

  Vulture waited… and waited. As the light grew dim he tucked his head under one wing and snoozed. Finally something alerted him, woke him up to hard-edged starlight.

  Mr Crane strode out of the village, glints in his eyes reflecting the stars. His hat in his hand, he halted to one side of Vulture, gazed at the bird for a moment, before firmly placing the hat back on his head.

  ‘He must pay,’ he said, then snapped his mouth closed, like the lid of a tomb.

  2

  There is an old aphorism that says a gun is just a lump of metal until there is someone there to pull the trigger. It is not inherently evil or wrong in itself, for it is just a thing. This same aphorism cannot be twisted to fit Jain technology, since it is a gun with the trigger already pulled, or else it is the speeding bullet, or perhaps a better analogy would be that it is a landmine. Yet still it is blameless in itself — the blame lies with the Jain AIs who pulled the trigger — or armed the mine — five million years ago. However, the metal, plastics, electronics, switches and even the explosives of a landmine have useful applications elsewhere. Many aspects of Jain technology are similarly very useful, and can be used to further the goals of civilization; after all, a technology is not evil, only the way it is used can be described as that. We now understand that in every case where this pernicious construct has wiped out a civilization, elements of the same technology were used for good by those who had disarmed it. Unfortunately, by then, the armed version had already spread enough to eventually take off that civilization at the knees, and in each case it surely bled to death.

  — From Quince Guide compiled by humans

  The bridge area of the King of Hearts resembled the one Cormac remembered on the original Jack Ketch, with its wide black floor and holo-projection giving him the impression he was standing on a platform out in open space. However, here there were cross-hatched lines traversing the dome above him, destroying part of that illusion, and a whole segment blacked out behind him, while the nose of the attack ship was clearly visible to the fore. It seemed as if he was standing in a viewing dome set just behind the nose, but he knew this area lay well inside the ship’s new armour and its massive composite reinforcements.

  No stars were visible through the dome at the moment, since the attack ship was presently in U-space, and the view beyond was a featureless grey. Cormac did not need to register this lack of view to know where they were. His sense of U-space now seemed to take precedence over all his other senses. Even the King of Hearts looked insubstantial all around him. Turning, he could gaze through its structure at the engines, the weapons, to where Scar sat motionless as a rock in his quarters, and to where Arach and Hubbert Smith were sparring in zero gravity.

  ‘Another attack?’ he enquired, trying to keep himself rooted in the moment and in his present position, for he felt constantly as if he was on the point of drifting, and could be swept away by invisible tides in U-space. He focused now more closely on his immediate surroundings. The bridge he currently occupied had a noticeable lack of chairs — King obviously was not as genial a host as Jack — but at least it did not have those grisly decorations Cormac had seen in the Jack Ketch: the perfect copies of ancient execution devices arrayed like exhibits in a museum.

  King did not reply, and Cormac guessed this was because the AI had already stated that there had been another attack. Even though now supposedly again loyal to the Polity, King remained a thorough misanthrope. Cormac therefore tried accessing information directly from the attack ship’s server, but he received utterly no response. Maybe King had simply disabled the device, not liking humans getting too close to its pristine synthetic mind.

  ‘Tell me about this attack,’ Cormac insisted.

  A glaring red dot appeared in the cross-hatching above the ship’s nose, then expanded into a massive red-bordered frame. Within this appeared the image of one of Erebus’s wormships in some area of space where the stars were clustered close together. There was something familiar about these constellations, but then Cormac had seen so many starscapes that wasn’t entirely surprising.

  ‘The ship arrived shortly after the last underspace interference emitters were withdrawn from the blockade,’ King stated obscurely.

  USERs? Cormac only knew of a few places where they had been deployed recently.

  ‘Where is this, King?’

  ‘Cull.’

  The wormship up there in the frame was pouring out a swarm of objects — it looked as if someone had kicked a woodpile containing a wasps’ nest.

  Cull.

  King knew plenty about that world, since it was there that both itself and a few fellow AIs had betrayed the Polity to try and grab the Jain technology possessed by, and possessing, the bio-physicist Skellor. The King of Hearts had been the only one of these predators to escape.

  ‘It used sophisticated chameleonware to get close, but once it began deploying its weapons, that ceased to be an option for it. Unlike the ship involved in that previous attack, this one’s was in the nature of a suicide mission.’

  Perfectly on cue, the wormship shuddered, fires igniting inside it, massive explosions tearing away chunks of its structure. Still, however, it continued to emit those bacilliform objects Cormac recognized. ‘Rod-forms’ was the term now being used for them.

  Suddenly, within view appeared a Polity dreadnought accompanied by a scattering of the newer Centurion attack ships. One of those vessels employed first a DIGRAW — a directed gravity weapon — for a ripple seemed to speed through space towards the wormship, rod-forms bursting apart in its path. The wormship jerked as it was struck, and then writhed to reform, shedding dead segments of its compartmentalized structure. The attack ships now shot past the alien vessel in a random formation, hitting it with just about every weapon they had. By now the dreadnought was firing too: heavier beam weapons and clouds of missiles that seemed to move just too slowly — many of them glowing and going out under defensive fire. One, however, did get through, and the blast must have momentarily overloaded the instruments that had recorded these events, for King’s screen blanked. When it came back on again, it was to show a collapsing ball of fire, which fell back to a painfully bright point, before exploding out again. Falling away from this, the remains of the wormship had lost coherence, become a loose-strewn tangle, which in a moment flicked out of existence.

  ‘CTD imploder,’ King noted.

  ‘Some of it escaped,’ Cormac noted, ‘which rather undermines your suicide-mission theory.’

  ‘We know where it is, and it will be dealt
with,’ King replied flatly.

  Cormac grimaced at that then wondered aloud, ‘What was the point of this?’

  ‘I am receiving transmissions now,’ King informed him.

  Cormac waited, arms crossed, enviroboot tapping against the floor. Eventually King deigned to impart to him the relevant information just received: ‘Numerous rod-forms were fired towards Cull. Most of them were destroyed, but two managed to reach atmosphere before they too were destroyed. However, one of them succeeded in firing a single missile.’

  ‘Damage?’

  ‘Yes, damage.’

  ‘Y’ know, King, the Polity consists of humans too and, as much as you may dislike that fact, if you want to be part of the Polity, you’ll have to be ready to talk to them occasionally.’

  ‘The missile contained a form of nerve gas, which was released inside the sleer-human hybrid village.’ Now the picture changed to show a village of globular houses. No sign of any hybrids, though there was a line of what looked like newly dug graves, each marked by a chunk of sleer carapace driven into the ground at its head. ‘Every one of them was killed,’ King added briefly.

  Again, another puzzle.

  ‘Now, first of all, why attack them?’ Cormac paused for a moment. ‘And why use a nerve gas? Surely that required some knowledge of hybrid physiology, when an explosive would have done the job just as well. It seems rather… specific’

  Grudgingly King replied, ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Is Erebus insane?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Then there has to be a logical reason for its recent attacks on Klurhammon and Cull. We have to presume the hybrids represented some sort of danger, and that meanwhile some other threat to Erebus was extant on Klurhammon. How could the hybrids be a danger?’

  ‘I do not know.’

  ‘Dragon?’ Cormac wondered.

  No reply from King.

  ‘Something there I guess…’ Cormac kept on turning it over in his mind, aware that minds much greater than his would be looking at the same puzzle. In a moment of inspiration he abruptly cried, ‘Dracomen! Those hybrids are probably like dracomen: immune to being sequestered by Jain technology! The dracomen on Masada must be warned!’