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  ‘It’s being done,’ King replied.

  Being done?

  He thought it odd that minds so superior to his own had not worked all this out long before him. Suspiciously odd. Only later did he learn of the wormship assault on Masada — the dracoman homeworld — and how that attacking wormship did not last more than ten seconds after surfacing from U-space. Still, this did not explain the anomalous use of nerve gas on Cull.

  He turned and left the bridge to go and join his comrades Arach and Smith. With them he hoped to find a distraction from the void currently extending beyond this ship, a void somehow horribly attractive to him and seemingly intent on drawing him in.

  * * * *

  This G-type star had been of no more than scientific interest to the Polity, or anyone else, after the arrival of the first probe here nearly a century before, since, even though it lay within Polity space, it was remote from all civilized worlds. This was why the haiman Orlandine had chosen it. She arrived some distance out and immediately activated her ship’s chameleonware to conceal it, before scanning for the kind of automated watch stations Polity AIs tended to scatter about in places like this simply to collect scientific data… and to watch. There were two of them, she discovered, in orbit of the sun’s single gas-giant planet.

  Using her ship’s chameleonware, she spent some weeks invisibly approaching the said stations, furtively docking, and in each sowed a Jain mycelium she had prepared. These mycelia absorbed surrounding material and spread out like hair-thin vines, attaching to each station’s power supply and bonding in parallel to instrumentation. Within a few hours she took control and was able to edit the data the sensors were collecting for the stations’ monthly U-space broadcasts to the runcible AI on the nearest civilized world. Next, and most importantly, she took control of the software that activated upon detecting any unusual activity in this planetary system, and instructed it to send that data direct to her. Once this was done she turned off Heliotrope’s chameleonware — a technology she did not like to run for too long since it was so greedy for energy. Now the stations were blind to her presence, and to anything she did here.

  Next she landed Heliotrope on the smallest of the eight moons orbiting this sun’s single planet — the gas giant. This moonlet was geologically active, though what erupted in plumes up to five miles high from its icy volcanoes was not magma but liquid nitrogen, dust and methane compounds. The temperature here rose only forty degrees above absolute zero. There were lakes on the moonlet’s surface and sometimes it rained, but water was as solid as iron and instead the stuff that fell from the blue and green clouds to gather on the surface was liquid methane and ethane.

  Because of these low temperatures, what with the sun being a glowing orb only slightly larger than the other stars, there was a lack of energy for Orlandine to utilize. A particular one of the higher-energy worlds closer to the giant — a moon sufficiently heated by geological activity for it to geyser boiling sulphur and for liquid water to sometimes flow on its surface — might have been a more suitable choice. However, that same geological activity made it a dangerous place, and she had decided to conduct a lengthy study of it before relocating there. She confidently chose this world first because already she had experience of using her Jain technology in a low-temperature environment, on the occasion of blowing up a similar moonlet.

  Before attempting anything else, Orlandine used the ship’s drill to grind down a few feet into the surface and plant a seed which, powered by Heliotrope’s fusion reactor, germinated and began to sprout Jain tendrils. These began boring through the surrounding rock and ice, using microscopic drills, and to in turn sprout nanotubes which periodically grew quantum processors the size of salt grains along their route. In time this structure would begin to find power sources like radioactives, areas of geothermal activity and reactive chemicals. Once she was sure it was busily working as required, Orlandine decided to go outside.

  Orlandine’s carapace — a ribbed metal shell attached to her back from the nape of her neck to the base of her spine, loaded with the advanced technology that made her haiman — was now permanently bonded to her body by the mycelium she had used to increase her capabilities close to those of a major AI, but she hardly noticed it now. The spacesuit she wore — and had only removed once to tend to a wound she had received while preparing that previous icy moonlet for destruction — was specially made for haimans and incorporated the carapace. Similarly it incorporated the cut-down assister frame she also wore: a device that plugged into the carapace and presented two metal arms at just above waist level, and of which she possessed greater and more accurate control than over her own arms of flesh, bone and blood.

  She began disengaging herself from Heliotrope’s interface sphere. This took a little while because she needed to physically disconnect from the Jain-tech aboard, and it tended to not want to let go of her — or, rather, there was some part of her that did not want to let it go. Once the numerous hair-thin tendrils linking her to the main mycelium in the ship were all severed, all that remained was her disconnection from the simpler Polity technology. Upon the disengage instruction, a power supply plug retracted from the spinal socket in her carapace and withdrew into the chair behind her, then lines of optic plugs on the ends of curved arms retracted from the sides of her carapace and hinged back out of sight on either side of her chair. The sensation of physical disconnection, though she did remain connected by electromagnetic means, was almost like being muffled from the rest of the world by a thick blanket, so, to compensate, Orlandine opened up the sensory cowl positioned behind her head as she pushed herself upright using the two limbs of her assister frame.

  The door into the interface sphere whoomphed up from its seals and slid aside, and she pulled herself up and out into the corridor beyond. At the end of the corridor she entered her living area, then headed towards the airlock. A series of brief mental instructions started the airlock ahead of her cycling open and simultaneously closed up her spacesuit. The segmented back of her spacesuit helmet rose up between her head and the petals of her sensory cowl, while the ribbed chainglass visor rose up from the front of her suit collar to engage with the helmet at the apex, its segments locking together to give an optically perfect finish. She now considered the possibility of installing a shimmer-shield as a suit visor, since it would be more convenient, and as she entered the airlock, then finally stepped outside, a thought set automated machines within the ship to work on this possibility.

  Shutting off all but her human sight, Orlandine saw only shadows. However, light amplification revealed thick ice underfoot, eaten away in places to show numerous laminations glittering in rainbow colours. Scanning deep into the ice with her sensory cowl, Orlandine picked out numerous boulders, the branching of underground streams of ethane and, of course, the rapidly expanding capillary-like structures of her recently planted mycelium. In the distance jagged peaks rose like gnarled canines in a deformed jaw, and beyond them the stars shimmered behind wisps of violet cloud. To her right the tight curve of the horizon was more easily visible, soot-black against a pink dome that was the edge of the gas giant, its magnetic fields creating twisted aurorae outside the normal human visible spectrum. Orlandine was enchanted, fascinated, and the species of joy she felt was almost a pain in her chest. Even through only slightly augmented human senses, this view would have been beautiful; seeing it across a wide band of the electromagnetic spectrum made it glorious. And, standing there knowing her capabilities and reviewing her plans, Orlandine felt herself to be the lord of all she surveyed. This feeling lasted only until the signal arrived.

  Orlandine experienced a fraction of a second’s confusion, then she realized the signal was coming simultaneously from the two Polity watch stations, for it seemed they had noted something unusual. Momentarily she feared the phenomenon they had detected might be herself, and that something had gone wrong with the mycelia she had seeded in them. But reviewing the data and transmitted images soon dispelled this noti
on.

  It was coming in fast, impelling itself through vacuum using some form of U-space tech Orlandine recognized but had yet to analyse and understand herself. It was one of Erebus’s wormships: a great Gordian ball of wormish movement miles across. A brief flash, and one sensory feed went out. From the other station Orlandine observed a flare grow then wink out from the location of the blinded station. She turned back to the airlock, quickly ascertaining that the first station had been hit by a microwave beam. By the time she was back inside Heliotrope, the other station was gone too.

  Within her ship’s interface sphere she swiftly reconnected herself to Heliotrope while simultaneously breaking its connection to the Jain mycelium in the moonlet’s crust below, and launching the ship. Accelerating up through thin atmosphere she engaged chameleonware and felt some slackening of tension upon entering vacuum. She was now invisible and could escape if she so chose, but she was curious. She checked her power supplies, and began bleeding output from the fusion reactor into the laminar storage and capacitors that supplied her esoteric collection of weapons. At first the moonlet lay between her and the wormship, but rounding it she was able to use her sensors to observe the vessel clearly.

  Having destroyed the two watch stations, the wormship had opened out its structure and was now launching rod-shaped devices which were accelerating in groups of three or four towards each moon. There were numerous reasons why it might be doing so, and she decided to take a closer look. She was invisible after all.

  At a distance of a hundred thousand miles from the alien vessel, Orlandine now had a perfect view of it, but what it was up to was still not really clear. It could be seeding Jain-tech to build up some kind of cache, it could simply be placing its own watch stations or it could be setting up some kind of base. When Heliotrope was fifty thousand miles from it, the ship’s spread structure abruptly snapped closed like a fist and it began accelerating directly towards her. Orlandine just watched it for a moment. Its choice of direction had to be coincidence, for surely it could not see her. Then abruptly she was receiving something — a computer virus of some kind, but oddly not a very effective one. She could have rejected it, but the information it might deliver could be useful so she consigned it to secure processing space. Then came steeply climbing energy readings from the approaching vessel, and she knew she was in trouble.

  She flung Heliotrope to one side, hull temperature rising eight hundred degrees, changed direction again, and fired a selection of missiles from her rail-gun. The EM emitter in one missile screamed up to power; two others exploded, spreading clouds of microscopic signal relays and sodium reflectors. This sophisticated chaff cloud blotted the wormship from her view, just as she hoped it blotted out the enemy’s view of her. But how the hell had it seen her? Her chameleonware could baffle just about any sensor. Then, processing this problem while simultaneously controlling her ship and its weapons, and deciding her subsequent course of action, Orlandine realized how: she had become complacent.

  The greater the complexity of any technology, the more room there was for error. Chameleonware worked just as long as the enemy you confronted did not know you possessed it. If that same enemy was as sophisticated as you, it would stop looking for what was there, and start looking for what wasn’t there. In environments like this, where there was little backdrop to hide against, the enemy would find you by locating the inherent errors and holes in your chameleonware. It was time, Orlandine felt, to get the hell out of here.

  Using the mycelium inside her body to brace it, she slammed Heliotrope into a hard turn. She fired off still more chaff missiles and ordnance, then glimpsed the stab of a microwave beam cutting through the chaff cloud to her right. The wormship became momentarily visible, explosions blooming all around it as it defended itself from her missiles. Ahead of her lay one of the rod-forms, on course down toward the moonlet she had just abandoned. She hit it with the high-intensity solid-state laser she’d recently installed in the nose of Heliotrope, between the jaws of its forward pincer grab. The laser, a coherent beam no wider than her wrist but pumping out the kind of energy usually reserved for particle weapons, cut straight through the object, then must have hit something vital for it exploded like a balloon full of liquid. She fell through a cloud of skinlike fragments, then accelerated into a tight orbit about the moonlet itself.

  Beam weapons fired by the wormship turned ice to vapour on the jagged landscape below, burning gulleys through it thousands of miles long. She saw sharp stone exploding from knife-shaped peaks as they heated just too fast for their mineral structure to sustain. Then she was out, accelerating. The wormship, she noticed, had slowed — clearly it, or whatever drove it, had decided not to pursue.

  Orlandine dropped Heliotrope into U-space and fled.

  * * * *

  As Cormac took the shuttle down into Klurhammon’s atmosphere, the U-space journey to this world now seemed like a distant dream. He was relieved to be back in the solid world with its solid facts all around him, unpleasant though they might be, and perhaps the term ‘realspace’ now possessed more meaning for him than for others.

  An occasional blue-green or red flash lit the screen. Briefly, at one point, he spotted a coherent beam punching down to their left through the cloud layer.

  ‘King is certainly getting enthusiastic,’ observed Hubbert Smith.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Cormac acidly, ‘and not showing any inclination to land and grab any of that technology.’

  ‘You’re such a cynic. King doesn’t want any Jain technology — he can give it up any time he likes,’ quipped Smith.

  Cormac glanced over at him. Smith sat in the copilot’s seat, using the instruments there to monitor both general coms and the situation on the planet below.

  ‘What’s the status now?’ he asked tersely, not in the mood for Smith’s humour.

  ‘We’re getting no communication from the surface,’ the Golem replied, ‘but that’s not surprising. Any survivors will now know the dangers of using general com channels.’

  ‘The enemy?’ asked Cormac as cloud engulfed the shuttle.

  ‘Still active,’ Smith reported.

  Cormac glanced back at Arach, but the spider drone was showing enough sensitivity not to do his usual tappity dance at the prospect of a fight. They had all seen the pictures from orbit of the wrecked city, the burned-out homesteads beyond it and the numerous corpses — some still walking. He then looked at Scar, who was squatting beside the spider drone, but the dracoman just wore his usual ferocious expression.

  Smith went on, ‘After taking out the larger concentrations of Jain-tech with warheads King is now targeting the smaller stuff in the vicinity of larger groups of refugees. He won’t get everything, however, and still can’t help our particular small group of survivors.’ The Golem turned towards Arach and winked.

  The shuttle was now vibrating, and soon punched through the underbelly of the overcast. Below stretched a chequerboard of fields scattered with occasional buildings like game pieces — a landscape that much reminded Cormac of the English countryside seen from a gravcar. There were rivers down there too, but their regular pattern demonstrated artificial antecedents. He glanced down at the terrain map appearing on one of his lower sub-screens, then at the cross on the main chainglass screen before him, and decided he didn’t like the inaccuracy of this so queried the shuttle’s computer through his gridlink. Some delay passed before he had the information about their route lodged in his mind like a memory. The delay irritated him but was a necessary consequence of the surrounding ether being filled with Erebus’s subversion programs. Approaching such matters incautiously might easily result in him coming under control of one of those things down on the ground, and it making him fly this shuttle into a mountain.

  ‘King tells me one of the four survivors is down,’ said Smith abruptly. ‘Probably dead now and being drafted by the opposition.’

  ‘Damn.’ Cormac wished he could go faster. In his gridlink he accessed the plan King had se
nt while they were still aboard. In what was often termed a ‘third eye’ he studied the layout of their destination: a building complex located underneath a tree canopy. King was having difficulty identifying targets there. By means of heat signatures and observing their patterns of movement, the attack ship AI had ascertained that there was fight going on in the complex and that four — now three — individuals might be under attack from Jain-subverted humans. Unfortunately, though King should be able to hit a target a foot wide from orbit, the heat signatures of the good guys and bad guys were difficult to distinguish from each other. It also might not be that easy to tell the difference up close. Though Cormac had already worked out a plan of attack and imparted it to the others, and they, professionals that they were, had absorbed and understood it, there was still a chance this could turn messy.

  The fields terminated right up against a forest of huge gnarled trees. Accessing information about this world, loaded to his gridlink but not yet loaded to his mind, Cormac learnt that these also constituted a crop — their seed pods producing an interlaced mass of biocontrol modules. Apparently the wood itself could also be wired up as an organic processor, but there was some dispute about felling the trees because of an ongoing investigation into the possibility that they might be sentient. For a moment, as he gazed at the forest, the trees seemed to multiply to infinity, and yet it was as if he knew the position of every one of them. He also glimpsed the buildings presently hidden from normal view.

  ‘Dammit!’

  ‘Problem?’ asked Smith.

  Cormac concentrated and brought his immediate surroundings back into focus. He really didn’t need the distraction of that other perception now.