9

The history of dracomen is well documented (check out the numerous entries in that questionable publication the Quince. Guide) but what isn’t known, though it is debated at length, is their future. The world of Masada, where the dracoman race sprouted from the ground, as from Cadmus’ sowing of the dragon’s teeth, is no longer under interdict, and thus dracomen, growing rapidly in number from their inception, are departing to other worlds to set up home. This sort of dispersion was occurring even during the interdict, since dracomen had proved a very useful addition to ECS combat forces, went wherever in the Polity those forces were needed, and often never returned home. Continually they are percolating throughout the Polity, though inevitably the AIs keep a close watch on them. The problem with them is that they were created by an alien entity with just as much intelligence and possibly more guile than possessed by most major AIs. What do dracomen want? Are they still in the service of Dragon or do they now possess the same motivations as any evolved being? The latter seems unlikely for they are still basically artificial intelligences despite their biological nature. And precisely how their bodies function has yet to be understood, let alone the unfathomable processes of their minds. However, though it remains possible that Dragon has some nefarious purpose in mind for them, there is another more plausible scenario. The dracomen were a dying Dragon sphere’s act of procreation. They were its grab for something comparable to the gene-motivated immortality all evolved creatures strive for. They were its children. Only two of the four Dragon spheres now remain, and could be as easily destroyed as their brethren, but Dragon entire will never die while dracomen still exist.

- From How It Is by Gordon

At first she thought the gabbleduck was weaving together strands of flute grass, but then she understood that the ribbons of material it was using were a dull alloy inlaid with nanoscopic circuitry. The Atheter was making— No, she could not think of any word to name that artefact, yet she knew the alien would climb inside it, to then interface with it and through it ascend to a higher perception of reality. This was an old art, of course, and one being swiftly displaced by the new and easier technology of the Jain. Mika thought of them as the Jain, but for the Atheter both the name and the understanding of that dead race was utterly different.

As she focused her outer eyes beyond her fellow, Mika’s view abruptly included the weird basketwork city beyond. She reached up with one of her composite arms and inserted a curving black claw into her bill to worry at some fibrous remnant of her recent dinner still trapped between her teeth. Still focusing on the first two views with two pairs of eyes, she then focused her distance-viewing eyes up above the city, where a fleet of ships shaped like soft-edged crucifixes was now descending into sight. There were those who held extreme doubts about Jain-tech, and rumours of conflict now surrounded it, so as a precaution these ships had been summoned to take this world’s mind-collective off to a safe place . . .

Mika made the transition from deep sleep to utter wakefulness in just an eye-blink. Her head felt heavy, stuffed full, but she experienced no blurred confusion about where she was or what she was doing. She was ensconced inside a weaponized Dragon sphere which was now, most likely, arriving outside the accretion disc of a new solar system - but one swarming with wild Jain technology. She opened her eyes to darkness and the sensation of floating. Moving her hands, she touched snaky forms surrounding her, and tracking one back down found it was attached to her own torso, just below her ribcage. She slid a hand up to her neck and then ran it round her head. No attachments there, so perhaps one previously there had been removed, or else the one attached below her ribcage was linked to her mind through her body. For certainly Dragon had made a connection to her brain, for how else had it been filled with Atheter memories?

In the darkness she closed her eyes and concentrated. It felt as if there were objects like steel orchids hanging in the meat of her brain, and that when she tried to get close to these, to link with them, to know them, they snapped closed. Only by utterly relaxing herself did the orchids seem to open and lose their density, then utterly weird sensations flooded into her consciousness, along with images impossible for human eyes to have seen, for humans possessed only one pair of eyes each. How much of the Atheter memstore was now lodged inside her skull? And how much else besides? For occasionally other human sensations and images surfaced - those she at once recognized as recorded by aug and gridlink during the sole human mission to the Maker realm. At one point she saw herself fleeing through corridors, escaping from massive beetle-like biomechs. She saw Sparkind soldiers protecting her and dying. These memories, she recognized, were in fact those of the runcible technician called Chaline - a survivor of that same mission who had witnessed what Jain technology had done to the Maker civilization. Mika slightly resented these memories, not because Dragon had pumped them into her mind, but because Chaline had once been Cormac’s lover. It was silly human emotion, but one she clung to. Her life now seemed to be fast straying into the territory of the unhuman, and at least this petty jealousy reminded her of what she originally was.

‘It seems you’ve turned me into a walking memstore,’ she informed the darkness.

Yet from whatever angle she approached this, she could not seem to get upset about it. Almost certainly Dragon had tampered with her mind to make her so readily accept this imposition, and even accept the tampering itself. There came no reply from Dragon, which didn’t surprise her. She lay there contemplatively a while longer, then finally enquired of the darkness, ‘Are we there?’

Reddish light bloomed and she saw she was floating within a fleshy cyst with various organic umbilici attached to her naked body. Abruptly they began to detach and retract into the walls. Glancing down she saw raw holes rapidly closing up in her skin. Her body should not be able to do that sort of thing by itself, therefore she was right about it having been altered. She wondered if Dragon had made further physical changes to her during her recent long sleep, while also filling her skull with both Atheter and human memories. However, even though she was curious about all this, the intrusion seemed no more than that: a curiosity. As the last of the snaky things slid from sight, she reached up to push against the soft ceiling, while she swung her feet down to the floor, though experiencing no real sense of up or down. Thus braced she studied her surroundings and noticed a package, wrapped in some organic caul, bonded to the wall of the cyst. She pushed herself over to it, took hold and felt her fingers rip through the soft outer tissue. Inside, as half expected, she found her undersuit and spacesuit, and began the frustrating task of dressing while in zero G.

‘To reply to your first observation,’ came Dragon’s belated reply, ‘yes, I have turned you into a walking memstore. Then, to reply to your question: no, we are not there yet, though we are getting close.’

‘Why have you put all this stuff into my head?’ she asked.

‘Because you are the delivery mechanism.’

‘Are you going to explain that?’

‘The seemingly easy way of learning - by asking - is not necessarily the best,’ Dragon replied. ‘When you eventually understand, you will understand fully.’

Annoyed at the evasive reply, but even more annoyed with the way she was gyrating in mid-air while trying to fasten the seal-strips of her spacesuit, Mika said, ‘Can’t you at least give me gravity in here?’

Immediately a hand of force slammed her down onto what was now definitely the floor.

‘Thanks so much,’ she said, knowing her sarcasm wouldn’t be lost on Dragon but guessing it would be ignored. ‘Where are we then? At my delivery point?’

‘No, we are here.’

A patch of blackness appeared above her and began to spread. The moment she saw the glint of a star in that blackness, she realized what was happening. The illusion was near-perfect and this looked like a hole in the cyst tearing open directly onto vacuum. It gaped all the way around her until the walls completely disappeared. She hung in void, stars glinting all about her, while the second Dragon sphere became as clearly visible nearby as Luna when seen from the surface of Earth. As a result she felt an agoraphobia she’d never experienced with the Polity version of this kind of three-sixty-degree viewing technology.

‘Be nice to see at least a bit of you,’ she suggested.

Her own Dragon sphere etched itself onto existence around her like the body of a diatom: a glassy entity in which she could see translucent organs pulsing and writhing, and the tubes of those equatorial weapons amid sporadic rosy glows of layered objects she guessed to be fusion reactors. However, this all remained at the periphery of her vision, for looking straight ahead she saw only open space.

‘So why are we here? she persisted.

‘Because we are being followed - and we don’t want to be followed.’

Abruptly the same rosy glows flared and something deep below her flashed light of a colour she could not even name, and twisted itself in a direction she could not point to. The sphere dropped into U-space . . . and Mika gazed briefly upon impossibility, and found that rather than it driving her mad, she could almost encompass it. She only just managed to repress a yelp of surprise before Dragon surfaced to the real again. She looked at her hand, a claw gripping soft glassiness, and released her hold on the cyst wall. The sphere dropped into U-space again. She closed her eyes, which lessened the alarming perception but did not entirely banish it. Five more jumps, a brief glimpse of a binary star and a closer view of a green sun spewing hoops of fire, then the intense image of something like the head of Medusa, silhouetted against white light. Mika shuddered, reminded of her dreams, but knew what this shape really was. Then the Dragon sphere around her surfaced into the real again, amid the chaos of a killing ground.

Mika flinched as her sphere hammered straight into a visible shock wave carrying assorted burning debris and twisting chunks of shattered wormship. The impact registered as a mere shudder deep down where she resided. However, the sphere’s sudden change of course did throw her to one side, and she abruptly sat down. This then was that ‘other purpose besides’ Dragon had mentioned when they were discussing its new weapons.

Down to her right something glowed like heated iron, and in her peripheral vision she recognized the source as one of the sphere’s equatorial weapons. A sky-blue particle beam stabbed out, becoming blurry and turquoise where it lanced through gaseous cloud. Rising through the cloud like some chthonic monster came a wormship spewing a swarm of missiles ahead of it.

The particle beam splashed against the wormship’s hard-fields, and within the tangled body of the alien vessel a constellation ignited as hundreds of hard-field generators burned out all at once. The beam then winked out as Dragon revolved slightly, then its next massive equatorial cannon fired up. The last hard-fields went out and the new beam sliced straight across the wormship like a sabre cutting through a pile of eels. The beam then played back and forth, tearing the two remaining halves of the enemy apart. Acceleration suddenly flung Mika back against the wall of the cyst. She pushed herself down to the floor and lay there on her back. White lasers webbed through clouds of burning gas all around, igniting black dots to a painful incandescence. Two massive impacts ensued on Dragon’s skin and peripherally she registered glowing dents there with serpentine movement underneath. Distantly she saw another wormship burst apart in some massive explosion, and then observed the other Dragon sphere hurtle through the resulting debris cloud.

Mika noted how the wormships in this conflict did not resort to their rod-form weapons - perhaps realizing they would not prove effective against the Dragon spheres. Soon enough it seemed that nothing was. The chaos lasted less than ten minutes before the two spheres were coasting peacefully along together, with only occasional explosions around them as their white-light lasers picked off the odd stray missile or a large chunk of wormship debris.

‘How many of them were there?’ Mika finally asked.

‘Five,’ Dragon replied.

‘You should be working with Polity forces,’ she suggested.

‘Better to kill the disease itself than a few bacteria.’

Before Mika could question that remark further Dragon dropped back into U-space, and all she could think of was coiling up in a ball and wishing the reality out there away.

* * * *

The cargo runcible assembled around Heliotrope’s pincers was now complete, as was all the other equipment packed aboard, and testing could begin once Bludgeon came across to link himself up. Ship and war runcible had nearly reached the rendezvous point before the fire in one of the U-space engine rooms had truncated their journey, and both were now using their fusion engines to cover the remaining distance. Orlandine gazed through her sensors at what lay ahead: a black asteroid field, perhaps resulting from some long-ago cataclysm and set loose to roam interstellar space, was strewn out in front of them for the best part of a billion miles. The chunks of rock lay millions of miles apart, but the one immediately ahead would do. Extending about a quarter of a mile across, it would be adequate for a test of the weapon she now controlled, and it would be insurance should it turn out that Randal had been lying about the one coming here to provide her with Erebus’s new recognition codes and chameleonware formats, for this in fact could be a trap intended entirely for her.

Finding herself now at a loose end after hours of labour, Orlandine felt a sudden panic. It was at times like this that her guilt about the murder of her lover Shoala resurfaced. It was at times like this that she felt guilty about the tens of thousands who had died on Klurhammon and a particularly hard twist of grief for two of those lives. She clamped down on it quickly, and queried the war runcible about Bludgeon’s location. Learning that the drone was already on his way out to Heliotrope, she turned her attention to the appropriate airlock on the war runcible.

Bludgeon, the blind iron bedbug a couple of yards across, was already outside the war runcible airlock, and while she watched he leaped from the hull and glided over towards Heliotrope. Good. Orlandine disengaged herself from her ship’s interface sphere, which was not too much of a business, since some hours before she had physically disengaged from all the Jain-tech aboard so now only needed to disconnect from the Polity-tech. Once out into the corridor beyond, she eyed the new ducts carrying wrist-thick superconducting cables and networks of coolant pipes towards the nose of the ship. She noted how this passage was just wide enough to allow Bludgeon through, though the drone would have to cut away part of the interface sphere to gain access to it. But that was no problem; in the unlikely event of Bludgeon not possessing the right tools for the job, he could call on Cutter who, remaining onboard, possessed enough sharp edges and slicing energy weapons to rapidly dice the entire ship.

Reaching what remained of her living area, Orlandine hesitated. Even though she could at any time halt the plan she had set in motion, this moment nevertheless seemed like a point of no return. She moved on towards the airlock, past sections where walls had been torn out and two spherical reactors - spares from the war runcible - squatted at the end of a line of large cubic machines sprouting manifold pipes and S-con cables. Also spares from the war runcible, these cubes were high-powered refrigeration and thermal-conversion units. She could only hope all of these, along with the tanks of evaporant now distributed throughout the Heliotrope, would be enough.

Cutter crouched beside the airlock, folded up in a way no natural mantid could possibly manage and displaying a lethal mass of sharp-edged insectile limbs, the ports and protuberances of energy tools and two bulbous unknowable eyes.

‘You’ll look after him and keep everything on track?’ Orlandine asked, confining herself to human speech.

‘I will,’ Cutter replied, his mandibles sawing emphatically.

Orlandine had only recently learned that the partnership of these two drones had lasted even longer than she had lived. They were friends. They looked after each other. She tried to be reasonable about this because friendships between drones were not that remarkable, yet she still felt a stab of jealousy.

After a clattering from outside announced Bludgeon’s arrival on the hull, the airlock began to cycle. Orlandine closed up her suit, the chainglass visor sliding up to engage with the main helmet rising from behind. She now remembered thinking about replacing the chainglass visor with a shimmer-shield, but had since decided that if anything went wrong with the suit, a shimmer-shield might just blink out whereas chainglass would remain in place. The Jain-tech inside her body should enable her to survive any exposure to vacuum, but still she was reluctant to rely on that entirely. Perhaps, understanding the dangers she would soon face, she was getting a bit paranoid, but she knew that ignoring even such tiny precautions could get a person killed.

The inner door of the airlock opened and Bludgeon scuttled through, raising his blind head towards her. A brief informational exchange ensued, almost a mathematical greeting, then Bludgeon turned and headed towards the interface sphere as Orlandine stepped into the airlock of Heliotrope, maybe for the last time. The airlock evacuated quickly - the air it contained being pumped into a reserve tank, for though Heliotrope’s present occupants had no need of it, it could be used for cooling too. Orlandine clambered outside and pushed herself off from the ship heading towards the war runcible. For a moment she considered using the reaction jets located at the wrists of the suit, then abruptly decided against that. Trying to keep busy with such minor details just to avoid painful speculation could lead to disaster. She really needed to pause now and think hard about what she was doing, so she closed down all contact with both Heliotrope and the war runcible, and allowed herself a still moment in which to ask herself some salient questions.

Was Fiddler Randal working against Erebus, or was he merely something Erebus had fashioned to lure her into a trap? Further confirmation of everything he had so far told her had come with the methodology of Erebus’s attack upon the Polity, for it was perfectly in accord with the plans Randal had shown her earlier. It occurred to her that to assume this was some sort of trap for her was utter arrogance on her part. Surely she wasn’t that important to Erebus? Then again it seemed she was clearly important enough for Erebus to attack a world of ‘no tactical importance’ just to kill her brothers. It all seemed very odd, and she felt that Randal, who she kept locked up in that secure virtuality, had not yet told her everything. However, she felt this all to be worth the risk. Here at this rendezvous the war runcible would not be able to deliver its full potential but, unless a USER was quickly deployed, they still had a good chance of escaping any treachery. At their final destination, even if that was a trap, Erebus might find that it wasn’t a strong enough one. The war runcible, she hoped, would come as a rather unpleasant surprise.

Orlandine bent her legs to absorb her own impact against the hull of the war runcible while simultaneously initiating the ‘gecko’ function of her boot soles to stick herself in place. She then reached out with one arm of her assister frame to grab a rung of the ladder curving round the hull towards the nearby airlock. Now at her destination, she once again made contact with the ever-spreading Jain-tech network within the massive device, and ordered it to open the lock for her. As she entered, she saw the fusion drives wink out and, glancing to one side, she could just about see, with her human eyes, the asteroid they had been heading for turning slowly in vacuum some hundreds of miles away. Soon she was fully inside the war runcible and opening her helmet to the breathable air that for some time now had been displacing the original inert preserving gas. She could walk easily now, since all the gravplates within the device were fully operational, which was perhaps not entirely to Knobbler’s taste, since equipped with all those tentacles, he seemed specially designed for moving in zero gravity. He had also been designed to move speedily through corridors wider than those available here. His multiple limbs and big body leaving scratches and dents on the walls, Knobbler came into sight ahead of her, finally clattering and crashing to a halt and totally filling the corridor.

‘After the test it will take Bludgeon five days to reach Anulus,’ the big drone observed.

‘No problem,’ Orlandine replied. ‘Once Erebus takes the ECS forces out of play, it will take some time for it to marshal its own forces. Erebus won’t want to come out of the end of the corridor to Earth with anything less than full strength because there’ll still be plenty of resistance between the end of the corridor and Earth itself.’

With a surprisingly fast and sinuous twist, Knobbler moved on ahead - one sensor-tipped tentacle still pointing back towards her.

She strode along behind him, mentally checking all the repairs and modifications that had been made to the war runcible. The other drones were getting all the weapons up to speed since, for her plan to work, the runcible at least needed to survive in order to implement it. She sent signals to the interface sphere she had installed in this particular segment’s control blister, preparing it for its final component: herself.

* * * *

Azroc felt a moment of extreme frustration at not being presented with all the information and analysis available to the others present in this dodecahedral chamber, but then that would have defeated the object of him being here. He observed the cloud of magma now spreading out from the misshapen planetoid in the Caldera system and reflected that its effect upon the two Caldera worlds would be minimal. Then he pondered his earlier warning to Jerusalem about the wormships that had been orbiting that planetoid. Wormships that were now toast. He had said he was certain they must be up to something out there - that their attack upon the Caldera worlds was being delayed for some purpose, just like that other attack involving asteroid bombardment.

‘So what did you use,’ he asked. ‘A stealthed missile or were there attack ships out there?’

‘Neither,’ Jerusalem replied unhelpfully.

‘Is it necessary for me not to know what happened?’ Azroc asked.

‘When you have a loose cannon, it is best to give it a target and stand back, rather than try to control it,’ Jerusalem supplied.

Obviously the cannon in question was not Azroc himself. ‘The nature of this cannon?’

‘You have doubtless heard of a homicidal Golem called Mr Crane - the one some refer to as the brass man?’

‘I thought he was Skellor’s sidekick - working for the bad guys.’

An information packet arrived instantly and Azroc studied the Golem’s potted history. Mr Crane: a Golem Twenty-Five prototype corrupted for use by separatists, and then destroyed by Cormac’s troops on the planet Viridian. Resurrected by Skellor using Jain technology and turned into something even more dangerous than Golem. Then sent by Skellor as an envoy to Dragon on the planet Cull - after Jain-tech extraction, since Dragon would not allow such tech anywhere near itself. Dragon had repaired Crane’s corrupted and fragmented mind but, as with all things Dragon did, the nature of that repair was questionable. It was certain the brass man now contained Dragon technology, as opposed to Jain-tech.

Jerusalem added, ‘I question whether Mr Crane’s nature can now be assessed with any accuracy.’

‘So why did Mr Crane blow up a planetoid to wipe out the best part of fifty wormships and, more importantly, how?’

‘The “why” is simple. Mr Crane had become the unofficial protector of the sleer-human hybrids on Cull, which Erebus wiped out, so he is now out for vengeance. The “how” is complicated. We allowed him to use Polity vessels and runcibles to go in pursuit of the wormship used to kill those hybrids, which was then down on a small moon. He first obtained a spaceship from certain arms dealers on the Line, then went after the wormship and killed its legate captain.’

‘I see,’ said Azroc. ‘And this is how you know that the worm-ships are captained.’

‘Precisely.’

‘Then?’

‘Mr Crane next sought further information about the disposition of Erebus’s forces, which we supplied. Possessing a legate’s vessel enabled him to gain access to Erebus’s com and to use chameleonware that would be ignored even if it was detected in use, being Erebus’s own chameleonware. At the Caldera planetoid he analysed Erebus’s intentions to a quite remarkable degree, then used stolen detonation codes and a CTD imploder to the devastating effect you yourself just witnessed.’

‘Definitely a loose cannon to have on one’s side then,’ Azroc admitted, curious to know more about this lethal brass Golem. But that wasn’t relevant to his present task, so he returned his attention to the overall battle. ‘Wormship fleets are now disengaging at seventeen different locations,’ he observed. ‘It seems the shape of this attack is changing.’

‘Evidently.’ The reply came across flat and toneless, which meant Jerusalem was applying its processing power elsewhere and that a hastily fashioned sub-mind was now responding. But, even so, such a sub-mind probably possessed an IQ of an order of magnitude higher than Azroc’s own.

Azroc gazed from all vantage points at the model of the attack now hanging in virtual space inside his own mind. He once again modelled the Polity infrastructures beyond it - supply routes and manufacturing worlds, military bases and shipyards - but still could see no correlation. What was Erebus after?

‘Erebus hasn’t employed USERs at any point of attack,’ he noted. ‘This leaves him vulnerable to us bringing in reinforcements, but allows him to bring in reinforcements too, and thus keep his attack protean.’

Stating the obvious, Azroc thought. And his words seemed almost a prophetic commentary as those same fleets Erebus was withdrawing began to join attacks on other worlds. Azroc stared in frustration at the model he had created. Only twenty hours ago it had seemed that Erebus was preparing for ground assaults to capture about eight worlds, leaving the rest either depopulated or destroyed. Yet now some of those ground assaults were being abandoned, as were some of the other more destructive attacks. Even those wormships that had been engaged in accelerating the big asteroid towards one target world were now abandoning their position.

‘There are more wormships arriving in the Caldera system than elsewhere,’ he observed, though it seemed a trite comment to make considering the devastation there. Wormships were swarming out of U-space and hurtling down towards the twin Caldera worlds with almost careless abandon. The sun mirrors, previously used for energy generation, had now been turned into weapons and were busy frying wormship after wormship. Space in that zone was no longer black, and it seemed as if the conflict was being enacted inside a block of amber.

Azroc tried to step back from it all. What did Erebus want? Let Azroc suppose the entity wished, for whatever psychotic reasons, to either smash or take over the Polity, how would he, Azroc, achieve such an aim if he controlled the same resources? He would infiltrate the Polity, deploy his forces into critical places throughout it, and then initiate a surprise attack. Yet Erebus had done nothing of the kind. Instead it had first revealed its forces outside the Polity, giving ECS time to prepare, then at leisure had begun attacking the very periphery, even though it had the option to U-jump right inside and launch an attack there.

Azroc decided that there must be some critical piece of information still missing. He withdrew from his models and returned to utilizing ordinary human sensation and comprehension of his surroundings. The hologram at the centre of the hedron now displayed a montage of battle schematics intermixed with occasional gravity maps.

‘Any news yet from your agent about the attack on Klurhammon?’ Azroc enquired, swinging his attention across to those working at the concentric rings of consoles occupying the adjacent floor.

‘There has been no—’ The voice began in that same flat tone used by the sub-mind, then abruptly cut off. Then the real Jerusalem continued, ‘It would seem that Agent Cormac and the King of Hearts were given new orders.’

‘It would seem?’ Azroc noted that some of the personnel manning the consoles were now getting up and abandoning their posts.

‘Yes,’ said Jerusalem. ‘Apparently I myself wanted him to proceed to Ramone and there capture a legate.’

‘What?’

‘Cormac and his ship are currently down on the surface of Ramone, though details of his progress are sparse. Communications are intermittent, since encryption needs to be changed frequently by the groundside defence forces there.’

Azroc noted that those abandoning their posts had occupied an area around one particular individual. Azroc saw to his surprise that this was a Golem.

‘Now,’ said Jerusalem.

A length of console and a circular section of deck exploded into the air. At that precise moment all but the Golem threw themselves to the floor. A great ribbed pipe two metres across terminating in a massive four-fingered claw and numerous ports and lethal-looking protuberances shot out of the hole, curved over whip-fast, and slammed down on the Golem. Cryogenic gas exploded out at the contact point, as the claw closing on the Golem tore up part of the console and the metal flooring underneath. Miniature lightning flared and earthed, and there came the bright flashes of particle beams cutting within the mass. Then a glowing white explosion blasted the claw into the air, and an ensuing arc-fire melted both the Golem and everything lying within a few feet of it. The wrecked claw seemed to pause in frustrated hesitation, then retracted itself back down into the hole it had made.

‘Damn,’ said Jerusalem.

‘And precisely what happened then?’ asked Azroc.

‘I was just trying to capture one of the enemy in our camp,’ Jerusalem replied. ‘The same one who gave Cormac and the King of Hearts those false orders.’

Like the impact of a boulder falling, Azroc felt a large mass of fresh information fall suddenly within his remit.

‘I have already analysed this data for other similar false orders,’ Jerusalem explained, ‘and, oddly, it seems there have been no others issued. Yet Erebus’s agent here was in a position to cause us maximum damage by doing so. Now, see what else you can find.’

As Azroc began checking through the files and logs the enemy’s Golem agent had been using, he felt a surge of emotion, again from that point somewhere below emulation. This time, though, he recognized fear. The fact that one of Erebus’s minions had managed to penetrate here, right to the heart of the Jerusalem, told him this was a war that the Polity might actually lose.

* * * *

The antigravity tank was a disc-shaped affair with a ceramal skirt below and a wide turret jutting above from which protruded twinned particle cannons. Now only one of the cannons was capable of delivering its usual destructive potential. The other had been modified so its accelerating coils could be used to propel helium superfluid doped with iron particles, a supply of which resided in two cylindrical tanks welded to the tank’s skirt. Anything hit by a jet of this stuff would be frozen solid in a second, since the fluid’s temperature was only fifty degrees above absolute zero.

‘Remember,’ said Cormac to Hubbert Smith. ‘If you get a legate in your sights, you nail it immediately.’

Smith nodded briefly and climbed the steps leading to the open hatch in one side of the tank, and then lowered himself inside. Watching him go, Cormac continued to reflect on whether this was all a complete waste of time. Yes, the superfluid would certainly freeze Jain-tech hardware, but it could not freeze electric or photonic signals, so if the legate they targeted happened to contain some sort of explosive device that could survive the freezing process there would still be nothing to prevent it sending the detonation signal. It struck him that Jerusalem was either prepared to expend personnel for minimum gain, or this mission he was about to undertake was an act of desperation, and Cormac hadn’t thought things were going so badly.

‘Three wormships landed and decohered on the surface,’ said Remes. His tone had become leaden since the destruction of the AI Ramone, the one who had brought him into being. Maybe Remes was missing his parent.

Cormac studied the aerial shots showing the disposition of Erebus’s forces, which Remes was now relaying direct to his gridlink. The segmented objects looking like organic trains that had first led the enemy attack had now withdrawn and formed defensive lines two hundred miles long. Further back, behind them, were three Jain-tech substructures like huge spiky mollusc shells bonded together with tar that seemed likely to form the cores of each wormship. The nearest one lay twenty miles straight out from their present position here at the end of the grounded atmosphere ship. And there, he hoped, he would find his legate captain.

‘We’ll start with this nearest one,’ said Cormac. ‘You’ll hold back from hitting all three of the ship cores for the moment, in case we don’t find what we want in this one?’

‘We have cancelled the main assault,’ Remes confirmed. ‘Now that the wormship fleet has withdrawn, there will be no need to expend any further lives - except in support of your mission.’

Comforting, Cormac thought. Without him here, the ground forces would have needed only to maintain city defence while awaiting bombardment of the enemy by ECS capital ships. With the Cable Hogue looming up, he supposed it wasn’t surprising that the remaining wormships had retreated. However, information was now becoming available that this was not unique, for Erebus’s forces were being redeployed elsewhere throughout its concerted assault on the Line worlds.

‘Is that atmosphere gunship on the way yet?’ Cormac enquired.

Remes pointed back towards the city, before turning away and heading for the antigravity platform upon which they had arrived. Glancing where indicated, Cormac observed another massive ship like the one here on the ground drifting towards them like a skyscraper uprooted and turned on its side. Then he glanced round to check the disposition of his own small force.

Two of the bargelike troop carriers were loaded with fifty soldiers each, including twelve dracomen and numerous Golem. All the human soldiers contained those ‘little doctors’. He wasn’t sure why he had asked for such troops specifically, though he had a horrible suspicion he had chosen them because they seemed less human and therefore of less value. He didn’t want to examine his own motivations too closely.

The AG tanks were to go first, after the atmosphere gunship had done its work. The carriers were to follow, surrounded by a selection of gun platforms. Cormac glanced across at Scar, who was strolling back from some sort of draco-conference with a group of his brethren, then he crooked a finger at Arach, who was gazing out intently at their destination from fifty feet up on the side of the grounded atmosphere ship. The spider drone ran straight down the sheer armoured surface, bounced on the ground leaving a small crater, then hurtled across towards him.

‘I don’t need to give you specific instructions,’ Cormac explained to both the dracoman and the spider drone. ‘Everything is fair game, except a legate if we’re lucky enough to come across one. Let’s go.’ He led the way over to a flying gun platform on which a pulse-cannon was gimball-mounted. Since the gun seat was intended for a human, Cormac took possession of that while Scar stood by the control pillar. After hesitating for a moment, Arach grabbed a box containing an extra supply of the ordnance he used, climbed aboard securing the box behind him, then raised one leg, the glimmer of razor chainglass extruding along one edge of it. With two quick swipes he removed a large chunk of the safety rail, then settled himself down at the very rim of the platform. Opening his abdomen hatches he raised into position his two Gatling-style cannons and swivelled them to point off at right angles to each other. Then, as the shadow of the huge atmosphere gunship drew across them, Scar took them up into the air.

The moment the shield wall opened to allow the gunship through, it seemed like someone had opened a hatch onto a howling thunderstorm. Immediately, munitions began to impact on the gunship’s hard-fields as they first filled the gap in the wall, then eased out ahead of the vessel. Some missiles, coming in at acute angles, penetrated the narrow gaps in shielding, but were soon mostly tracked and obliterated by autogun fire. Some, however, blew cavities in the ship’s armour. One of them dipped down directly towards Cormac’s little force. Immediately gridlinking to his pulse-cannon, he transferred targeting to his own visual field, placed a frame over the missile, acquired it and gave the instruction to fire all at once. The cannon swung up and to the side -consequently dropping then swinging his seat in the other direction - and fired. The missile exploded, raining chunks of white-hot ceramic over the troop carriers. Having nearly been thrown from his seat, Cormac now strapped himself in securely and grabbed the cannon’s guiding handles.

Once beyond the shield wall, the gunship accelerated and the tanks began to follow it out. They floated along only a few feet above the ground so that they could slam down at any moment, for stuck like limpets to the ground they were less vulnerable to many forms of attack and also attained a stable firing position. The two troop carriers followed, gun platforms rising up around them like flies about cattle. But there were no further attacks for the gunship was scouring the ground ahead.

Missiles and beam weapons kept stabbing down from the huge vessel at targets moving about in the churned wasteland below. Cormac caught subliminal glimpses of rod-forms with Jain growth spread all about them, objects like steel cockroaches and others like long flat coppery leeches, before they disappeared in explosions or else some beam weapon tracked across them. He saw a gun turret shoot up like an iron mushroom from the earth before a massive blast excised the whole area to leave a smoking crater. The top part of the turret glanced off the underside of the gunship and began to drop again, before a particle cannon beam turned it to vapour. Always there came the sounds of metal smacking on metal and the glassy crunch of ceramic armour giving up, amid deafening explosions and high-energy shrieks. Cormac had almost forgotten how severe this all could be. He applied a program in his gridlink to optimize his hearing, toning down the worst of the racket to enable him to hear what he needed to hear, but even if he survived this mayhem, he knew his eardrums might require some doc-work.

Ahead of them multiple detonations were raising a massive firestorm that blotted from view the segmented lines of the enemy. Behind this hard-fields shimmered and flickered like the scaly flank of some translucent giant beast. Then parts of the enemy hard-field wall began to blink out. The Polity assault was too concentrated for it to withstand, and enemy shield generators burned out one after another. Then came another massive explosion, flinging up numerous lengthy wormship sections.

‘Looks like someone dropped a firecracker into a tin of mealworms,’ said Smith, over com.

This choice of description was unusual enough for Cormac to do a quick search of his internal library to find ‘mealworms’. The quickly glimpsed images he was provided with seemed appropriate.

The gunship slid on over the carnage it had already wrought and began firing at targets beyond. Cormac’s forces accelerated and spread out to optimum dispersement. He himself concentrated on familiarizing himself with the pulse-cannon, since until they reached their destination there was little else he could do to influence events.

A quick check showed him that the pulse-cannon possessed no autogun capability. Its processor had been removed because its unsophisticated shielding could not defend it against Jain worms or viruses and had been supplanted by some pretty basic hard wiring. It seemed that, in an utterly old-fashioned way, he would have to be this weapon’s mind.

Running recognition software so that that he would not commit any friendly fire, his gridlink cued to cut weapon fire should his targeting frame fall upon other Polity vehicles or personnel. Keying himself to react fast to anything moving close by that wasn’t any of his own force, he found himself overreacting to flames and smoke until further refining the program. He placed his finger ready both on real and virtual triggers, and then his hindbrain and the weapon became conjoined as an autogun. All was turning to carnage around him as, with fast robotic precision, he fired the cannon while only glimpsing his insectile targets amid the smoke of explosions. It occurred to him then that he really ought to have more personal investment in all this, so he used cognitive programs to get the rest of his brain up to speed. Around him the action seemed to slow down, but seemed no less deadly for that.

Soon they were passing through an area where segments of wormship lay scattered like discarded egg cases, and where hollow rod-forms smoked in the scorched earth. Even though the atmosphere ship had scoured a path through, still a few armoured monstrosities swarmed out into the light. The weapon he controlled firing intermittently, Cormac realized he was nailing only about one in fifty of them, and probably only the ones Arach allowed him to, for the spider drone was very enthusiastic indeed in demonstrating the capabilities of a hundred-year-old war drone. Eventually Cormac accepted the futility of his own meagre input so just turned the pulse-cannon off. He noted the human gunners on nearby platforms putting their weapons aside too, content to watch Arach dance about blasting Erebus’s finest into scrap. Cormac allowed himself a smile, but only a brief one - the reward for complacency on the battlefield was usually a body bag.

Ahead of them the atmosphere gunship rose high out of the smoke and focused on fighting a duel with something directly below it. Just beyond the scattered segments of wormship, the churned-up soil sloped down towards a murky boiling lake. Cormac instantly forced himself to greater alertness, since anything could be lurking under the water’s surface. Arach was also doubly on his guard, ceasing temporarily to reload from his ammo box and peering intently over the edge of the gun platform. The discshaped tanks, in a maneouvre Cormac had seen before, turned on their edges, pairs of them mating up at their bases so they seemed to roll above the lake surface like wheels. However, there came no attack from below, so Cormac U-sensed into the depths. Obviously whoever was running the gunship had also considered this a likely ambush risk and already made it safe. He perceived things still glowing deep down in the water as great globular bubbles of steam rose to the surface, and he wondered if the intense heat down there would eventually boil the lake away.

The upslope beyond the lake looked like the back of some spined beast, for here a forest had been reduced to spiky shards of wood, all evenly coated with black mud. The tanks maintained their wheel formation, which seemed the best strategy since great numbers of attackers kept erupting into the open from underground. Not much to hit on the slope beyond, however, and the few assailants there were of a different nature, designed for another environmental niche. Floating silver worms writhed out of the mess and speared upward, only to disappear under multiple weapon fire and fall away like aluminium confetti.

Beyond the shattered treeline at the top of the slope, a few miles ahead, lay the wormship core still enclosed in a geodesic dome of hard-fields, the nearer side of which the atmosphere gunship was pounding. The occupant of that mass of Jain substructure must have realized the danger now represented by Cormac’s force, for mushroom gun turrets sprouted from the ground lying beyond the hard-fields, and were almost as quickly obliterated from above. Then a gap opened as the defence there began collapsing, and they drove for it without hesitation. Missiles and semi-living predators started to hammer down on the attackers from every direction. A nearby blast sent a troop carrier nosing into the ground ploughing up a bow wave of mud. Cormac glimpsed a pair of AG tanks hurtling apart like flying hubcaps; he saw a gun platform hanging canted, a burning man falling from it. Soldiers poured from the crashed troop carrier towards the tangled wall of Jain substructure, pairs of tank separating to cover their attack. The other carrier landed nose-first against that wall and discharged its passengers too.

Scanning, Cormac requested via his link.

The scan data came through piecemeal owing to the interference and constant electronic attacks. Cormac cursed and resorted to his U-sense to fill in the gaps. He mapped hollows, energy concentrations and movement, from which he built up a schematic of what lay ahead. He then formed a protean attack plan and saw it instantly applied. An explosion flung chunks of Jain coral through the air and opened up the wormship core. Soldiers stormed inside, and tanks and gun platforms entered wherever access was wide enough. Scar guided their platform in behind Smith’s adapted tank and one other to which it was still paired in wheel formation. With the still-functioning particle cannons of these twinned tanks incinerating any intervening structure, they advanced. It seemed like they had entered the interior of a ceramic wormcast, tunnels and cavities opening all around them from which unidentifiable things shrieked and skittered. He saw star-limbed monsters, created thus for travelling fast in this environment, jetting explosive bullets from between their glass mandibles. He glimpsed skeletal balls rolling out and unfolding into shapes disquietingly similar to Arach - before Arach himself destroyed them. Orders relayed to the atmosphere gunship resulted in the whole structure shaking about them as the big craft above began demolishing those areas of the wormship core irrelevant to Cormac’s purpose but certainly still containing enemy mechanisms.

As he processed the information now being presented to him by the various scanners mounted in tanks or carried by soldiers, and sometimes relayed directly from Golem sensoriums but mainly from his own penetrating sense of his surroundings, Cormac grew distant from the frenetic part of himself he labelled ‘autogun’. Briefly he wondered if this was how AIs and haimen felt when they created sub-minds and sub-personae, but there was far too much to do now for him to indulge in such idle speculation.

T3 and 5 concentrate fire on your 6 elevation 3 . . . units 3, 5 and 7 advance and secure area designated 12 axial on globe grid . . .

He issued orders faster than human speech, also running subprograms to enable him to issue separate orders simultaneously. Modelling the ebb and flow of the attack in his gridlink he looked for openings, weaknesses, the best way to apply the forces at his disposal with the aim of getting Smith’s tank safely to that energy-dense concentration of matter lying deep within this core structure, though necessarily distancing himself from the lights constantly going out in this model as people and machines died all around him. Gradually, the attacks from Jain-engineered organisms ebbed around his own particular group, since it was of prime importance to protect Smith and his tank, and their reason for being here. Final barriers crashed down with the sound of shattering porcelain to reveal a chamber fifty feet across, in the centre of which was suspended some glassy concoction like a giant synapse, protrusions connecting it all around to the chamber’s walls.

And something was moving inside it.

Then suddenly all enemy movement within the ship’s core ceased.

Through the eyes of others Cormac saw biomechs simply freeze in place, automated weapons that a moment before had leapt out at them like trapdoor spiders now sagging and dying. Firing still continued for a while, but it all came from Cormac’s own forces. In reply to his query, someone in the gunship above informed him that all enemy movement for miles around had also ceased, all the Jain biomechs frozen.

Just now, Cormac thought with cold clarity, the legate right there ahead of us has obviously realized we are here to capture it, so it will destroy itself. We will be very lucky if such destruction does not include us and the entire ship’s core.

But nothing was happening.

Smith, Cormac sent, needing to add no more.

The two tanks ahead finally separated, and Smith’s vehicle accelerated, smashing its way through glassy struts. A stream of superfluid jetted towards the synapse thing like the beam of an energy weapon, but merely splashed against it and rained down. Surrounding struts shattered and the central structure tumbled. Still playing a stream of liquid helium upon it, Smith followed it down. It hit the chamber floor and shattered, spilling out something bulky and metallic. Focusing in with his gun sights, Cormac could see no sign of a legate.

‘Scar, take us down there,’ he ordered.

Soon the gravplatform was crunching down into what looked like the wreckage of an immense greenhouse. Smith’s tank settled over to one side, its superfluid gun still directed at a grey bulk amid the wreckage. Cormac unstrapped himself and stepped down to the floor, enviroboots crunching on the mess. Interference was dying all around him, while outside channels began to open and bandwidth to grow.

‘What is that?’ he wondered.

‘Still alive - I think,’ Arach replied.

Cormac turned to the drone and to Scar. ‘Stay put but be ready to get out of here fast.’

They reluctantly obeyed as he moved forward.

Drawing closer to the grey bulk he observed something like a huge coiled grub, with cold fog billowing from it. Maybe this was merely some sort of protective coating with the legate inside? Drawing his thin-gun, perhaps more for reassurance than any real expectation that it would be effective, he advanced to stand directly over the strange object. Gazing down at it, he mentally peeled away various layers to get to the core. There was something humanoid inside . . . something rather too humanoid. The grub-thing abruptly opened out to reveal what was bonded into its inner surface. A skeletal human face, with Jain tendrils penetrating all around its head like a Medusa hairdo, turned to gaze up at Cormac with its utterly black eyes.

‘Oddly,’ began the woman entrapped there, ‘it was his final destruct order that enabled me to break his hold ... at least for a while.’ She blinked, licked her lips. ‘But now I find I am anxious for this all to end.’

‘Stay alive and help us defeat him,’ said Cormac, catching on at once.

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘While the betrayer still sits on his throne I won’t be allowed to live, and anyway I don’t want to. You have precisely ten minutes from now to get your people beyond the blast radius.’

Betrayer?

Cormac glanced towards the single barrel of Hubbert Smith’s tank, from which depended a neat line of icicles.

‘That won’t work,’ the woman advised him. ‘Get out of here now.’

‘We’ll take you with us.’

‘One of the many CTDs here sits inside what is left of me,’ she said.

Cormac didn’t have any difficulty believing her, for within the grublike object that both held her and of which she had become a component, he could see a dense mass sitting amid the spread-out parts of her body.

‘Who are you?’ he asked out loud.

‘Run now,’ she replied dreamily.

Cormac reached out and scraped a fingernail down her cheek. He was damned if he was going to leave here with absolutely nothing - there was a good chance that this little scrap of tissue under his fingernail would be able to at least tell them who she was. Then, inside her, he spotted movement: changes in electrical activity around the CTD.

‘Okay, out of here!’

Smith’s tank flipped up to rejoin its partner, the two tanks slamming together like cymbals. Cormac turned back towards the AG platform, expecting obliteration at any moment. He needed to be on that platform and away, so, without conscious consideration, he stepped past the intervening space between them, his boots slamming down on the ceramal deck. A Gatling cannon spun towards him, and Scar turned with teeth bared.

‘Go! Now!’ Cormac ordered as he quickly strapped himself into the gunner’s seat.

Scar glanced towards where Cormac had been standing only a second before, then he wrenched the platform into the air. Soon they were retracing their route into the wormship’s core, hurtling along after Smith’s tank. No detonation yet. Maybe the woman had known what he could see, and so had given him a warning. Within minutes they were outside again, in the hot smoky air.

‘Hold here,’ Cormac instructed, as he watched all the troops piling back aboard the one mobile carrier. He then assessed the perpetually updated model of his attack plan and the relative positions of those within in. Soon everyone who could was out of there and, once they were racing away over the incinerated mud, Cormac signalled for Scar to continue.

‘We failed,’ Cormac announced, both verbally and over com.

‘That’s unfortunate,’ replied Remes from twenty miles away, ‘but now it appears that you weren’t even supposed to be here at all.’

Just then a blast lit up the entire sky.

‘What?’ Cormac turned and looked back in time to see a tsunami of debris bearing down on them. The hot shock wave hit hard, tilting the gun platform and flinging debris past them. He glimpsed chunks of Jain coral hurtling through the air like scythe blades, saw Scar headless at the platform’s controls and Arach tumbling away helplessly through the storm. Then, a boulder of Jain coral slammed straight into the side of the platform like a giant fist. The gun collapsed crushing Cormac underneath it, and something else hit him hard on the side of his head.

The lights went out.

* * * *