Line War

1

The two million inhabitants of the planet Klurhammon claimed that their homeworld did not have a population sufficiently large to warrant a runcible, that device for instantly transporting people across the vast reaches of space. Those few who felt the need to travel elsewhere could easily book passage on one of the many ships that visited to collect the harvests of biomolecular construction units that were the main business of their world. However, in reality, the locals did not want to make it any easier for others in the interstellar Polity to visit them. They were introverted, relished their small society, enjoyed the open spaces around their high-tech farms and within their sprawling open-plan single city of Hammon, and they regarded the rest of the Polity with either indifference or suspicion.

It was not their decision to make.

A runcible was installed in Hammon twenty years ago, along with its controlling artificial intelligence, which became effectively the planetary governor. There were objections to this move, but when a massive influx of visitors failed to appear, and the profitability of certain select biologicals — once transported out by spaceship but now sent by runcible — rapidly increased, these objections died. Those few visitors who did arrive were treated with respect, but little warmth, and soon even their numbers waned. The people of Klurhammon thus continued with their introvert and somewhat Byzantine lifestyle, but were soon to have their antipathy towards visitors justified.

The controlling artificial intelligence and the crew of the Lubeck — a mile-long cargo hauler shaped like a slipper, with a structure resembling a submarine’s conning tower protruding from where the ankle should be — saw the visitor first. Its strange underspace signature presaged the arrival of something utterly alien — something that none but the ship’s AI could recognize. Crew gazed in awe at a screen displaying a sphere three miles across seemingly formed of a tangled mass of giant legless millipedes constantly in motion, loops writhing in and out. It slid past the Lubeck impelled by some engine that clawed at the very fabric of space.

Some managed to exclaim in surprise before massive acceleration, which could not be compensated for by the ship’s internal gravplates, slammed them into walls, floors or ceilings. The Lubeck’s AI knew this would certainly kill some of them, but it also knew that to stay within the vicinity of this thing could mean death to them all.

It was correct.

The missile needled across intervening space from the alien vessel, its passage the briefest flicker to the human eye, but long enough for the AI, whose speed of thought was orders of magnitude above the Lubeck’s crew, to recite every prayer in every human religious canon. It punched through the Lubeck’s hull and detonated before crewmembers impacting hard with the internal structure of the ship could actually die from their injuries. Sun-hot fire bloomed inside the stricken craft, travelling out in a sphere neither slowed nor diverted by any intervening material. In a glare of light and in the silence of space, the cargo hauler simply disappeared. The weird snake-tangled vessel did not alter course or slow and quickly fell into orbit around Klurhammon even as the fire it left behind cooled and dispersed. The Lubeck now consisted of a spreading cloud of gaseous matter containing the occasional sprinkling of metal globules cooling and hardening into what resembled perfectly formed ball bearings.

The runcible AI, named Klurhammon after the world it governed, had seconds longer to contemplate the arrival of this alien vessel. This allowed it time to transmit data and conduct a brief conversation before some form of U-space interference curtailed that option.

‘One of Erebus’s ships has just arrived, destroyed a cargo hauler and is now approaching,’ it told Earth Central — the ruling artificial intelligence on Earth. ‘It is not even bothering to conceal itself with chameleonware.’

‘Get yourself out. Get out now,’ that intelligence replied.

‘It was my understanding that my world was “of no tactical importance”,’ Klurhammon observed. ‘I’ll stay and do what I can for them.’

The option was still there for the Klurhammon AI — physically a large lozenge of crystal using quantum-interface processing — to rail-gun itself from the planet and out into space. It chose not to do so, instead activating its rather pathetic array of orbital weapons and firing them. Missiles sped towards the alien vessel, microwave beams punched invisibly across orbital space. The AI observed some beams striking home, but the burned and blackened modular units of the alien vessel’s wormish structure just revolved inside it, to be replaced by shiny new insectile segments. Perhaps one of the missiles would be more destructive? Almost upon that thought a firestorm spread across tens of thousands of miles, all the missiles detonating before reaching their target.

‘Bad decision,’ Klurhammon opined.

In the ensuing second and a half remaining to the planetary AI, no reply was forthcoming from Earth Central. The high-intensity particle beam fired by the alien ship was eight feet in diameter: straight and blue in vacuum, but blurred and turquoise in atmosphere. It struck the centre of Hammon directly over the runcible, and in a few seconds the ensuing firestorm devoured runcible, AI and the surrounding two-mile-wide complex, then washed into the city to scour over buildings flattened by the initial blast wave. Fifty thousand people died, some so quickly naught remained of them but smudges on some still-standing walls, others in the slow agony reserved for those with most of their skin charred away.

Like many on the world of Klurhammon, Cherub Egengy was a haiman — a human partially combined with AI. Seeing his city struck so hard, on his vantage point on the north face of the Boulder he just clung to the ochre stone amid the heathers, unable to process the sight. Belatedly, through external comunits scattered around the world, he received the message — with explanatory information packets — the AI had sent just before expiring: ‘We are under attack from a ship controlled by the entity named Erebus. Planetary assault or planetary destruction certain to ensue. Run away. Hide.’

Direct-downloading the information packages via his gridlink to his mind, Cherub instantly learned that Erebus was the rogue AI that had once controlled the dreadnought the Trafalgar, which had deserted the Polity after humanity’s war against the alien Prador. This malign AI, which controlled a pernicious alien nano-technology and a fleet of ships numbering in the tens of thousands, had now returned to attack.

Planetary destruction.

Abruptly Cherub’s assister frame — motorized braces for his arms and legs terminating in extra metal fingers, and two additional limbs extending at waist-level — reached out and gripped the rock, pulling him close to it. For a moment he thought this was a reaction, on some level of himself, to ‘planetary destruction’, but then realized that his survival-orientated sub-persona, which he always put online when he did something dangerous, had recognized another danger. A second later the blast wave from the strike on the city tried to drag him from the rock face. His ribbed carapace already protected his back from his neck to the base of his spine. His sensory cowl, which when closed was a tongue of metal extending from it up behind his head, he now spread open like the petals of a flower for further protection. However, he felt hot cinders burning through his clothing into the skin of his arms and legs. Within his carapace he onlined a program to lock his muscles and cut out pain messages, and then further studied the information packets the AI had sent.

‘Jain nano-technology. Informational subversion. Can sequester all Polity technology, and even humans themselves…’

Instantly shutting down access to his carapace from all outside sources cut some incoming program. Internally he tracked down what he had already received, running high-level diagnostics, isolation techniques and hunter-killer programs. He just got it in time: some ugly and hugely complex informational worm that would have rendered him utterly obedient to whatever sent it… this Erebus. He wondered how many others had managed to react so quickly. What about his brother, Carlton? What about his mother? Turning his head slightly he gazed at the burning city. Carlton, who was out at the hothouses, might have stopped the worm. Their mother, however…

She was in the city doing some business while Cherub climbed the Boulder. This business would have taken her very near the centre, so he assessed her chances of survival as little above zero. Grief tightened a fist inside him and there was no logic involved in his suddenly wanting to climb down to ground level and head back there. But his mother had always wanted him to operate on logic — to use his loose combination of human mind and artificial intelligence to best effect. He had once read, ‘Grief is a selfish indulgence,’ and decided just then not to let it kill him, for even now there were things descending from the sky directly towards the city.

Cherub used programming measures within his carapace and neurochemical measures, via the hardware in his skull, to dull the pain while not dulling his intelligence.

Run away. Hide.

He was too visible here, so first he turned on the surface chameleon effect of his carapace and chameleoncloth clothing. Maybe his penchant for wearing such gear and going wild like this to study the local fauna would end up saving his life. Reconfiguring internal hardware and writing programs in his mind, he created a near facsimile to Earth Central Security — ECS — chameleonware. His carapace did not possess sufficient projecting and scanning facilities to make it 100-per-cent effective, but it would have to do. Then, as the wind dropped to a mere hot gale, he onlined full assist in his climbing program and hurried the rest of the way up the rock face like a spider scuttling up a wall.

Reaching the curving summit of the Boulder, Cherub scanned around him. The boulder-birds he had come here to see were absent — doubtless scared off by the explosion — but they were no longer his concern anyway. Using his sensory cowl, the full potential of his augmented eyes and all the enhancement programs to hand, he focused on the objects descending towards the city. He counted ten bacilliform shapes, each precisely like a rod prokaryote bacterium, but about sixty feet long and with an exterior of a completely featureless blue grey.

Bombs?

That seemed unlikely since the ship above seemed quite capable of messing this place up without resorting to such conventional methods. Anyway, bombs that size would have to be planet busters, so why drop ten of them all in the same spot? He would therefore assume they were not bombs, since to do so would be to admit that he now had a very short time left to live. He just watched carefully, recording everything he was seeing and sensing.

Settling about the central incinerated area, the rod-things just seemed to melt into the rubble. Focusing closer on one, he saw it spreading itself, like something made of jelly, over foamstone rubble and tangled girders. It then began to emit tentacular growths that speared down into surrounding crevices. Near to one of these rod-things, he observed a woman stumbling along, something hanging from her arms, which she held out before her. He realized that she was blind, and that what hung from her arms was shredded skin.

His mother had certainly been well within the blast zone, so had probably died instantly — surely that had to be better.

Cherub forced himself to abandon that train of thought before it led to him having to again alter his brain chemistry.

The woman must have heard something for she stopped and turned abruptly. Out of a nearby drain a tentacle rose like a rattlesnake readying itself to strike, then it lashed out and penetrated her chest, numerous tendrils spearing out of her back as if the horrific thing had splintered inside her. She collapsed to her knees, dragging it down with her. After a few minutes the thing retracted, seemed to hesitate poised over her for a moment, then dropped to the ground and squirmed on past her, emerging endlessly from the drain. Its victim swayed back and forth on her knees, then suddenly lurched to her feet. She looked around for a moment, as if oblivious to the fact that her face was a charred ruin and she seemed to possess no eyes. After scanning a pile of rubble she stepped over to it and picked up a steel reinforcing bar about two feet long. Cherub tracked her subsequent purposeful search through the ruination and watched her smash in the skull of another burn victim before moving on. Cherub realized that the bacilliforms were products of Jain-tech, and that they were infecting the survivors with that same technology. Finally he dragged his horrified attention away from the woman in time to observe a new object descending from the sky.

This thing was quite obviously a ship of some kind. Thirty feet long, it was curved like the head of a spoon. Its exterior was silver-green fading to black at the edges, and it bore patterns like umber veins running through its surface. Silently it landed inside the city, in which it was now possible to see those weird tentacular growths every few hundred feet, and also humans, hijacked like the blind woman, stumbling through the ruins bearing makeshift weapons. It was a vision from hell, as they slaughtered other survivors with sickening regularity. And when the newly arrived ship opened up and a figure stepped out, it seemed as if the arch-demon himself had arrived to oversee it all.

From a distance the bizarre humanoid seemed wholly of metal — just like a Cybercorp metalskin Golem. But closer inspection revealed that its shiny blue-green exterior was without visible joints, and stretched and contracted over its frame like a living skin. The android towered tall and was incredibly thin, and its outstretched fingers resembled a spider’s legs. The head slanted abruptly back at the forehead, and tapered sharply down to the lipless slot of its mouth. It had no nose and the eyes were lidless and insectile.

It walked from its spacecraft towards a nearby rubble pile, and there stood waiting. One of the tentacles uncoiled from the smoking mass of shattered foamstone and girders and arched over until it was only a few feet from the humanoid’s face. The tip of it split into three prongs then froze. After a moment the prongs closed up again and the tentacle retracted into the rubble. The humanoid swivelled round and headed back to its vessel.

Cherub assessed what he had just seen, and it struck him as likely that the brutal slaughter in the city was almost of peripheral concern to something capable of deploying technology like this. Sure, if you are going to attack, you take out the AI and the runcible first, but a few surviving burn victims should be somewhat irrelevant. He gazed at the activity continuing amid the rubble. Of course, by destroying the AI you would be wiping out a massive source of information. Cherub felt certain that what he had been witnessing here was a data-gathering exercise — and that the data gatherers had just delivered their report.

The humanoid slid back inside its spacecraft, which immediately launched itself straight up, slamming to a halt in mid-air, before accelerating straight towards the spot where Cherub crouched. He remained utterly still, utterly reliant on his chameleonware to hide him. The ship sped overhead, then dropped low towards the fields of drastically modified plants that lay beyond. The android clearly had to be after something here, and he wondered what. This world was small and insignificant and, as declared in one of the AI’s information packets, ‘of no tactical importance’. Maybe Cherub would find out what it was seeking, since it was heading the same way he must go to reach the hothouses, where he hoped to find out what had happened to Carlton.

Seated in a viewing lounge aboard the giant spaceship Jerusalem, Agent Ian Cormac peered over at the object folded up in the comer looking like a chromed spider corpse, which was a close enough approximation to reality. Not a corpse, however, just self-deactivated and bored. Cormac well understood how the spider drone felt. Nothing was happening here and, if anything was to finally happen, he knew his most likely involvement would be to spectate from an acceleration chair and hope for the best. But though he too felt surplus to requirements, he was not bored, for he was having to get used to what seemed to be a whole new range of senses.

Another one …

He turned to gaze out of the large panoramic window ranged along one wall. The sensation he now experienced was difficult to nail down: maybe like a sudden pressure drop, a pulse of infrasound, or one of those night-time flashes of light caused by a stray cosmic ray striking the optic nerve, or perhaps an out-of-key note occurring in a symphony that he hadn’t until then even realized was being performed. No description seemed adequate. It was similar somehow to that sense of the ineffable he felt when a ship he was aboard dropped into U-space. However, this time it was directional, and he even got a sense of mass and shape. He instinctively knew, and had already confirmed such a feeling on numerous occasions, that another big dreadnought had just surfaced into realspace half a light year away. He could confidently point towards it, and sometimes felt that, with an effort of will, he could even step right over to it.

Cormac understood that there was still something odd now about his mind. In his final encounter with a psychopath called Skellor he had escaped a Jain substructure encaging him by stepping through U-space — a feat supposedly impossible for a human being. Driven to utter extremity, his brain penetrated by the alien organic Jain-tech that Skellor was employing to torture him, he had done just that. It was an ability he would find very useful to recover at times, but if it was contingent on what Skellor had done to him, then reaching that state was something he would rather avoid. He had subsequently tried to use the same escape route while being pursued by Erebus’s biomechs, but that time failed. It seemed, however, as if, like a runner confined to a wheelchair, he could still feel the track under his feet and the wind in his face.

He tried to dispel the disturbing feeling and return to the moment by using his gridlink to delve into the coms traffic in this highly active planetary system. Jerusalem — the AI controlling the huge ship he was currently aboard — had turned this system into a fortress. The nearby hot inhabited world of Scarflow was sheltered by huge mirrors which diverted the sun’s energy towards orbital installations. This energy in turn was, when the devastated Polity fleet arrived here after its disastrous encounter with Erebus, being converted into coherent maser beams projected towards a cold Mars-sized planet further out, so the same energy could be used in terraforming it. Upon the fleet’s arrival the percentage of energy being projected had been quickly reduced, the rest being stored for future use, while the coherent masers were at once prepared to be employed as weapons.

But Erebus had not come.

Erebus, which controlled a vast mass of biomechanoid ships, constructed using Jain technology, had effectively ambushed a fleet of Polity ships and wiped out much of it. Cormac had lost personnel and friends in that conflict. He’d actually hoped Erebus would turn up, but logically that would have been a daft move for the entity to make. Then, again, attacking a small fleet outside the Polity had not been so bright either. Though causing massive destruction, Erebus had done no more, tactically, than seriously piss off the Polity’s ruling AIs. Cormac still could not fathom why it had done so. However, he felt a deeper disquiet about the reaction on this side, in that it was only a reaction. The superintelligent AIs of the Polity should be proactive; they should become the predators in this situation, they should be doing something, yet it seemed to Cormac that they were just sitting on their hands, literally or metaphorically.

‘What are you thinking?’

He turned to see Mika — Polity scientist, companion and now lover — standing a short few paces behind him. He had not heard her approach, but maybe, on some subliminal level, he had known her to be there, but that level had not alerted his conscious mind fully to her presence. Did that mean he trusted her? Or was it that his new-found U-space awareness was distracting him, for even when there were no ships arriving, he received a constant niggling sensation from the runcibles perpetually in operation on the Polity worlds nearby.

‘The usual,’ he replied. ‘I can’t understand why Erebus did what it did, and I’ve even less idea what it is going to do now. It just makes no sense.’ Somehow, almost instinctively, he did not want to mention to her his reservations about the Polity AI response so far. Nor had he told her, or anyone, that he had recently become able, somehow, to sense U-space.

‘Not to you maybe — so surely that means Erebus is an enemy to be feared?’

‘Perhaps so,’ he said.

She wore skin-tight leggings and a loose pale green blouse — the sort of attire she always donned when ‘relaxing’. Her ginger hair was tied back, her angular face perfect, obviously having just been given a makeover by a cosmetic unit. Even the blush marks at her temples were concealed — the ones caused by her physical connection to the virtual reality equipment she too frequently used to study those two Dragon spheres out there in the void. In connecting herself to VR like that, rather than via internal hardware, she was in a minority, for she had yet to augment herself. It seemed to Cormac that just about everyone else around here either wore augs or was gridlinked. Only a little while ago some queries he had made through his gridlink had given him much to ponder. Until about four years ago the proportion of citizens opting for cerebral augmentation had averaged 46 per cent across the Polity. Over the last four years, since the depopulation of a world called Samarkand, that had been steadily rising, shooting up to 62 per cent in this quadrant of the Polity after the disastrous events on another world called Coloron, where an entire arcology had been obliterated to prevent the spread of Jain technology. This showed that people were scared enough to seek more individual power. He was suspicious of this ready abandonment of humanity but suspected he might be reading too much into it.

‘Jerusalem,’ he asked abruptly, ‘what is the AI assessment of Erebus’s method of attack?’

The AI replied instantly, probably turning only a fraction of a per cent of its attention towards this conversation.

‘We are puzzled,’ it admitted.

‘Why are you puzzled?’

‘For precisely the same reasons as you yourself. Erebus seems to have displayed all its cards before the game has even begun.’

‘See?’ said Cormac to Mika. He then gazed up at the ceiling, as most people did when addressing an AI whose precise location they did not know. ‘What about those objects in the asteroid field?’ Though Erebus’s entire mass of biomech ships had not appeared, something else had arrived out there not so long ago.

‘We have yet to find them. I suspect that they are merely devices to keep watch on us, since anything else would cause disturbances we would detect.’

‘Perhaps I should go out and take a look?’ suggested Cormac.

‘That will not be necessary,’ the AI replied firmly.

‘Cormac,’ agreed Mika, ‘there’s nothing for you to do at the moment.’

Yes, he thought, even entities with artificial intelligences a couple of orders of magnitude greater than mine don’t know what to do. He nodded, but just then he spotted Arach, the spider drone, slowly opening out his long metal legs and lifting his ruby-eyed head to survey his surroundings. The drone seemed to test the air briefly with his pincers before springing into a fully upright position: a chromed spider some five feet across. Arach now possessed a new abdomen — the original, equipped with automated weapons, having been left behind on a world near where the Polity fleet had been ambushed to help fend off Erebus’s pursuing ground-based bio-mechanisms. This new abdomen apparently contained a similar array of armament.

‘Something has occurred,’ Jerusalem observed.

Cormac realized that, for Arach would only have bothered waking up if there was a chance he would get to use all that new armament. Cormac resisted the urge to key into the local AI nets to find out what was going on. It all struck him as rather too convenient.

‘Tell me,’ he said, noting Mika’s expression becoming resigned and almost sad.

‘One of Erebus’s wormships has attacked a Polity world,’ Jerusalem replied.

‘Which one?’ Cormac asked, imagining one of the big ones, with a population in billions, now reduced to a smouldering ruin.

‘The choice of target is, again, puzzling.’

Arach was now doing his familiar tappity little dance on the carpet, obviously unable to contain his glee. Jerusalem was specifically informing Cormac about this and the spider drone was suddenly active… which must mean there was a situation that needed investigating without requiring an investment of battleships, major AIs or weaponry. Cormac was needed.

‘You know, I thought AI minds could work a hundred times faster than those of humans, but you’re going slow enough now to try my patience.’

‘Very well,’ said Jerusalem. ‘The wormship attacked a very minor world, of no tactical importance, called Klurhammon. As we understand it, the same ship has now departed, after wiping out a large proportion of the population and causing much destruction.’

‘Makes no sense.’

‘Precisely.’

‘And it needs looking into.’ Cormac found himself moving towards the door of the lounge, while Arach scuttled across to fall in behind him. Abruptly he halted, not liking his own unthinking reaction, then turned and strode back over to Mika.

‘You nearly forgot me,’ she said.

‘Will you come?’

Before Mika could reply, Jerusalem interrupted: ‘I cannot allow that.’

‘Why not?’ asked Cormac, gazing into Mika’s face and seeing she already knew the reason.

‘There are two Dragon spheres stationary nearby and, besides the AIs insystem, Mika is the nearest thing we have to a Dragon expert. Also… her presence would constrain you.’

It was true — he had already made that assessment — but he felt there was something else involved here. ‘And?’

‘Mika has a concord with Dragon — it communicates better with her than with anyone else here. She is therefore a valuable resource when it comes to communicating with that particular entity.’

Cormac accepted that, feeling rather ashamed at his relief.

‘Then I’ll see you when I return,’ he said to her.

They kissed, perhaps with a bit less passion than previously, but certainly with the same sincerity.

‘Goodbye, Cormac,’ she whispered. ‘Try to stay alive.’

He headed away, trying not to notice the tears glistening in her eyes. The door opened for him automatically, and soon he was striding through the Jerusalem’s numerous corridors, heading for the room he had been sharing with Mika.

‘Do you think there’s going to be violence? the spider drone asked eagerly as it scuttled along behind.

‘Shut up, Arach,’ Cormac replied.

Arriving at the room he went straight to a particular cabinet and from there removed only the two things he really required: a thin-gun he had grown accustomed to practising with and the wrist-sheath containing his Tenkian throwing star — a device long proved to have an erratic mind of its own. He headed straight out again without even looking at the other belongings gathered there.

‘I’d like to select my own team,’ he said as he strode along.

‘Those currently available have been notified,’ Jerusalem replied.

Annoying that the AI had probably already worked out exactly who he wanted to select.

‘And my own ship?’

‘The Jack Ketch III is unavailable, since it has yet to acquire any engines.’

Cormac halted, somehow getting an intimation of what was coming next. ‘Then what ship is available?’

‘The King of Hearts has been refitted, and is now prepped and ready for you.’

Great, the same AI attack ship that once went rogue and then had… a change of heart. Following this transformation it had rescued Cormac himself and those few surviving the debacle on the world where he had lost his comrade Thorn, his mentor Horace Blegg and many others. He didn’t at all trust the AI running that ship, but he guessed Jerusalem now intended for King to prove itself trustworthy.

‘Fine,’ Cormac replied. ‘Fine.’

He reached a drop-shaft and, programming it ahead of him through his gridlink, stepped into it and allowed the irised gravity field to waft him upward. Stepping out into another corridor, Arach clattering quickly behind, he found only one person awaiting him. The ersatz man was tough-looking with cropped black hair, brown skin and unreasonably green eyes. All emulation, for this was Hubbert Smith, a Golem android in the thirtieth production series.

‘Time to load up and ship out,’ announced Smith.

‘So it would seem,’ said Cormac. ‘Where’s your companion, Ursach Candy Kline?’

‘It would seem that our personal experience of warfare with Erebus must be fairly distributed, so she shipped out of here about four days ago.’

Cormac grimaced and moved on.

‘How y’ doin’, Arach?’ said Smith.

‘Lock and load,’ the spider drone replied.

Cormac fought to stop his grimace turning into a grin.

‘What about Andrew Hailex?’ he enquired.

Hailex, like Smith and Kline, was another of those rescued by the King of Hearts. He was human and, when Cormac first saw him, the man had looked to be in his twenties, as most people chose to look since that option had become available in centuries past. Cormac knew him to be actually in his sixties and an experienced Sparkind combat veteran. The man had been utterly hairless and bulky. Grinned a lot.

Trying to find a replacement for Thorn?

No, Hailex had looked more like Gant, who had once been in Thorn’s Sparkind unit — another who had died during one of Cormac’s missions.

‘Hailex will not be joining us either,’ Smith replied. ‘He applied for a transference to agent training.’

Somehow that figured, and Cormac’s grimace returned in full force.

In one of the small departure bays a further individual awaited them. However, this one was neither human nor Golem but dracoman — a product of the giant alien entity called Dragon — and an example of what might have gone on to dominate Earth if only the dinosaurs hadn’t been wiped out. Dracomen were one of Dragon’s jokes, or lessons, or whims. They were as reptilian as their name implied: their skins were mostly tegulated with green scales, except from throat to groin where they were yellow. They possessed a leg structure and gait that was distinctly birdlike, faces jutting and toadlike, and huge eyes. Scar, one of the first of the dracomen to be created, now exposed his teeth in an expression that could be either a grin or a preparation to rip out someone’s throat. Admittedly, Scar might still grin while committing such a bloody assault.

‘The other dracomen?’ Cormac enquired of Smith.

‘All reassigned. There aren’t many of them in total and their peculiar ability to resist Jain sequestration and to recognize it in others, even at a distance, is too valuable a resource to risk.’ Then, perhaps realizing how pompous he had sounded, Smith continued, ‘Jerusalem doesn’t want all those eggs in one basket… do dracowomen lay eggs, anyway?’

On the circular steel floor a small intership shuttle awaited: essentially a flattened cylinder twenty feet long with gimbal-mounted steering thrusters shaped like two-foot-long pitted olives mounted on its rear. The ramp door was down and the lights were on inside. Jerusalem had clearly prepared the way. Without comment, Cormac headed over and boarded the craft, and the others followed him inside. As he strapped himself in, he experienced sudden trepidation, but not because of the enemies he might be about to face. This would be his first time travelling through U-space since his arrival within this system. He could detect ships arriving and departing through that continuum, so what would be his reaction now he was going to be actually entering U-space himself?

Again Mr Crane was perched in his favourite vantage point atop the sandstone monolith, gazing out over the butte-scattered and presently arid landscape of the planet Cull. He still wore his long coat, but it was rather tattered now, as were his trousers and wide-brimmed hat. Even his boots were scored and sand-abraded. However, the brass-coloured adamantine body underneath these garments remained untouched by this harsh environment. Vulture, at the moment circling the monolith, wondered if within that body Mr Crane’s rejoined crystal mind thought unfathomable thoughts, or perhaps no thoughts at all. The bird also believed that a technology feared across the Polity maintained the brass Golem’s other internal workings, whatever they were.

Set in a brass face that seemed the sculpture of some remorseless Apollo, the black eyes were unblinking. In their depths it seemed that small stars flickered occasionally, or perhaps that was just Vulture’s imagination. When finally the bird descended before him in a flurry of dust and a scattering of oily feathers, he directed his gaze upon it and tilted his head in faint query.

‘They’re still searching every square inch of this place, but still keeping well away from you, buddy,’ the bird announced.

Vulture himself had once been an artificial intelligence running a ship of the same name. A Dragon sphere had saved his life from that nutjob Skellor and the Jain technology the man had wielded, but had then transferred the AI into this avian receptacle. Spreading his wings into the dusty wind, Vulture stretched luxuriously: he rather liked this body, perhaps Dragon had done something to his mind to make him feel that way.

‘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 about, 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.