The Engineer Reconditioned

PART ONE

Here dust motes are worthy of note and micro-crystals intensively studied. A fist-sized rock discovered by the deep spacer Plumb Line is the subject of lengthy scientific dissertations and now a marker buoy accompanies it on its quarter-completed billion-year journey. The Chasm, deep-space side of that tongue of stars called the Quarrison Drift, is empty as much of space is not…

“It’s an egg, and as soon as we get it aboard it’ll hatch out and some disgusting alien will eat us all. You mark my words.”

Abaron ignored Chapra. She was an aficionado of ancient celluloid and often came out with such ridiculous statements. He continued to observe the read-outs from various scanners and frown in perplexity. Was it something others had missed, or had some joker recently dropped it here?

The sphere was three metres in diameter, completed one revolution every couple of seconds, and sped across the Chasm at approximately one-and-a-half kilometres per second. At that speed it would have taken it five million years to get here from the nearest star system in the Drift — discounting the possibility of someone having dropped it from a spaceship yesterday.

“You wait, they’ll tell us to twin it with a marker buoy and study it from a distance,” said Chapra, gazing at her screen. Abaron snuck a quick glance at her. She wore the appearance of a teenager: long black hair and perfect dark complexion, decorative caste mark at the centre of her forehead, and slim figure in a form-fitting bodysuit. Her cat’s eyes and pointy ears were a fashionable look called partial catadapt. The new look. He shook his head, annoyed. What made her do it? She was a hundred years older than he was, and was one of the most reputable xenologists in the sector.

Chapra swung towards him. “What do you think?”

Abaron scratched at his greying beard — not for him the look of youth — then said, “I think, that in the circumstances we have detailed, they’ll let us pick it up.”

“Ah, the optimism of youth.”

She could have been reading his mind.

“It’s probably something new to the Chasm and by picking it up we won’t be disturbing any… long-term studies.”

“Stepping on any toes you mean. Ahah, here comes Judd.”

Abaron glanced around. Judd was short, black-haired and Asiatic, almost Chinese in appearance had he been human, but he was Golem.

Without preamble the android told them, “You have permission to bring the sphere in.” The ship, Schrödinger’s Box, resembled a box only in that it had an inside and an outside. Its shape was that of a grain of barley with the hair still attached and it was a kilometre long. Many scientific minds noted its resemblance to a spermatozoon, and were quick to point out the symbolic significance of this design of ship being at the forefront of human exploration and research. The AI mind that did the designing remained sensibly silent about the whole matter. Some said its reticence was due to an instruction from higher AI minds. Perhaps they were embarrassed.

Closer to and you could see that sensors and the ports for launching probes studded the ship’s hull. It was a pure science vessel, on which Polity scientists had to book a place years in advance — coming to the ship, on their turn, by the onboard Skaidon gate, or runcible. The ship was run by AI and crewed by free Golem androids, most of which remained in stasis until needed. The sphere, in comparison to this ship, was a hardly noticeable speck. A drone, which in appearance was no more than a three-fingered metal claw with rocket motors attached, flew out to grab the item and bring it into an isolation chamber. In there, padded clamps clasped it, and the ship’s AI discretely sampled molecules from its surface, and passively scanned its interior.

“Ninety-eight percent frozen water inside. The rest is carbon compounds and trace elements.” Abaron refused to acknowledge Chapra’s grin. Touch consoles, screens and holographic displays surrounded them in the central processing room. The specialised AI-linked computers that collated information, from the isolation chamber and from the ship’s skin of sensors, worked silently, but there seemed a hum of power in the air.

“Should I be smug, do you think, and point out the obvious?” asked Chapra, spinning around on her swivel chair.

Abaron finally looked at her and snapped, “I wouldn’t call what you said a serious scientific prediction.” Chapra pouted at him, which made him even angrier. He thumped his fingers over his touch console, calling up displays of information. He did not turn when Chapra rolled her chair up beside him.

“A hundred years time you might get just as bored,” she said. Abaron paused and turned to glare at her, but she was gazing back at the holographic display above her console. “Ah, here,” she said, and rolled her chair back across. He quickly followed.

Above the console now hovered a holographic representation of the sphere. Beside it information in the form of graphs, bio’ equations, and Standard English scrolled up too fast for Abaron to read. Chapra picked up an interlink transmitter from her side table — the device looked like a polished ball bearing —

swept back her hair to expose an interface plug behind her ear, and plugged in.

“Outer shell is a polycarbon fabric, superconductive up to seven hundred degrees Celsius.” As she said this, the outer layer melted away to reveal a honeycomb structure. “The inner layer is again of polycarbon, but with interleaved calcite and calcium formations. It would appear to be structural only.” She looked at Abaron. “The shell.” She grinned.

Abaron ignored her. He watched as the inner shell fled, and tried to tell himself his fearful fascination was scientific curiosity.

“Water,” said Chapra. “Loaded with organic impurities the most common of which is this.” Using her console she projected a red circle on the sphere’s surface, then expanded it to infinity, zooming in on that point to reveal a complex helical structure. It was crystalline at first, but grew to reveal individual atoms. The display spread; the structure filling the entire room and fading beyond it.

“DNA,” said Abaron.

“Not quite,” Chapra told him. “It’s trihelical and has some very complicated protein structures wound in there as well.”

Abaron was now too fascinated to be annoyed. He called up information from his console, limiting it to his screen. This just does not happen to me, he thought. Major events always occurred light years from where he happened to be at any one time. Great discoveries were always on the other side of the Polity, Separatist outrages a hundred worlds away.

“Damn close,” he eventually said. “Bloody damned close.”

“To what?” Chapra enquired kindly.

“To the theoretical models.” Abaron looked at her sharply, but she had turned away. He watched her banish the large hologram and return the display to the revealed sphere of ice. She sat back, relinquishing control to the AI again.

“There’s an anomaly with the water here,” she said. “The nominal temperature of the sphere is fifty Kelvin, which is low enough for the water ices to have become complex ices, yet they have not changed. I would say that certain free proteins in the ice have stabilized it. We need to have a long hard look at that… Let’s cut to the chase now shall we?”

The AI responded by excising the water ices to show the shape at the heart of the sphere. It was a creature: coiled like an embryo, reptilian. There was a tail there, finned, something like a head, strange triangular-section tentacles folded against a long ribbed body, and an arm easily recognisable as such, but ending in a hand with tens of long twiglike fingers. Chapra drew in a sharp breath. Abaron swore.

“It’s an egg,” he said, a species of dull dread in his voice.

“I think not,” said Chapra in an abrupt reversal.

Something close to the creature, held under its long fingers, the AI picked out in bright red then projected to one side and expanded. It was a structure of folded tubes and unidentifiable components. They watched in silence as the AI took it apart, expanding sections, then further dismantling them. Equations blurred past at the bottom of the projection.

“Well?” Abaron eventually asked.

“I expected this to be an artefact, something manufactured. That would go some way to disprove the egg theory.” Chapra regarded him. “But, as we are both well aware, when technology reaches a certain level its artefacts are often indistinguishable from life.”

“Then it could still be an egg?” he asked, sensing a victory, if a somewhat Pyrrhic one.

“Oh no, the creature is adult. This is probably an escape pod of some kind.”

“The creature —” began Abaron, hardly daring to ask.

Chapra finished for him. “ — is in stasis.”

Abaron licked his lips. He’d come out here to study the few micro-organic motes the Box trawled up. This was his ultimate wet dream: the discovery of an alien life form, possibly sentient, and wholly weird. He didn’t know whether to be ecstatic or terrified.

“Do you think we’ll be allowed to revive it?” he asked.

“We’ll probably be instructed to do so. This is not a question of xenology but one of morality. We have rescued this creature and now we are responsible for its well-being.”

“There’s a lot of work to do.”

“There is. We’ll have to reproduce its optimum environment and sources of nourishment, and those are only the first steps. Reviving it without killing is not going to be easy. Then there’s communication… ”

“Can we be certain it’s sentient?”

“At the moment nothing is certain. But what would an animal be doing in an escape pod?”

“It might just be a disgusting killer,” said Abaron, making an awkward attempt at humour.

“Quite,” said Chapra. She did not laugh. She waved her hand, and the AI consigned the holographic model back to its memory.

The isolation chamber was fifty metres across, circular, the ceiling and floor flat grey ceramal. There was frost on every surface. Padded clamps, like cupped hands, held the sphere at the precise centre of chamber: two metres from the floor and two metres from the ceiling. Chapra and Abaron, clad in carbon sixty coldsuits, paced around it in the usual point seven-five gees of the ship. To one side squatted a Physical Study and Research robot, telefactored from the ship’s AI. The PSR was a nightmare of chrome, glass, and dull ceramal. There was something insectile about it. It bore the appearance of a giant chrome cockroach stood upright. But a cockroach never had so many arms and legs. Abaron felt nervous around the thing, even though he had been using such devices all his adult life. It was just the knowledge that in a few seconds it could strip him down to his component organs, muscles, and bones. And if that was not horror enough, it could put him back together again to complete his screaming. He shuddered.

“The cold isn’t getting through your suit is it?” asked Chapra.

“No. Are we going to get on with this?”

“Not entirely up to us. This is a command decision.”

Abaron felt a dull humming from the floor, then the clamps folded back and abruptly withdrew into the floor, leaving the sphere floating in place.

“Gravplate suspension,” observed Chapra. “We’d best get back.” As they got out of the way the PSR moved in and embraced the sphere. It reached in with U-sound cutting appendage then, like a scarabid beetle working its ball of dung, revolved the sphere. With a high-pitched whining the cutter scribed a line around the sphere’s circumference. This complete, it grasped above and below the line with its many limbs, twisted the two hemispheres in opposite directions. At first these screeched like seized bearings, but soon began to move more freely. Then in a fog of ice powder, the PSR separated them from the inner skin Abaron had earlier seen in the computer model, and put them aside. Now the machine cut again, this time following the hexagons in the honeycomb. When it finally reached into the cuts with hundreds of spatulate limbs, and levered them apart, this final outer shell opened off the central ball of ice in four parts, like the petals of a flower. Then after putting these aside the PSR really got to work.

It took the ball of water ice apart, cutting away curiously-shaped ice blocks and stacking them. Abaron wondered if the blocks needed to be such odd shapes or if that was a quirk of this particular PSR. It looked to him as if the sphere could be reassembled from them and hold together like an interlocking Chinese puzzle. Probably there was a sensible explanation for this, though he was damned if he was going to ask Chapra.

Eventually the PSR exposed the creature, and held it up underneath its scanning heads to confirm what it must next do. Held by the huge machine like that the creature looked terribly vulnerable. Abaron jumped when the robot suddenly started to move again. It reached in with new limbs and, with that high-pitched whining, drove needles as thin as hairs into frozen flesh.

“At last count there were a hundred and fifty variations on the trihelix. We have to catalogue where the samples come from in its gut. Obviously some of them will be from its equivalent of bacteria, E-coli and the like, and other parasites that live on its food.” Chapra’s voice was entirely analytical.

“We’ll get more idea of its environment this way as well,” said Abaron. Chapra turned to regard him and he found it difficult to analyse her expression behind her visor. She pointed at the blocks of ice. “We can’t even assume that it lived in water. That might have been some kind of protective amniote.”

“Quite,” said Abaron, then impatiently, “Why did we come down here?” Chapra pointed at the creature. The PSR had now withdrawn.

“Permit me to lecture,” she said. “I’ve studied alien life forms for a hundred years more than you, Abaron, and if there is one thing I’ve learned, it is that all our superb-technologies are not enough. They can in fact be a hindrance. It is far too easy to wall yourself in with AIs and their information. It’s too easy to distance yourself from your subject. That way leads to sterility and a lack of intuition. Look at it, and remember that it is alien and alive, not equations in a computer. Always remember the one unique thing humans bring to the study of alien life: imagination.”

Abaron glanced up at the creature, then back at Chapra. “I haven’t got time for this. I’ve a million tests to run.” He turned and marched stiff-backed from the chamber.

Bloody woman and her touchy-feely shite, he thought.

Chapra watched Abaron go then returned her attention to the creature. As she studied it, she heard the lock behind her open, and guessed it was not him returning. She glanced around as in walked someone without a coldsuit, but then Judd had no need of such protection.

“He refuses to learn from you,” said the Golem.

“He’s stubborn and proud, but he does have a good mind. He’ll learn eventually — we all do.” Judd folded his arms and looked up at the alien. “He is a fool and he is frightened.”

“Yes, but perhaps you should remember that foolishness and fear are things you can only emulate, Judd.”

“Anything I can emulate, I can understand.”

“You may be Golem,” she replied, “but you’re young as well.”

“Meaning?”

Chapra smiled. “Your knowledge grows, Judd. It would seem you have made a good start on understanding pride.”

There were four tanks arrayed in the room like library shelves: each stretching from ceiling to floor, two metres wide and five metres long. Their glass walls had a very low refractivity and, because of this, it seemed as if three walls of water stood there. It would have been possible to do this with the field technology, but the contents of the tanks were very precious, and not even the ship AI wanted to risk the incredibly unlikely event of a power failure.

Each tank contained plants consisting of free-floating masses of blue spheres bound together with curling threads. Around these swam shoals of small strangely-formed pink shrimp-creatures. There were those with a tail fin, one central row of leg flippers, one hinged arm to pick and feed with. Others were tubes with the flippers and feeding parts inside. And still others were distorted hemispheres of shell with limbs and mouth parts arranged radially underneath. On the floors of these tanks their larger and more heavily-armoured brethren crawled over and occasionally dismembered each other. Abaron walked between the tanks carrying a notescreen. There were dark marks under his eyes and his movements were jerky and slightly out of control.

“It’s the temperature. Perhaps it’s the temperature,” he said to his screen, and put his hand against the glass. Quickly he snatched it away and shook it. The water in the tanks was as near to boiling point at Earth atmospheric pressure as it was possible to get without it becoming volatile.

“Pressure,” he said, staring into a tank. After a moment he looked around as the Golem Judd stepped into view from behind one of the tanks. They stared at each other for a moment then Judd nodded his head in acknowledgement. Abaron backed away a couple of steps then quickly left the room. Chapra leant back in her swivel chair and put her feet up on her touch console. This caused a flurry of activity on the holographic display for a moment. She smiled to herself when the display settled on an alphabetical list of xenological studies of alien genetic tissue. After a moment she frowned and took her feet of the console.

“Box, how come we’re not overrun with experts?” she asked.

The voice of the ship AI was omnipresent and faintly amused. “I wondered how long it would take one of you to notice. You are not overrun because I closed the runcible gate.”

“Well, tell me. I don’t need to be led like a child.”

“Within ten minutes of your discovery being announced on the net there were over a quarter of a million priority demands for access to this vessel. Many of the demands could not have been refused at the transmission end. Had the runcible remained open this ship would have been filled to capacity. Too many cooks.”

“I would have thought a few would have got through before you shut the runcible down.”

“No. I shut the runcible down before your discovery was announced.”

“How long before?”

“As soon as I detected the sphere.”

“Ah,” said Chapra, and put her feet back up on the console. “Are all our findings being relayed, all our studies?”

“Yes.”

“How many official complaints so far?”

“Just over two million. You have been charged with everything from unhygienic practice to xenocide. I have put a hold on all communications.”

Chapra grinned delightedly. Abaron would hate this of course. But Abaron did not see the joke of her coming aboard this ship as a partial catadapt. Then again, perhaps he didn’t know what Schrödinger’s box was.

“What about you?” she asked. “Is what you are doing legal?”

“I have unrestricted AI mandate.”

That was enough. Everyone knew it was not humans who made the important decisions in the human polity: they could not be trusted. Chapra shrugged then called up a projection of the creature suspended in icy stasis in the isolation chamber. She glanced across the room when Judd entered, then returned her attention to the projection. A skating of her fingers across the touch controls brought into focus the subatomic mechanisms of life in the grip of absolute cold.

“You are studying the mechanisms of stasis,” said Judd.

“That could be said,” she replied. “It could also be said that I’m studying the mechanisms of… resurrection, awakening. They are the same.”

“Can you wake this creature without killing it?”

“Yes and no. We can wake it and if there is any problem we can throw it back into stasis so fast there will be little damage done.”

“There are no problems of environment?”

“None. Abaron would say there are, but he is being perfectionist. Any living creature of this complexity has a broad range of environmental tolerance. The differences he is quibbling over are the differences between Winter and Summer for a human. The only way to find the optimum is by waking the creature and studying its reactions.”

“You have seniority,” observed the ship AI.

“I am reluctant to hurt his feelings.”

“There is pressure,” said the AI. “Answers are required.”

“We’ll be lucky if we get anything,” said Chapra. “You know the difficulties of communication with aliens

— points of reference, all of that. This creature doesn’t have eyes. Its primary senses seem to be related to taste and smell but on a level so complex that it might even be capable of decoding individual molecules. Add to that it living in water at a temperature that would nicely cook a human and you find a lack of common ground. We need so much more information: its technology, where it comes from… ah.” Chapra paused for a moment then stabbed her fingers down again, deleting the projection of the creature and calling up something else. The result was a shifting, and slightly nauseating greyness. She quickly cancelled that. “I see… I didn’t feel us drop into U-space. How long until we leave the Chasm and enter the Quarrison Drift?”

“Twenty-two hours,” replied Box.

Judd added, “It will be a solstan week before we reach the system that may be the system of origin.” Chapra shifted one finger aside and pressed down.

“Abaron,” she said. “You best get to the control room. We’re going to do it now.”

“We’re up to zero now. Everything stable,” said Abaron.

“That was to be expected,” said Chapra. “The problems start as soon as all that body ice turns to water.”

“The freezing was exceptionally efficient,” Abaron allowed.

“I would say nigh perfect,” said Chapra. “There’s no apparent cell damage to the creature. I wonder just how much of our interference is necessary.”

“The weta,” said Abaron suddenly.

“Pardon.”

Abaron could not help smiling; he knew something she did not know. “It’s a cricket that lives in New Zealand on Earth. It has adapted itself to night-time freezing and a morning thaw without substantial damage.”

“Yes, but the weta evolved to it. I doubt that is the case with this creature. What we see here is advanced cryogenics.”

Annoyed Abaron said, “Or genetic manipulation.”

Chapra regarded him and raised an eyebrow.

“Quite,” she said, her surprise evident. “Now, let’s move on to the next stage.” Her hands fled over the touch keys. The holographic display showed much of the isolation chamber. It was as if they sat at their consoles just to one side of it.

“One degree above zero. Flooding chamber,” said Abaron. As he said this the floor of the chamber dropped a couple of metres below the entrance lock, from below which a jetty extended. Water poured into the chamber from holes all around the wall. When it reached the nil gravity area below where the creature floated, just held in place by the tips of some of the PSR’s limbs, it splashed up and floated too, in seemingly gelatinous masses.

“Deep scan is showing cell chemistry initiation. Heat generated. It is primitively warm-blooded, which is surprising considering its environment,” said Chapra.

“Brief neural activity,” said Abaron.

“Okay, let’s shut down the null-field.”

The field, created by two opposing gravplates, collapsed when Abaron shut off the plate in the ceiling. A growing column of water collapsed and the creature sagged as it gained weight.

“Enzyme activity is too fast for anterior cell chemistry. I’m taking the temperature up five degrees. Use a microwave pulse, we want all that ice thawed quickly,” said Chapra, her voice urgent.

“Done,” said Abaron.

“Christ! Look at that activity,” said Chapra.

“It moved,” said Abaron.

“The chemistry is almost too fast for scan to follow!”

“It moved,” Abaron insisted.

“What?”

“I said it moved.”

“Put it in the water,” Chapra said.

The PSR lowered its charge into the water, which was now a metre deep. Abruptly the creature jerked away from the PSR, then feebly began paddling.

“Get the temperature up! Quick, it’s going into hypothermic shock. Use the microwave pulse again if necessary.”

“Ten, twenty, thirty… it’s coming out of it.”

The PSR retreated from the chamber. The creature continued to propel itself around and around. Abruptly it broke the surface with a triangular section tentacle, angled over like a periscope. The water lay two metres deep now. The creature moved to the edge of the jetty, then underneath.

“Dim the lights fifty percent,” said Chapra.

“Eighty degrees,” said Abaron. Wisps of steam were now blowing off the water’s surface.

“Hold it at ninety and keep the pressure at one atmosphere.”

“Surely it needs more.”

“As I said, it’ll likely have as much an adaptive range as a human. We want it tolerable enough for us to go in there.”

“Why?”

Chapra glared at him. “We have to learn to communicate.”

“Send a Golem in,” said Abaron.

Chapra turned away. “Just do as I say.”

It was the first time she had ever felt truly angry with Abaron, and was beginning to realise it might not be the last. She returned her attention to the chamber and watched as the creature slid out from under the jetty. It moved fast now. An underwater view showed that it propelled itself with a tail fin like a sharp propeller that pulsed in alternate directions. It changed direction and halted by gripping the bottom with its tentacles. It stabilized itself with two fleshy rudders jutting from its sides. The arm — it had only the one — it kept folded to its ribbed body. The head was that of a nightmare crayfish, but without eyes.

“I think you can open the way into one of your tanks now.”

“That will raise the temperature,” said Abaron tartly.

“Let it,” said Chapra. “It’ll only be for a while.” She did not allow herself be drawn. His turn to get under my skin, she thought.

At Abaron’s instruction an irised hatch slowly opened in the wall. Water poured in and the chamber filled with steam. The creature turned toward the disturbance, then backed away. Abruptly it darted to its disassembled sphere and turned one of the inner segments over on top of itself. Crustaceans and plants poured in with the water. The tank emptied and Abaron closed the hatch. Then he and Chapra watched anxiously. Eventually one of the larger crustaceans ventured over near the creature. There was a flicker of movement and the crustacean was up against the creature’s mouth parts, a faint cloudiness in the water, then a cleaned shell and emptied bits of exoskeleton drifted to the bottom. The creature slowly came out of its hide.

“Yes!” yelled Abaron happily.

Chapra watched with increasing fascination as the creature took up the empty shell and used it to scrape at the bottom of the tank. When this had no effect, it carefully picked up all the shell fragments in its single hand, swam over to the jetty, then reached out of the water and deposited them on the jetty.

“I think now I can sleep,” she said, and wondered if that was true. The creature’s response had been perfect, disturbingly perfect.

PART TWO

Kellor took the crodorman’s pawn then grinned at him across the board before picking it up. The crodorman had a look of real fear on his whorl-skinned face. It had taken a while to get that look there, since Kellor had appeared to be a perfect mark when he entered the tent. He looked young and a trifle depraved, his pouting mouth and pretty face the cosmetic choice of a certain contemptible type. His clothing, the tightly tailored white uniform of a preruncible ship captain, was also the choice of that type. The crodorman grunted in pain at the penalty shock, his eyes closed and the bigger whorls of thick skin on his face and wrists flushing red. Kellor studied him with interest. He reckoned on check in another five moves. It would be fascinating to see what level the penalty shock went up to then. The shock from checkmate killed people with a weak constitution. He wondered if the crodorman might die, and he smiled at the next expected move.

“You’re Kellor,” someone said.

Kellor glanced around at the man who had elbowed himself to the front of the ring of spectators. They shushed him but he ignored them. Kellor inspected the uniform and recognised the man as a General in the Separatist Confederation. Now there was a contradiction in terms. He looked up into the bearded face and saw there the harshness of rigid self-control, a mouth like a clam, and eyes a black glitter amidst frown lines.

“What can I do for you?” he asked, off-handedly making another move. He took no pieces this time, so there was no penalty shock. But Kellor was aware that his nonchalant attitude was scaring the crodorman. The General could not have come at a better time.

“I am David Conard,” said the General.

How very interesting, thought Kellor. Here was the Butcher of Cheyne, the man reputedly responsible for the deaths of over two million Polity citizens. He turned from the board, a flick of a smile on his face when he saw the sweat squeezing out between the folds in the crodorman’s forehead. Over ten seconds and the penalty shocks would start. You had to think quick in this game.

“You want my ship?” he asked, noting how the people who had been shushing the General had now moved back from him.

“We can’t discuss this here.”

Kellor nodded then glanced aside and moved his castle directly after the crodorman’s move. The crodorman rapidly followed that move, a look of relief on his ugly face. Oh silly silly crodorman.

“No problem,” he said to General Conard. “I’m finished now.” The crodorman lost his look of relief and stared at the board, then he looked up at Kellor. There was no pleading in his expression, just fear and a braced expectancy. This was the bit that Kellor liked; the moment his opponent realised he had lost and that he was about to experience pain, or die. He had enjoyed this moment so often, yet it never palled; the gun pointed or the blade of a knife paused at the skin. But it could never be protracted in a real fight as it could in penalty chess. Kellor grinned at the crodorman and slowly reached out for his queen.

“This will be checkmate, I believe,” he said.

The crodorman swore at him then made a sound halfway between a scream and a groan when he made the move. Kellor watched him writhe for a moment, then detached his own wrist bands and picked up his winnings. As he walked from the tent with the General the crodorman slumped across the board, either in a faint, or dead. He did not notice. By then he had lost interest.

The device was alive. Chapra defined it as a device because she was certain it was a product of technology rather than of evolution. It was also growing. Some time during their sleep period the creature had placed the thing on the bottom, at the side of the chamber furthest from where its food crustaceans congregated. It was half again the size it had been. It was now ten centimetres across: a spaghetti collection of tubes, a coral.

“You notice it’s increased in size rather than complexity. It’s exactly the same shape as it was,” said Chapra.

Abaron grunted an acknowledgement. She knew he was deeply involved in problems with the food ecology. The crustaceans ate the artificial proteins he gave them, they could in fact ingest Terran protein and plant matter, and they seemed really healthy. But he could not get them to breed. It was possible he might never know what was lacking in their food or their environment, but opined that while he tried to find out he learned much else. Chapra reckoned it was work he preferred because it tracked him away from the alien itself.

“Where has the shell gone?” she suddenly asked. “Box, did you have it cleared from the chamber?”

“No, the creature utilized it,” replied the ship AI.

“Show me.”

A flicker and she was looking at an earlier view into the chamber. Another flicker and the water became totally unrefractive; it looked as if the creature, the plants, and the pseudo-shrimps were just floating through air. She watched as the creature placed the device on the bottom then began cruising in circles around the chamber. After a time it reached up on the jetty and collected all the pieces of shell. It took these to the device, and next to it, on the floor of the chamber, ground the shell to sludge and fed it into the tubes.

“What are the main constituents of those shells?” Chapra asked. Abaron replied, “Calcium carbonate and calcium phosphate.”

Chapra’s hands glided for a moment then she paused in irritation and plugged in her interlink. Her hands glided again.

“The device has been increased in size structurally, using those compounds, but its other constituents are more diffuse. These are carbon and copper compounds in the main, with aluminium, microscopic amounts of tungsten carbide…” Chapra’s voice trailed off and she sat there trancelike. After a time she turned to Abaron who was watching her carefully. “Now is our opportunity,” she said.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“I mean I’m going in there.”

“You must be insane,” he said. He looked slightly ill.

“Box,” she said, ignoring him. “I want those compounds in the precise proportion they are in the device, only ten times the quantity, separate and held in inert containers… make the containers from the same material as the sphere inner shell, and in the same fashion. I leave it to you.”

“What about contamination?” asked Abaron, a catch in his voice.

“None of its bacteria or viral forms have shown any pathogenic tendency in human tissue, and we are free of all harmful human viral or bacterial forms. Even the beneficent ones we do carry would not be able to survive in its environment.”

“The heat?”

“I’ll wear an environment suit, but I do not want to be completely cut off.”

“Why?” asked Abaron, confused.

“If I completely enclose myself the creature may not be able to see me in its way. Remember, its primary senses are most like our senses of taste and smell — it has no vision.” Abaron just shook his head and returned his attention to his console and display. Chapra smiled and stood, removed her interlink. Before leaving the room she rested her hand on Abaron’s shoulder.

“Xenology is not the most clever choice for a xenophobe,” she said, and headed for the door. Before she went through it he managed a reply. “It is exactly the right choice.” Once she was outside the room and beyond Abaron’s hearing, Box said, “He is right, and we watch him. His fear makes him a most meticulous researcher.”

“Have you followed my instructions?”

“But of course. Judd awaits you in the isolation chamber.”

“Superior bastard,” she muttered as she strode down the corridor. The world of Callanasta was Diana Windermere’s home world, and where the rest of the Cable Hogue’s crew were stationed or lived on permanent call. It was also the world the Hogue orbited and, it had been established, that orbit was of great benefit to the Callanasta’s two-centuries-old terraforming project. Diana thought it good that a breaker of worlds, just by its presence, assisted in the making of a world. The call came while she was spear fishing for the huge adapted turbot in the estuary. She was slowly coming up on one of the great diamond shapes as it cruised along the bottom when there came a splash above her and the iron crab of a remote drone sank down toward her. The turbot shot away in a cloud of silt and Diana resisted the temptation to shoot the spear at the drone. It would only bounce off. She surfaced and the drone surfaced with her.

“This is a priority call. You are to come at once,” said the drone. Diana pulled her hemolung breather.

“Another fucking drill?” she spat.

“The crew are gating aboard at the moment. We leave the system in one hour.” The voice was different all of a sudden. Diana realised the Hogue AI had just spoken to her and that it sounded excited. Usually it was locked into the net and too busy in other pursuits to even talk. Diana dropped her spear gun and opened up with her fastest crawl for the shore. She kicked off her flippers in the surf then ran down the grey strand to her beach house. She delighted in the strength of her body. To be this fit compensated for the times she had spent in hospitals being cell welded back together, just as the captaincy of the Hogue compensated for the years she had spent taking orders. She grinned to one side at the drone as it overtook her, carrying her flippers and spear gun. Her beach house was made of pine shipped around from the other side of the planet and was a replica of the chalets they built in Siberia in the twenty-second century shortly after the permafrost melted. At least, that’s what the catalogue said. Diana did not care so long as she had room for her weapon collection and gym — not for her the augmentations that were so popular in Security, as she considered it better to know her own strength.

Inside the chalet she stripped off her swimsuit and stepped under the shower. As she did this she heard the thump of her spear gun and flippers hitting the floor. Out of the shower she dried, pulled on her jump suit, looked around for anything she might need. There was just one thing. She took a large ceramal commando knife down from its wall display and slid it into her boot. It was unlikely that she would use it; she just took it because she felt uncomfortable without it.

In the back of the chalet stairs led down into an underground chamber that had been carved out of yellow rock of Callanasta. It always gave Diana a thrill to come down here. She rated this, her own runcible. The floor of the chamber was dark glass underneath which could be seen the shapes of machines and ducts. At the centre of the floor was a circular dais of black glass three metres in diameter. At the centre of this stood two nacreous bull’s horns three metres high between which shimmered the cusp of this Skaidon gate. No living human understood the science. Iversus Skaidon had, for the brief time he survived directly interfacing with an AI. The whole science was created in a matter of minutes. Diana watched the drone shoot into the cusp and disappear. There were people who used it just as casually, but Diana could not. Always there was a moment of reflection before she stepped through. She stepped through.

No time. No space, nor pain. Just a feeling of strangeness that came not from the transference itself but from the dislocation. The air was different, as was the gravity, sounds, smells, tastes. All in an instant.

“Captain, it isn’t a drill.”

Weapons comp: Eric Jabro.

“I figured that,” said Diana, striding away from the gate to the screens that showed Callanasta below. She needed that momentary reassurance. “Is everyone aboard?”

“I’ll check.”

They would be. Whatever this was, they had trained for it for the last eight years. She stared down at the planet. For eight years the planet had had tides, now it would have to do without for a while. The suit blew cold air up under her hood. Every so often a feather of the air in the room got through. It felt as if someone had passed a red hot iron near her face.

“If the air temperature is taken lower, vision will be restricted.” Chapra stood with her back against the lock door. Judd stood a pace or two ahead of her. Was this such a good idea? She looked down at the case of hexagonal containers she held. It weighed heavy on her arm. Would the creature understand the gesture? Would it even recognise what was in these containers?

“Let’s do it,” she said, her words disturbing the air in front of her face and letting some of the heat in. She started to sweat.

“The creature is aware of our presence,” said Judd. The Golem was linked in to Box and to the control room where Abaron sat biting his nails. Box had arbitrarily decided not to speak to them while they were in the isolation chamber as this might confuse the creature.

“There,” Judd pointed to where three triangular tentacles broke the surface and zeroed in on Chapra. The fronts of these tentacles were equilateral triangles about ten centimetres on the side. Contained in these triangles was an organic complexity that had something of a lamprey’s mouth, the underside of a starfish, and a computer interface plug.

“It is physically motionless now, though Abaron informs me that there is huge sensorium activity.”

“Fine,” said Chapra. She walked to the end of the jetty, lowered the case to the floor, then walked back to stand beside Judd. There was something strange… something made her shiver.

“We are being ultrasound scanned,” the Golem observed.

Chapra nodded. That was what she was feeling. Her partial catadaption made her more sensitive to some things. She thought about some of the structures they had studied in the creature’s head. There had been much they had been unable to fathom, but now they at least knew it used ultrasound. Just by looking at a human’s hands, eyes, and the structure of the brain it is not possible to know all of what a human is capable.

“Something like a dolphin,” said Judd. “There are also complex pheromones present in the air.”

“It’s talking to us,” said Chapra.

“It is scanning the case,” said Judd.

Before Chapra could think of any reply to that the creature propelled itself to the edge of the jetty. A tentacle poised above the case, came down, pulled the lid to one of the containers, hovered above it. Something like a butterfly’s tongue flickered from the end of the tentacle. There was a pause, then the creature sampled the other cases so fast its movements were a blur. The hand came out then snatched the case into the water, gone.

“Well, thank you, too,” said Chapra, but she was euphoric.

Back in the control room Abaron watched, fascinated as the creature coiled around its strange device and worked upon it in some strange manner. It opened the pots one at a time and fed tastes of the various compounds into it with its tentacles. It reached inside with its long fingers and shifted things, reached deep inside with dabs of the compounds. This was causing reactions inside the device and turning the surrounding water cloudy. Abaron could see it was growing rapidly. When it reached twenty centimetres across, the creature snared more crustaceans, feeding itself on their flesh and their shells into the device, which continued to grow. After one sleep period it lay a metre across, and was like some enormous seashell bearing the shape of a wormcast. Its outer surface was red and rough, but what he could see of the interior was iridescent white, smooth, with the tube ends turned out like lips. Movement was visible far inside, which under scan seemed the interplay of complex mechanisms, or the internal function of a living creature. The line was blurred.

“Have we any idea at all what that is?” asked Abaron.

“Could be anything. It might use it to prepare its food, make drugs, or it might even serve no purpose at all. Imagine an alien watching a human paint a picture… ”

“I think it serves a function.”

“It’s a step or two beyond complete analysis,” said Box in an unusual interruption. “But there are nanomechanical structures in there and as a consequence we must limit scan.” Chapra said, her voice flat, “Then its function could be anything, and might even be everything.”

“What do you mean?” asked Abaron.

“Nanomechanical — it’s likely it can make whatever it wants from the molecular level up. I would guess the only constraint to be materials, environment, and the size of those tubes.”

“It might make something to break out of there,” said Abaron. Chapra looked at him. “It is not a prisoner. If it wants to leave at any time and shows that capability, then we should allow it to leave.”

Abaron shuddered.

“That bothers you?” Chapra enquired.

“It bothers me, but I can live with it… what’s it doing now?” They both turned to the projection. The creature caught one of the larger crustaceans, but rather than eat it, fed the crustacean into one of the tubes of the strange machine, then coiled around it.

“Feeding it?” wondered Abaron.

“I don’t think so,” said Chapra, and her fingers went reflexively to her console. After a moment she lifted her hands away. “Box, I’m not getting anything on scan.”

“Scan is inadvisable at this time. The radiations of scan may damage the nanomechanical structures or interfere with whatever process is taking place.”

“Ah, Schrödinger,” said Chapra tightly, but she allowed a little smile at the irony.

“You’re not letting us look,” said Abaron in disbelief.

“Precisely,” said Box.

To Abaron Chapra said, “He’s right, X-rays and ultrasound could wreck things on a molecular level, and the other spectrums of scan aren’t likely to do any good.”

“What about underspace?”

Box said, “An underspace scan still requires a real-space medium after gating.”

“Oh,” said Abaron, and looked embarrassed.

“That’s my lot for now,” said Chapra, and she stood and left the room. Abaron sat for an hour analysing all extraneous data, but when the creature made no further moves he decided it was time for him to sleep. After he had gone, Judd entered the room and stared at the projection. Communication between Golem and ship AI was silent but long. Eventually Judd leaned forward and turned off the display, then just stood there still as something dead. Once in her quarters Chapra sat on her bed and stared at nothing in particular for a while.

“Box,” she eventually said, still staring, “There’s huge potential here.”

“We have no suitable scale of measurement or comparison,” the AI told her.

“I was just thinking,” she went on. “The scientific community is not the only group that’ll be taking an interest.”

“This has been noted.”

“I am glad… you are only a science vessel.”

“I am.”

“What is being done?”

“As soon as nanomechanical structures were discovered in the device Earth Central was informed and has since taken appropriate action.”

Chapra lay back on her bed. “Every world that’s in the net but outside of Polity control will be watching, if not doing something. Separatist organisations are almost certainly looking for ways to capitalise on this. What exactly is being done?”

“The dreadnought Cable Hogue has been dispatched and will arrive in two solstan weeks.” Chapra swallowed dryly. That if anything brought home the seriousness of things; dreadnoughts were not put into action for anything less than interplanetary war.

“Will we come under military control?”

“No,” said Box.

Like a million scientists before her Chapra did not believe that.

Kellor watched Conard’s reaction with some amusement as the vendor thanked them for their custom and floated on to the next table. Separatists were uniform in their hatred of all machine intelligences. Kellor sipped his cool-ice and waited. He reckoned on the transportation of weapons or as an outside bet a military strike, which was fine by him so long as the target was not actually within the Polity.

“We require your services,” said Conard.

Kellor obliged this comment with a, slight tilt of his head.

“There is a science vessel that poses a threat to the Confederation. We need to take it out.”

“Polity?”

“Yes.”

“Expensive.”

“Ten million units of irradiated platinum.”

“Behind the Line?” Kellor asked, preparing to get up and walk away.

“What do you mean?”

“Is it in Polity space?”

“No.”

Kellor sipped some more of his drink and allowed a chunk of the psychedelic ice to melt on his tongue. That was a lot of irradiated platinum for destroying a science vessel outside of Polity space. There had to be a catch. There always was.

“Where is this vessel?”

“Its last reported position was at the edge of the Quarrison Drift. Entering the Drift. I have that position to within a light year. There must be no survivors; total obliteration.”

“For my own sake I have to agree. I don’t want the Polity taking an interest in my affairs. What complications might there be?”

“The ship could be planetside by the time we reach it.” Conard gave a bleak grin before sipping his glass of mineral water. Kellor distrusted people who made a point of staying sober. It probably meant they needed a clear head to keep track of their lies.

“I don’t have the equipment for a large-scale planetary action. All I have is delta wing landing craft adapted for orbital bombardment.”

“We will supply soldiers and landing craft for any ground action. You have the hold space.” Kellor nodded then tilted his head as the crodorman came staggering into the vending area. The man looked drunk and angry. Kellor shook his head in mock sadness and dropped a hand down to his belt. He felt nothing but contempt for bad losers.

“How soon can you be ready?” asked Conard.

“There are a few loose ends… ”

The crodorman approached their table, pulling something from his bulky garments.

“Trazum speck!”

Kellor knew enough crodorun to recognise the challenge and threat. He stood as the crodorman finally pulled free a cylinder of grey metal. The end of the cylinder shot away to a distance of a metre and hovered suspended, the vague shimmer of field-stiffened monofilament between it and the cylinder. Kellor drew a small flat gun and pointed it. The crodorman paused; that moment again. The gun made a sound like a plastic ruler slapped against a table. The crodorman’s arm fell off. The weapon fell with it and sheared in a half a recently vacated chair. On his feet now Kellor aimed again. The crodorman had time only to look down at the blood pumping from his stump. Again that sound. A hole the size of a strawberry appeared in ridged forehead and spattered customers behind the crodorman with pieces of skull and brain. He fell back over the vending machine which whined under his weight and thanked him for his custom. As Kellor holstered his gun he noted Conard clipping a similar weapon back into a wrist holster. He filed the information away for future reference.

“That’s one loose end,” he said.

“It’s female,” said Abaron.

“I thought you had females,” said Chapra. They were sitting in a small eating area. Chapra was eating prawns and Abaron occasionally gave the plateful a strange look.

“Female… definitions. I had two sexes and made the fundamental error of assuming that because they were so like Earth crustaceans in every respect they would be the same in meiosis… it’s the trihelical DNA. There are three sexes, all contributing their share of the chromosomes. This is the third.” He pointed at the projection. It showed a crustacean little different in outward appearance to its fellows.

“So our friend used the device to conduct a sex-change operation,” said Chapra with much amusement.

“Yes,” said Abaron grudgingly. He looked at the creature curled around its weird machine. “No doubt it is correcting my error with one of the other species.”

“Why don’t you do the rest?” asked Chapra. “Help it out.” Abaron stared at her for a moment as if trying to decide whether or not she was ridiculing him. He eventually nodded then took up his notescreen and headed out of the room.

“What has it got in there now?” Chapra asked the empty air. The projection flickered and changed, showed the creature harvesting some of the water weed and feeding it into the machine. The projection then flicked back to real time showing the creature uncurling and moving back from its machine. A cloud of small objects gusted from one white mouth.

“What is that?”

“Seeds and spores,” said Box. “Initial analysis shows—” Box’s voice abruptly cut off.

“Yes… shows what?”

The silence lasted for racked-out seconds. Chapra felt a chill. It was not often that an AI did not reply, was not there. To her knowledge this could only mean that Box’s entire processing power had come on line. And that power was phenomenal.

Box said, “I am sorry to delay. There are seeds and spores for one hundred different varieties of water weed.”

“But there was only one,” said Chapra, and only after she had said it did she realise what Box had told her. “Jesu, it can do that?”

Box said, “From the plant material it placed in the device the creature has made seeds and spores for one hundred different varieties of water plant. The genetic coding for sixty-four percent of these plant seeds is close enough to the original plant code for it to have altered that genome. The rest fall outside that area of probability as they are bihelical DNA.”

“It’s an engineer, a fucking genetic engineer.”

“Shall I continue?”

“Yes, sorry.”

“Many of the seeds seem to have their origins in a completely different environment from what is likely the creature’s native one but have been altered to survive in it. Five of the seeds are from Earth seaweeds.”

“You mean Earth-type?” asked Chapra, even though she knew an AI did not make that kind of mistake.

“Earth seaweeds, specifically three types of kelp and two bladder wracks. The kelps are Furzbelows or Saccorhiza Polyschides, Sea Belt or—”

“Yes, yes, you’ve made your point, but what does it mean?”

“You require my answer to that?”

“I would like it. I know what mine is.”

“Very well, this creature is or was a member of star-spanning race with a technology comparable if not superior to our own. At some time it or its kind visited Earth.”

“Is or was?”

“We have never before encountered a creature like this yet it has obviously travelled in human space. If its point of origin does turn out to be the system for which we are heading, then the creature might post date the extinction of its own kind by as much as five million years.”

“How long now until we get there?”

“Forty-eight solstan hours.”

Chapra nodded to herself and returned her attention to the projection.

“Hell,” she said. “What now?”

The creature had placed the sample pots on the jetty, each of which contained something.

“I’m going down there.”

“Judd is on his way.”

“Yes, I’m sure he is.”

Diana unclipped the restraining bar from her seat as the interface helmet automatically disconnected itself from her head, from her mind. Abruptly she was human again; limited to a small and fragile bipedal form. It was to be a god to interface with the Cable Hogue. It was also very tiring.

“Everything nominal,” said Jabro, as if he expected no answer.

“Nominal,” said Diana, still seeing the shore scenes from Callanasta’s surface. The tsunami had been ten metres high, but the shore baffles had absorbed most of its energy. There had been only minor flooding in some coastal areas. No deaths. But then not many people lived on that world.

“We should do a weapons test before arrival,” said Jabro. Behind his back Orland grinned at Seckurg, the token Golem on the bridge.

“Why should we?” asked Diana, her face straight.

“We don’t want anything to go wrong at the other end,” said Jabro, just as straight-faced.

“Hogue,” said Diana, addressing the ceiling as was the wont of any addressing an AI, the location of which they were unsure. “Give us a vector on something to blast.”

“Asteroid field two hours away at present speed. Navigation hazard and mostly the size of Separatist dreadnoughts. Nice that,” said Hogue with relish.

“How long with the Laumer engines?”

“One hour. Engines still on diagnostic.”

“Take them off that and put them online. This is a priority mission.” Deep in the guts of the Cable Hogue, banks of crystalline cylinders phased red-violet then off the visible spectrum. The force holding the ship under the surface of underspace dragged it deeper and slammed it forward. The energy expended was such that the ship left a visible trail behind it in realspace; self-created antimatter sparkled into oblivion as it connected with stray hydrogen atoms and left black lines like stretch marks across vacuum.

One hour later the Cable Hogue flashed into existence in a field of asteroids with a dispersion of thousands of kilometres. Asteroids glowed and bloomed into expanding spheres of plasma. Jabro segmented an asteroid the size of Earth’s moon, then hit each segment with quark bombs. The resultant flash was mistaken as a nova on a distant world, a hundred years on.

“That cost us,” said the ship AI, but Jabro was laughing like a maniac and did not hear. Diana smiled to herself, knowing Hogue would not have allowed Jabro access to that particular weapons bank if the cost had been prohibitive. The cost later turned out to be a twenty minute stopover in the troposphere of a gas giant for refuelling, then the Hogue really opened up with its Laumer engines. The result was called The Cable, and it glowed in the skies of many a world for decades.

The heat licked at the edges of the air blast on Chapra’s face as she entered the isolation chamber. It almost seemed malevolent. Judd walked out ahead of her, to the edge of the jetty, and studied the containers. The creature was floating about ten metres out and Chapra felt that faint sensation that told her she was being ultrasound scanned. After a moment she followed Judd and peered down into the containers.

“A gift?” she wondered. She squatted down and looked closely. Three of the containers held small quantities of metallic powder. There were small quantities of crystalline substances in a couple of others, and in the remaining three were minute copies of the containers themselves. Chapra reached inside and took one out. Like the originals it was transparent. There was a mere fleck of something inside it. Judd said, “The creature showed increased scanning activity when you spoke and it is showing it again now.”

Chapra stood up. “Perhaps it understands that this is how we communicate. I imagine that it communicates using ultrasound and pheromones — not an easy language to translate.” She stooped and took up four of the containers. Judd took up the other four.

“I don’t think these are a gift,” she continued. “I think the creature is letting us know its requirements.” She turned to the door then and halted in surprise. Abaron, dressed in a totally-enclosing environment suit, stood just inside the chamber.

“Abaron.” She could think of nothing more to say.

“There is a communication for you,” he said, his voice grating from the PA of the suit. He quickly turned back to the door, hit the control to open it, went through. Chapra and Judd followed him through the lock. In that little chamber Abaron removed his mask while Chapra flicked back her hood. His face was pouring with sweat.

“Is that suit malfunctioning?” asked Chapra sweetly, then damned herself for insensitivity — at least he was trying. She shook her head. “What do you mean ‘a communication’?”

“A priority message from a place called Clavers World,” he said.

“Box? I thought you weren’t letting anything through.”

“I merely reassigned priority. One of my subminds has been vetting all communications. This particular one may be relevant to all our actions. It is from Alexion Smith and it is on real time.”

“Him. What the hell does he want?” As she said this Chapra glanced at Abaron and saw the awe on his face. “Strike that,” she said. “Let’s go and find out.” Junger twenty-eights, thought Kellor. He stood in the hold of his ship watching, on a nearby viewscreen, the gunships jetting across vacuum from the heavy-lifter shuttle. The General must have bribed someone in the Polity to obtain them. They were dated, and must have been scheduled for destruction at some point. Sixteen of them. Kellor licked his lips. He was not sure he liked this. The money was good and must obviously be in proportion to the risk… but some of the other toys the General had brought aboard bothered him. The tactical atomics weren’t so bad. Kellor had used them himself on many occasions. But the CTDs were. Contra terrene devices were the kind of things to get you really noticed by Earth Central, and it was by not being overly noticeable to EC that Kellor was able to continue to operate. He really hoped the General had no intention of using them against a Polity world

— that would really piss off some major minds, and a pissed-off AI was an enemy indeed.

“You have some reservations,” said Conard. A few paces behind him stood his two young aides, their expressions utterly devoid of emotion and in Kellor’s opinion, intelligence.

“I always have reservations when I don’t know all the details,” Kellor replied. The General stood with a swagger stick tucked under one arm and managed not to look ridiculous. His uniform was neat and spotless on a diminutive frame. His face wore a mildly thoughtful expression. But Kellor had begun to understand what went on behind that expression. General David Conard hated the Polity, and most especially its AIs, with fanatical intensity. He would die to bring it down. And he would kill anyone to bring it down. Kellor considered himself a better man. As far as he was concerned people could live how they liked. He only killed for money.

“There is nothing much to add. You must first sever communications using those… missiles.” He said the last word with contempt. It was his disgust at the thought of using smart missiles that had made Kellor finally realise the depth of Conard’s hatred of AIs. “And on our subsequent arrival in the system take out the Polity ship you’ll find there.”

“And that’s all?”

“Yes, and as I said before, ‘There must be no survivors; complete obliteration’.”

“And it’s only a Polity science vessel?”

“Yes.”

“No colony on the world?”

“No.”

“That’s all right then.”

Kellor turned to watch as the first of the gunships entered the hold of the Samurai. They had four-man crews, which meant his own crew would be outnumbered by about twenty. He would have to prepare for that eventuality. He turned back to Conard.

“Why?” he asked.

“I’m sorry?”

“Why do you want to destroy a Polity science vessel? Surely there are better military targets?”

“That does not concern you.”

Kellor pretended to think about it then nod reluctant agreement. He had noted and filed the edge to Conard’s voice. That edge had not been there at the beginning. Something had changed and the mission had acquired greater urgency. If the Separatists were becoming desperate to destroy that vessel then it carried something of huge potential value. With his back to the General, Keller allowed himself a cold little smile and glanced to the squat muscular bulk of his first officer. Jurens returned his look then nodded back to Conard. Kellor turned to watch.

The General strode over to a group of four of his soldiers who had come aboard the Samurai in the first Junger. One of these was either ill or drunk and his fellows were attempting to support him. As the General approached they quickly stepped away. Conard did not hesitate. He kicked the soldier in his testicles then kicked his feet away from under him. As the man lay on the deck groaning Conard reached down and pulled something from his neck and tossed it aside. Jurens stepped up beside Kellor.

“H-patch,” he said. “Confederation soldiers like to stay stoned so’s they don’t have to think about what they’re being ordered to do. Arseholes.”

The General, just to drive the point home, began systematically kicking in the soldier’s ribs. The man probably couldn’t feel it. Jurens spat on the deck and turned away. Kellor followed his first officer from the hold. He too, as a young mercenary, had suffered such officers as Conard.

PART THREE

Alexion Smith looked neither old nor young. There was nothing fashionable nor particularly unfashionable about his appearance. He had short blond hair, a thin non-descript face set as a background for calm green eyes, and wore a ribbed and neatly patched environment suit. He looked… utilitarian. From years of association Chapra knew that this was because such things as fashion just held no interest for him. His love was for things long dead and buried: ancient ruins and ancient bones, preferably alien ruins and alien bones. He sat now at ease in a deep armchair in a projection that occupied the air over the consoles in the control room. Behind him was a window through which could be seen a barren landscape below a sky half-filled with a red-giant sun. Weird birds drifted in charcoal silhouette.

“Alex, it’s nice to see you,” said Chapra as she dropped into her swivel chair. Abaron took a seat in the background.

“It is nice to see you, Chapra, though I wouldn’t recognise you. I take it you got fed up with the grey hair and sagging tits?”

Chapra grinned at the sound of a sharply indrawn breath behind her. “I did. I find that in this form it is easier for me to get what I want. Appearance is all even in this cosmetic age. What is it, Alex? What’s given you priority over half a million other callers?”

Alexion looked out his window for a moment before returning his attention to Chapra.

“I was fascinated by your discovery out there, Chapra, and supposing that the escape pod is five million years old I considered that discovery within my remit. I’ve been watching and paying attention… picking up on every scrap of information… The evidence is mostly mythological, philological… you know as well as I that you can excavate languages and stories as well as ruins—”

“What’s your point, Alex?”

Alexion looked at her very directly, “Based on the construction of the escape pod — remains of one exactly the same were found in the Csorian time vault — and based on the machine it… uses — the shape of that machine was etched into the walls of the same vault and no-one knew what it was until now

— and based on thousands of other fragments of information collated by AI, there is an eighty-three per cent probability that the creature you have there is… Jain.”

Chapra shivered and heard Abaron curse. She immediately wanted to object; but the Jain died out millions of years ago, they’re just dust and legends and racial memories of gods… Alexion went on, “In the Sarian mythos the Jain were the great sorcerers, the transformers. Their houses were said to be black water-filled boxes built in the equatorial deserts. Their symbol was the triangle. And if that is not enough, the world to which you are heading, has been posited for over a century as likely a Jain home world.”

“Okay, I’m convinced,” said Chapra. “But how is this to affect what I am doing here?”

“The ship AI there, Box, is loading every Jain study, every relevant piece of information. It might help.”

“Is that it?” Chapra was beginning to feel a vague disappointment.

“They moved suns, Chapra. There are those who theorise that here we are in the backwoods of a civilization that still exists. I guess my message is: for all our sakes, don’t fuck up. Ciao.” Alexion flickered out of existence.

Chapra turned to Abaron. “This changes nothing,” she said.

Abaron nodded, but he looked scared again.

The Jain — this was how both Abaron and Chapra referred to it now, it was better than ‘the creature’ — took the containers from the jetty to its machine. Chapra smiled to herself. Perhaps they might never be able to speak to each other, but they understood each other. When she and Judd had collected them the containers held samples of what the Jain wanted in quantity. One of them contained a sample of only a few atoms inside a small vacuum sphere of glass. The Jain’s requirements had stretched from the prosaic to the exotic. It had wanted iron, it had wanted tantalum, and it had wanted a metallic element only theorised until then. Making a few ounces of the stuff had stretched the main onboard laboratory and required five Golem to come out of stasis to assist.

“You note it only requires elements,” said Chapra.

“Confirmation that it can build all the molecules it wants, so long as it has the atoms,” said Abaron. He was being very correct and very logical, very in control.

“I wonder though… ”

“What?”

“That metal, the Jainite, and the niobium… I’ve checked. There was nothing like that in the isolation chamber, nor in the tanks.”

“They could have been present in the escape pod.”

“No. I had Box check back on every scan. We were thorough.”

“What are you saying then?”

“We missed something, or with that machine the Jain is able to synthesise atoms, even if in minute quantities.”

“It’s Jain,” said Abaron, as if that was all the answer required. Some hours later the Jain manufactured something else.

“The device is a scanner,” said Box. “It scanned the entire ship with some kind of neutron burst.”

“That’s not possible,” said Abaron.

“It’s Jain,” said Chapra, relishing the moment.

The device the Jain had built was about the size of a human head and looked like the bastard offspring of a whelk and the insides of an old valve radio. After using it the Jain saved one small component then fed the rest of it back into its bigger machine, its creation machine. Afterwards it fed in one of the large crustaceans. Then it came to the jetty and left something squatting there.

“This I have to see,” said Chapra, hurrying on her way. She glimpsed Abaron licking his dry lips as he reluctantly followed her. In minutes both of them were in hotsuits and walking out on the jetty. Judd strode behind them.

“It’s the crustacean. It’s been altered,” said Abaron, then he stepped rapidly back when the beast lifted its armoured belly up off the jetty and, walking on four armoured limbs, began to come towards them bull terrier fashion. After a moment Chapra moved back as well. The beast squatted down a couple of metres in front of them, waiting.

“Look at its back,” said Abaron.

Chapra did so and there saw a triangle of ridged and pocked flesh. It was the negative of the end of the Jain’s tentacles, she saw this at once.

Judd said, “This was one of the crustaceans. It has been stripped of its digestive system and now has a small organic power cell. Its sensorium has been upgraded to eighty per cent of received spectra and there are additions to its primitive brain. Its blood is heated by metallic heating elements.”

“It’s a probe,” said Chapra. “I bet the additions to its brain are memory.”

“Cannot be determined,” said Judd.

“All right, I bet there are direct links between those additions and that triangle on its back.” After a pause Judd said, “There are.”

Chapra turned to Abaron and tried not to notice that he had pressed himself up against the door.

“I’ll bet the intention is for it to wander around the ship then come back here. Once back here the Jain probably plugs in and reads off all the information it has gathered.”

“That seems likely,” said Abaron, a quaver in his voice.

“Okay, let’s see,” said Chapra, and she hit the door control. The beast got up again, advanced to the door, and through. They followed it into the lock, opened the next door into the ship. Beyond this door awaited the Golem named Rhys, who in appearance was an Australian aborigine.

“Rhys will accompany our little guest on its tour around the ship,” said Box. The beast moved off down the corridor, clicks and buzzes coming from a sensorium that was a mass of complex spikes, facets, brushes, and dimpled plates, all shifting and swivelling.

“Is this a good idea?” said Abaron, and Chapra wondered how he had restrained himself for so long.

“I think everything is under control, and won’t be allowed to get out of control… what is that on your belt, Rhys?”

Rhys glanced back and tapped a hand on the gun holstered at his hip. In appearance it was a Luger made out of chrome, but with a few strange additions.

“It is a singun,” said Rhys, his usually happy demeanour at once very serious.

“You see?” said Chapra to Abaron.

“But… I didn’t think such things existed.”

“They do. One shot from that will have the effect of turning our friend inside out through a pin hole in space.” She observed Abaron’s confused expression and explained. “For about a second it generates a singularity in its target. Our friend there would be reduced to sludge.”

“Wouldn’t an energy weapon have been better?” asked Abaron.

Judd said, “There is a high probability that the creature can generate defences against energy weapons. We have no known defence against the singun.”

Chapra decided not to point out to Abaron that use of ‘we’.

“It’s all rather moot,” she said. “The Jain has shown no signs of hostility.”

“The Jain has placed a container upon the jetty,” said Box.

“Let’s go see what it wants now,” said Chapra, and they trooped back into the lock. Soon they were out on the jetty. The container was at the furthest end.

“What the hell is that?” wondered Chapra as she strode towards the container. Showing great fortitude, Abaron strode at her side. Inside the container was a coil of something fleshy. They halted at the container and stood over it.

“It looks like something alive,” said Abaron, crushing the dread in him under the cool analytic scientist.

“It certainly—”

The coil snapped straight out of the container, cobra fast. It hit Abaron’s arm, hung there for a moment as it recoiled, then snapped out into the water. Abaron yelled, staggered back, and sat down.

“Oh,” he said, then looked down at his shoulder where blood was spreading between the layers of his environment suit. “It bit me.” In a moment Judd lifted him up and all but carried him to the door. Chapra followed. In the lock Abaron’s legs gave way and he looked more bewildered than scared.

“It’s just shock,” Chapra told him, but she could not put from her mind visions of an ancient celluloid film she had in her collection; of the contents of an egg shooting out and attaching to a man’s face, and the consequences of that.

Box looked upon the world with all its superbly precise senses and analysed it with a mind that made the mind of any god humans had imagined appear that of an infant throwing a tantrum, and it found the world beautiful. The eye of the beholder. Box could find beauty in anything because it could look at things in so many thousands of different ways. Many philosophers in the human polity now posited that humans were not created by gods, that in fact the complete reverse applied.

At the poles of the world the temperature was the same as at Earth’s equator, but at two atmospheres pressure. At its equator the environment was about as inviting to a human as the inside of a pressure cooker. The place swarmed with life much like that in the isolation chamber, but with one important exception. There were great and complex ecosystems here, but no outpost of any star-spanning civilization, and no discernible remnants, but then little might survive five million years in such hostile conditions. There were no Jain, not a trace.

Very cool and very factual Abaron said, “There are no toxins in me, there is no disgusting alien embryo waiting to burst out of my stomach in a messy spray. There is, in fact, nothing alien to my body inside me barring the two doughnuts I ate half an hour ago and the cup of coffee I washed them down with.” Chapra smiled. The attack, rather than feeding his fear, had destroyed it. Irrational fear could never long survive harsh realities.

“What happened then?”

“This.” Abaron peeled back the dressing on his arm to show the wound. A perfect circle of skin a centimetre wide and few millimetres deep had been excised from his biceps.

“What do you think?”

“I think the Jain took a sample. It is as curious about us as we are about it. Only its curiosity must have a greater urgency because it is entirely dependent on us and has no idea what we might want of it.”

“What do you think it might learn?”

“Everything it is possible to learn from my DNA. Being able to build and alter DNA to the extent it does it must be able to decode it down to the atomic level.”

“I think you’re right,” said Chapra. She thought a lot else but wasn’t going to spoil his moment.

“Box,” said Abaron. “What happened after the… worm… bit me?”

“It swam very fast to the inside of the Jain’s machine. The Jain is now wrapped around its machine. There is much nanomechanical activity.”

“There,” said Abaron to Chapra.

Just then the door to the medlab hissed open and in walked the Jain’s probe beast, closely followed by Rhys.

Box said, “There was an ultrasound communication between this probe and the Jain six minutes after the sample was taken from your arm.”

The beast squatted on the floor, facing towards Abaron, who sat on the edge of the examination couch.

“It is scanning you,” said Box, then, “Your graft is ready.”

“Perhaps it has come to see this,” said Abaron as he lay back on the couch. The doctor, which was a close relation to the PSR but deliberately less threatening in appearance, gripped Abaron’s arm above and below his biceps. What might be described as its head came down against the muscle. It quickly gobbled up the dressing. In a glare of sterilizing ultraviolet it pressed a circle of skin into place with a flattened white egg on the end of one many jointed arm. The egg had the words ‘Cell Weld Inc.’ printed on it. It hummed mildly. The probe beast got up, turned, and left the room.

“It’s satisfied you’re all right,” said Chapra.

When Abaron had nothing to say to that Box said, “You may be interested to know that prior to coming here the probe beast, as you call it, was in an observation blister, looking at the stars, and seeing our arrival at system DF678.98 and the world with the name Haden. It is now returning to the isolation chamber.”

“We have to see this,” said Abaron. He inspected his arm as the doctor took the cell welder from his arm. There was no sign of a wound.

“The world?” asked Chapra.

“No, what the Jain does with its probe beast.”

When the doctor released him Abaron headed quickly for the door. Chapra followed calmly after, faintly smiling. She let Abaron get ahead of her; out of hearing.

“Where’s the xenophobe?” she asked.

“There is nothing more fearful than fear itself,” said Box.

“Yet you would have thought the opposite effect.”

“Human psychology. Go figure,” said Box.

Rhys opened the lock doors for the probe creature. It walked out along the jetty and dropped into the water. Chapra cleared the projection of surface refractivity and they watched the beast walk across the bottom to its creator. The Jain, still clinging around its machine, turned its strange head, then after a moment let go. It coiled out a triangular-section tentacle and plugged into the probe beast’s back.

“It’s down-loading it, reading it,” said Abaron.

Chapra was glad to hear fascination in his voice rather than the suppressed horror she had heard before. They sat watching. Chapra expected nothing more than the tentacle to detach in a few minutes, perhaps in a few hours. She did not expect what happened next. The Jain convulsed, its tentacle cracking like a whip. It broke the probe beast on the chamber floor and let it go. Leaking green blood and fizzing like sherbet the beast floated to the surface. The Jain convulsed again and coiled hedgehog fashion, all its tentacles, its head, its arm, and its tail hidden away. Nothing but a crescent of ribbed body, sinking to the bottom.

“Hell, what happened?” wondered Chapra, her hands blurring over her touch console. Abaron just studied the projection, his hands folded in his lap. “It just discovered how long it was in stasis I reckon.”

Chapra gaped at him. That had not even occurred to her.

The Jain remained coiled for twenty hours and when it finally uncoiled it swam around aimlessly for another eight hours. Chapra and Abaron used the time profitably, putting a probe down into the seas of Haden and discovering many of the same plants and creatures that now flourished in the isolation chamber.

“This certainly could be the Jain home world,” said Chapra.

“Any world could be the Jain home world,” said Abaron.

Chapra waited for an explanation.

“Our Jain has ably demonstrated how it can re-engineer any life form, and how it can build life forms from component atoms. How much has it re-engineered itself? Haven’t we done the same? There are humans with gills and fins, humans with compound eyes and exoskeletons, humans who can live in ten gees.”

“Very true,” said Chapra. “We might even be Jain.”

That shut Abaron up for a long time. When he finally spoke again it was to say, “We have to learn to speak to it now. We have to learn its language.”

Chapra was in thorough agreement, but even she was not sure where to start. The Jain might speak using ultrasound, pheromones, molecular messages, and it might not speak at all. Its language might have billions of words, no words, ten words, or it might ignore them because it felt depressed. Scan of its wide neural structure showed a hugely complex organ in its skull, a spinal column almost as wide as that skull, and from which branched nerve channels as thick as a human arm, leading to sub-brains in the torso that were easily as complex as human brains, then leading to each of its eight tentacles, eight interfaces.

“It’s back at its machine,” observed Abaron. “Will it even listen when it’s there?” They watched it at work, tentacles moving here and there across the surface of its machine.

“The ends of those tentacles are interfaces and they are crammed with microscopic manipulators,” said Chapra. “There must be mating plugs and microscopic controls all over the surface of that thing.”

“The entire surface is perhaps one control system,” said Abaron.

“The machine is expanding,” Box abruptly told them. Chapra reached for her touch controls then realised she did not have to bother; they could see it now. The mouths of the tubes had been approximately forty centimetres wide and the entire structure two metres across. It was visibly growing now, in pulses.

“The machine is drawing in and circulating water,” said Box. No need to confirm. They could see the movement. They watched as it drew in shrimps and water plants. Only water came out.

“It’s making something quite big now,” said Abaron.

“Oh really,” said Chapra, her hands rattling over her console. She swore under her breath when she realised Box was still not allowing her to scan the machine, then she abruptly folded her arms and sat back.

The machine expanded until it was four metres across, the top of it out of the water, the mouths of the tubes three quarters of a metre across. In a couple of the tubes they could see flickers of light as from an undersea welder. It drew in some of the bigger crustaceans. They did not come out again.

“Looks like it’s getting there,” said Abaron.

The Jain reached inside one of the tubes, pulled out something bulky, a soft mollusc from its shell. It towed this object to the jetty, and with much effort heaved it up out of the water.

“Oh my God,” said Abaron.

On the jetty lay a female human child of perhaps five years. At the base of her back, etched in the purples and reds of a birth mark, was the triangular interface. As they watched the child vomited water then slowly stood up. Her skin was very red.

“The heat,” said Chapra.

The door to the lock opened and Judd strode into the chamber.

The Jubilan communications satellite was a confetti of bright metal wrapped around a silver ovoid half a kilometre across. Geostationary above Jubal it glittered like some huge Christmas decoration. Around it, like a swarm of silver bees, glinted shuttle craft and loaders. The dark wedge of the Samurai was in harsh contrast as it slid into realspace trailing streamers of red fire. From this wedge of night sped four hardly visible specks at slow relativistic speeds. Two fell on the satellite. One wavered, then was gone in a galaxy-shaped explosion. The other struck home and the bright satellite cracked open, jetting flame and human and mechanical debris. The satellite came apart in the horrible silence of vacuum. The only screams heard were over radio links, and brief.

Kellor watched the destruction with no visible sign of emotion, but he had reservations: there were always extras. He had expected no less. But this was a Polity world. The extra payment of five million was all that had swayed him. He turned his attention to the display showing the other two missiles dropping towards the planet.

“What did they use?” he asked Jurens.

Jurens glanced up from his console. “Pulsed laser. Pretty powerful. They won’t have that in atmosphere and anyway, the missiles have learnt.”

Kellor noted Conard’s disgusted expression and dismissed it. The display showed the missiles dropping to a mountain range a hundred kilometres from their target. They’d go in ten metres above the ground. There was only one weapon that could get through their shields and armour. Kellor smiled to himself as he watched them close in like hunting wolves. Then his smile dropped away as the two missiles blinked out of existence.

One weapon…

“Jurens! Get us out of here! Now!”

“Wait!” shouted Conard. “The runcible!”

Jurens ignored Conard, hit the ionic boosters, then poised his hand over the controls for the U-space engines. The Samurai was at a quarter C but it needed just a little more. Kellor slammed his hand down on Juren’s hand, and the ship dropped into U-space. It was a slow drag, the ship straining and the sounds of distorting metal reaching them on the bridge. Over one of the coms someone began screaming as they saw through an incomplete field into the infinite. Kellor felt something dragging at him, at the ship, and it was not the result of a too-quick entry into U-space. When the drag ceased, he allowed himself a grimace at the sweat he felt on his top lip and turned to face Conard’s raging. The General was severely pissed-off. He was glaring and unconsciously clenching and unclenching his hands. His two aides stood quiet in the background. A surreptitious scan had showed them both to be heavily armed. Automatics in the bridge covered them, and Jurens and Speck had weapons to hand. If the General started anything Kellor would finish it. There was no way the man could call on his other forces here. They were all sitting in their gunships which, with an order, Kellor could dump into deep space.

“They did not seem to me the smartest of missiles,” hissed the General.

“Get to the point.”

“You should have used a human team. AIs are not reliable.”

The sheer idiocy of that comment left Kellor without any reply. How could you argue with that?

Conard went on, “Humans are chosen of God and are the only ones with the right to sentience!” Oh dear, it got worse and worse. Kellor considered killing him right then and there. It seemed the only kind thing to do. The problem was that Conard had a source of information. Kellor wanted that source before he killed the man.

“The missile did not strike home because the facility was protected by ground-based singuns. Your entire force would not have got through and if I had taken the Samurai in any closer, they would have gutted it.”

Conard stood there still clenching and unclenching his hands. After an embarrassingly long time he seemed to get control of himself. He turned and strode out of the bridge. That’s it, thought Kellor, go and kick shit out of one of your subordinates,

PART FOUR

The sifting machine had, in strips, methodically sifted a tenth of the desert’s surface to a depth of one metre. At a pace of two kilometres per hour it sucked up the sand, passed it through various grids and sieves, and spat it out behind filling the trench it had made. The sand left behind the machine was level. This would last until the next earthquake or storm. One of either usually came along each day. The process was crude and frowned upon by many archaeologists who claimed that valuable artefacts could be damaged or destroyed. Alexion Smith took the view that anything surviving five million years in that desert would not be damaged by the sifter. His robust approach to archaeology was greatly disliked. But he got results.

Smith checked the sifter every planetary day — about four solstan days — and made a find on average once every solstan year. Mostly he came to empty out strange-shaped stones and package artefacts from more recent ages for transmission to associates. On this occasion he had a find. In the red light of the giant sun the coralline material was the colour of old blood. Under the lamps it would be pink and Smith knew where he had seen its like before. The excitement he might have felt before was lacking now. Years of research and now, out there, a real living Jain. Smith glanced up at the red sun and the psuedobirds. A shape was coming towards him and it wasn’t a bird. The crab drone landed on the cowling of the sifter with a clattering and scrabbling and once it got its balance it peered at him with stalked eyes.

“Who are you then?” asked Smith.

“I am the Cable Hogue,” said the drone in a gravelly voice.

“Interesting name.”

“I am a ship AI speaking to you through this drone. The drone is called CH143 though it sometimes calls itself Spider.”

“It has an independent mind then?”

“Yes.”

“Well… what do you want of me?”

“Your expertise.”

“Go on.”

“To advise on matters Jain.”

Smith dropped the fragment of ancient Jain technology back into the collection box of the sifter.

“I’ll come,” he said.

The drone rose from the cowling.

“You have four hours to get to the runcible here. Go to the Vorstra moon for short range transference to the Cable Hogue.”

The voice was somehow different this time.

“I take it Spider speaks now.”

“Spider spoke then. Only Spider speaks now.”

Smith nodded and smiled to himself, then returned his attention to what he was being told.

“By shuttle?” he asked.

“By runcible,” said the drone.

“Tell me, what manner of vessel is this Hogue?”

“A dreadnought.”

Smith felt a slight shiver of excitement. It would have to be one hell of a ship to warrant having a runcible aboard. He was about to ask what classification of dreadnought it was when the drone accelerated away with a sonic crack. After a pause he headed for his AGC, his desert boots kicking up plumes of the red sand. The sifter went on sifting.

“Initially she was your clone. That she is a she, is the least of her alterations,” said Chapra. The girl lay on the examination couch in medlab, her blue eyes wide open, her body motionless. She just stared at the ceiling.

“There’s the interface in her back,” said Abaron. “What else?”

“A lot. She wasn’t burned in there even though she was in water that is nearly at boiling point. She can withstand temperatures that would kill a normal human. Very tough. Also her brain is human, but there are sub-brains branching all down her spine. In that sense she is nearly an amalgam of Jain and human.”

“Normal DNA?”

“Not trihelical, no—”

Chapra paused. The girl was sitting upright.

“Not trihelical, no—” said the girl.

“She can speak,” said Abaron.

“She can speak,” said the girl. Only when she heard the girl repeating Abaron’s words did Chapra realise that she had used exactly his voice, as she had spoken with exactly Chapra’s voice before.

“She is learning, I think,” said Chapra, and listened as the girl repeated it. “We’ll have to give her the meanings of words. She’ll have to be taught.”

The girl repeated everything she said, then smiled. Chapra did not recollect smiling. She stepped up by the couch and took the girl’s hand, brushed stringy blond hair from her face.

“Come with me,” she said, and gave a gentle tug. The girl got off the couch. She did not repeat the words. Chapra felt a cold shiver. The girl had recognised the instruction. That was fast. That was AI fast.

“Let’s go and get you some clothes and something to eat.”

“Clothes and something to eat,” said the girl.

Chapra felt that shiver again. It wasn’t fear. It was awe. And her awe increased when in the eating area the girl learned how to use the eating utensils in moments. All the time Chapra and Abaron kept up a running dialogue, some of which the girl repeated and some of which she ignored.

“I believe the educative process can be speeded,” said Box, out of the blue. The girl tilted her head. “Hello,” she said.

The AI turned on the single screen in the eating area and ran the upper and lower case English alphabet, reciting them as they scrolled past. On the second run through the girl recited. Box did the same with the Chinese alphabet, but at twice the speed. The girl recited. The AI ran the Russian alphabet even faster. The girl recited. After that neither Chapra nor Abaron could tell what was being run as the screen was a liminal blur and Box’s and the girl’s voices a babble. Abruptly the screen flickered and divided and Box began to teach a word at a time: sea, seaweed, water, human, hand, eye. Chapra noted the AI presented huge amounts of information with each word. Beside seaweed, Box opened a frame to display many different kinds of seaweed, nanoscopic pictures of genetic helices, cladograms and other graphical information. She and Abaron sat back and watched in fascination. After an hour Judd came in with a touch console and ran its fibre-optic cable to a wall socket. He laid it in the girl’s lap. Shortly after that the screen became a liminal blur once again and the girl’s fingers were moving across the console faster than even Chapra’s. At that point the two humans left. For some it is a comfort to believe there are entities far superior to themselves. For some it is a comfort to know this. For others both views are merely depressing.

“What do you think it will want?” asked Abaron, as he poured vodka into Chapra’s glass.

“You mean after it has downloaded everything the girl has learnt?”

“Yeah.”

They were sprawled in form-fitting loungers in Abaron’s quarters. This was the first time Chapra had been in there. She noted that the only ornaments were old paper books arrayed on a shelf. A glance at one had shown it to be very old, dating from the twenty-first century before the Reliteration. The language in them was fragmented, almost impossible to understand.

“I don’t know. What would we want? What would you want if you were woken five million years hence by aliens?”

Abaron thought about that for a moment then said, “I would want to find out what happened to my own kind. I’d want to get in contact with them. But then that is me. We don’t know how the Jain associate. They may be rabid individualists.”

“Doubtful. You don’t achieve that level of technology by yourself.”

“Yeah? It might be old knowledge to them.”

More vodka poured into the two glasses. Chapra and Abaron were using an old human remedy for what ailed them.

By the time Chapra was washing down hangover pills with a pint of orange juice the girl was literate in eight Earth languages. She was now rifling Box’s libraries of information. Human limitations slowed her and she had gone through less than one percent of the information stored.

“Any specific interests?” asked Chapra as she stepped into the shower.

“She was taking an overview of all the information; dealing in generalities. She now probably has a general idea of human history, present attainments, and socio-political structures. She was avoiding the specific until a couple of hours ago,” said Box.

“What happened a couple of hours ago then?”

“She came across the first reference to the Jain and has since been concentrating on all the pertinent information. Seeing her interest I gave her access to the files recently transmitted.”

“Alex’s?”

“Eight per cent of them had as their source Alexion Smith.”

Chapra nodded to herself then hit the shower control across to cold. She swore as the blast of icy water hit her so soon after the hot and stood it for as long as she could. She never entirely placed her reliance in hangover cures. When she finally turned off the shower and dried herself with a rough towel from the dispenser, she felt thoroughly awake. She went through into the bedroom and gazed down at Abaron lying in a tangle of sheets, still apparently asleep. Her underwear she took up in one hand and her bodysuit she slung over one shoulder, then she padded naked from his quarters to her own. If that was the way he wanted it…

In her own quarters Chapra slung her old clothing into the cleaner, drew another bodysuit of the next primary colour on the spectrum and dressed. Once clad she touched her caste mark with its colour stick and went through its range of colours until it matched her clothing. She then decided against eating in her quarters and headed for the communal eating area. There she halted at the door to take in the scene. The girl sat before the screen with the touch console across her lap. To one side of her stood a hologram projector. Judd, Rhys and a third sexless and featureless Golem stood around her, slaves to her beck and call. On a table beside her was a plate of what Chapra recognised as high energy food and a beaker of vitamin drink. Here everything was secondary to the ingestion of information. Nothing could have driven that point home more thoroughly than the portable toilet beside the chair. She wondered if the girl had slept, or required sleep, then turned away and went back to eat in her quarters. Later, in the control room, Abaron smiled at her in a surprisingly mature manner. She had expected him to be embarrassed or resentful.

“Perhaps we should have taken a tranquilliser,” he quipped.

“We did,” said Chapra, and he laughed. Chapra wondered if she might prefer him lacking in confidence and all screwed-up.

“Has anything interesting happened while I’ve been asleep?”

Chapra detailed the girl’s researches and the scene that had met her when she had gone to the eating area.

“It was the toilet that did it really,” she said. “She’s just another probe beast, just another mechanism for obtaining information.”

“I didn’t go there,” said Abaron, his face curiously lacking expression.

“It bothers you too?”

Abaron shrugged. “Genetically speaking she’s the closest relation I’ve got.” He looked up from his console as Box activated the projection from the isolation chamber. “Ah, we have some action.” The girl had just come through the lock and was walking out on the jetty. At the end of the jetty she stripped off her clothing then dived in. It could have been a scene from anywhere on Earth had the water not been nearly at boiling point and had not the Jain immediately zeroed in on her like a hungry crocodile.

“I wonder if the Jain will smash this probe beast,” said Chapra. Abaron looked askance at her. She ignored him and cut the refractivity of the water. They watched as the Jain caught the girl with its single hand and snaked out one tentacle to plug in to her back. The actions looked almost obscene. The girl froze, arms outstretched and fingers rigid; a newt with its neutral buoyancy.

“I have received disturbing news,” said Box abruptly, hardly impinging on their fascination.

“Yes, what?” said Chapra.

“There is an unidentified ship heading towards us, due to arrive in two days. On its way here it released smart missiles at the Jubilan communications satellite and the planet-based runcible. The satellite was destroyed but the missiles fired at the runcible were intercepted. Had the runcible been destroyed we would have received no warning.”

“What?” said Abaron. “What was that?”

Chapra suddenly felt very cold. This had been a possibility right from the start.

“Unidentified?”

“The probability is high that it is a mercenary craft employed by the Separatist movement.”

“How long until the Cable Hogue gets here?”

“It is translight with a new design of engine. Projected time of arrival is four days.”

“ Cable Hogue?” asked Abaron angrily.

Chapra said, “The dreadnought sent out here to protect us—”

“Oh yeah,” Abaron sneered.

“My thoughts exactly, but we are not in a position to dispute the matter. I for one would prefer Earth Monitors here and an AI-directed warship than Separatists and out-Polity mercenaries.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because it would have interfered with your work.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“You don’t have to. You’re at the bottom of the ladder and only here because I agreed for you to come.” Abaron was still angry, but kept his mouth shut.

Chapra turned from him. “We have forty-eight Solstan hours?”

“Yes,” said Box.

Abaron looked thoughtful for a moment then said, “What about the runcible?”

“It is not possible, at this time, to use it,” replied Box.

“Why?”

“Since entering the Quarrison Drift we have gone beyond the range of any other runcible to which you could transmit.”

Abaron swore and peered down at his touch console. He refused to look at Chapra. She repressed the sudden contempt she felt. Really, he had been right to ask…

“What capabilities do you have?” she asked Box.

“I do not have armament.”

“Can we outrun this ship?”

“With a translight slingshot around the sun this is possible.”

“What about the Jain?”

“Hang on,” interrupted Abaron. “What do they want?”

“They want the Jain. Isn’t that obvious?”

“No, not necessarily. What are the projections, Box?”

“Separatists are normally xenophobic in outlook. It is more likely that they are coming here to kill the Jain and destroy all its technology than to kidnap and use it,” said Box. Chapra folded her arms, nodded, and met Abaron’s look of victory for a moment. He was grasping things more firmly now but Chapra had no time for such games. Things had turned deadly serious. She turned to the projection and saw that the girl was climbing out onto the jetty. The Jain’s tentacle was still plugged into her back. Once she was up on the jetty the Jain began to follow her.

“Box,” said the girl, looking straight from the projection at Chapra and Abaron. “It is necessary that I speak with decision makers.” There was nothing of a little girl in her voice. Over the com Chapra understood the precise selection of every word. She had asked, “What about the Jain?” She realised then that it might be the Jain itself that answered the question. She stared at the projection, noticed something else. “The machine, it’s shrinking again isn’t it?”

“Yes,” replied Box. “There is water flow and an increase in contaminants.”

“I’m going down there.”

“Me too,” said Abaron.

Here’s the test, thought Chapra. He had not been in the isolation chamber since that worm-thing had taken a chunk out of his arm. She watched him stomp out ahead of her and waited for the door to close.

“Was that true… about the runcible?” she asked.

“Would I lie?” asked Box.

Chapra said nothing as she followed Abaron. She was well aware that AIs sacrificed human lives for the greater good of humanity. She did not find this knowledge comforting.

As she stepped through the airlock, Chapra caught the tail end of a conversation between the girl, or rather the Jain, and Box. She understood none of it because it ran at high speed. It finished shortly after she and Abaron walked out onto the jetty. She felt suddenly superfluous. Information had already been exchanged, decisions made. The girl turned to her and Chapra saw a girl with her own character and a mind possibly superior to Chapra’s own. Yet the Jain, lying there on the end of the jetty with its weird head turned towards them, was looking through the girl, who to it was just a tool, a lens to bring them into focus for it.

“I have told the Jain of the Separatist ship,” said Box.

“And?” asked Chapra.

“The Jain wishes to be transported to the surface of the planet, which was its wish before I told it about the ship.”

“Why does it want to go there?” asked Abaron.

Chapra glanced at him and saw that he was staring intently at the Jain. His fear was gone. There was hungry fascination in his regard.

“Why I wish to go to the surface is not relevant. Under Polity law you do not have the right to detain me, and I can also demand transport to the nearest habitable planet, which for me is Haden.” Both Chapra and Abaron stared at the girl for a long moment. It was pointless asking how she… it, knew so much about Polity law.

“You are aware of the threat posed to you by the Separatist ship?” she asked.

“I am aware that on this ship I am in greater danger than I would be in the sea below. None of your kind have scanners sensitive enough to detect me in that sea, and should a search be initiated I would much more easily be able to evade it or defend myself.”

“Solves a couple of problems,” said Abaron. “The Jain can hide from them down there and they’ve no reason to attack us without the Jain aboard.”

Chapra glanced at him. He was naïve and in this situation that could be dangerous. “They are not coming here to kill the Jain just because they’re xenocides, but to prevent Jain technology getting into Polity hands, which they’ll view as just a bigger stick for ECS to beat them with. They won’t risk letting us get away. Even with the Jain gone we might already have learned something vital or have acquired some super-science device. There is no doubt that they will try to destroy this ship.”

“Then we have to run,” said Abaron, taking the lecture well.

“After dropping our friend off,” said Chapra, then, “Box, do you have a shuttle ready?”

“Yes,” said Box. “Judd will pilot it. The Jain will depart when its machine is small enough to transport.”

“I do not require a pilot,” said the girl/Jain.

“The shuttle is Polity property and requires a Polity pilot.” Chapra wondered about that. Why did Box want Judd as a pilot? The Golem certainly would not be coming back before the Separatist ship arrived. To try and keep track of the Jain? Or was Judd’s purpose more sinister? Maybe the people on that other ship had come here to kidnap and steal rather than kill and destroy. Chapra was sickened by the thought of Separatists getting hold of Jain technology. How much would Polity AIs dislike that prospect? Would they be prepared to kill the Jain to prevent it?

And who was to say the Jain would not go willingly? What did it care about human politics?

The Jain, through the girl, said no more. Its tentacle detached and it slid into the water. The girl staggered then regained her balance. Her face took on a more juvenile appearance. She smiled at Chapra and Abaron, then sat down on the edge of the jetty and dangled her feet in the boiling water. The Jain wrapped itself around its machine almost as if sulking.

The Vorstra runcible sat under a clear dome in a lunarscape etched with sharp-edged shadows. Lakes of silver dust patched the surface, their source the slow crumbling of crowded rock spires. Normally this was a place of interminably slow change and stillness, but now the lakes were moving under the influence of another moon.

Alexion Smith stood before the bull’s horns of the runcible, a carry sack slung over one shoulder, and his hand in the pocket of his baggy trousers. His associates often said he was as much an anachronism as the things he studied. Such criticism was far from his mind at that moment. He gazed up through the dome at a distant silver sphere, and replayed in his mind a comment made by a harried-looking runcible technician:

“Damned thing’s perturbed our orbit, but they said they’d reposition us before moving off.” The Cable Hogue was huge. Alexion had never seen any ship this size, had thought them only the product of holofiction producers and conspiracy theory junkies. With a shake of his head he stepped up onto the black glass dais and through the shimmer of the Skaidon warp. Shortly afterwards the Vorstra moon shuddered in its orbit and the Hogue moved away. An hour later the burn of Laumer engines lit up the sky. In later years, Alexion was delighted to learn that Jain artefacts had been washed up on the shores of the dust lakes. Providential, somehow.

PART FIVE

Floating in an observation blister Chapra watched an aqua-landing shuttle drop out of its bay towards the blue and white glare of the planet. She watched the triangle of it grow small and dark in silhouette, then glow and trail vapour as it hit atmosphere and slid into its orbital glide. Judd piloted. The Jain crouched in a cargo bay half filled with saline heated to a nice ninety-seven degrees Celsius. In its many-fingered hand it clutched its creation device shrunk down to the size of a human fist. Chapra smiled at that. How we define things: when it was large it was a machine and small it is a device. What then was the girl now the Jain had left her, now she seemed to have some character of her own? Did individuality mean anything when thought of in connection with the Jain? Could she be an individual, or would that be like calling someone with a severed corpus callosum two separate beings, two individuals? Perhaps so. It was too easy to look at her and see a human girl when she was really a mask over something wholly alien.

“Why did it leave her, Box?” she asked.

“To watch, to learn, to gather information.”

As the AI said this, Chapra felt the slight surge as the ion drive ignited. She saw the flare far to her right like a sunrise and watched as the planet, with apparent slowness, slid aside.

“She could be destroyed along with us.”

“The Jain can make another whenever it wants.”

And that brought it home.

“Make another what?” asked Abaron, coming into the blister and catching hold of one of the frame bars as he stepped out of the ship’s artificial gravity. “We’re picking up G,” he observed. Both of them looked to the black macula, in the reactive glass, where the sun was.

“Girl,” said Chapra.

“It’s not so worrying,” said Abaron. “Humans make humans all the time and are they any more responsible?”

“How very mature of you,” said Chapra with a grin, then a wider grin at his irritation.

“I will be starting ramscoop drive in twenty minutes. It would be better if you were inside the ship at that time,” said Box.

Abaron led the way from the blister. They stepped from it into the corridor gravity of the ship and both turned toward the control room.

“How long before we go translight?” asked Chapra.

“Three hours,” the ship AI told them, and as they entered the control room it went on to say, “You may be interested to know that I have received genetic maps of the five seaweeds from Earth and compared them to the samples from the planet and the ones in the isolation chamber.”

“How old?” asked Chapra.

Box went on, “Cross referencing certain structures, and taking into account mutational variables, I have a extrapolation graph that peaks at four point seven three million years. This would seem to confirm that the Jain’s point of origin in the escape pod was this system and that it has been in stasis for the aforementioned time.”

“Damn,” said Chapra.

“What’s the problem with that?” asked Abaron.

“Not that… we just never got around to asking why it ended up in an escape pod in the first place. We know lots about what it is and what it can do, but nothing about what it was and what it did.”

“I asked,” said Box.

“Well?” said Chapra when Box did not go on.

“Haden is a Jain world, but not the Jain home world. Originally it was two AU from the sun. The Jain we rescued was here to Jainform it. Using its starship it towed the world to its present position and over a period I estimate to be nearly ten thousand years it seeded it with the kinds of life the Jain like. While it was seeding the world an enemy attacked and destroyed its ship. It managed to get away in the escape pod.”

Chapra gave Abaron a look, then sat and tried to absorb that: a ship that could tow worlds about… spending ten thousand years seeding a planet… and an enemy that could destroy such a ship, defeat a Jain.

“Is there anything more about the enemy?” asked Abaron, putting his finger straight on a fear: more superior aliens.

“The enemy was another Jain.”

And of course that was right. The Polity was huge and ever-expanding and humans had encountered many alien life forms, but the greatest enemy had remained the same: other humans. Chapra smiled. Not so damned superior after all. She flicked a couple of touch controls and summoned up views back down the length of the ship. These showed a plain of ceramal scattered with instrumentation, then the tail fading into distance. She always enjoyed watching the ramscoop engines starting: the vast orange wings of force opening out through space. At that moment she could see only the white coronal glare of the ion drive shoving the Box up to scoop speeds. The ramscoop would then power the fusion engines to shove it up to a speed where the translight engines could get a grip on the very fabric of space and pull the ship through into underspace. Chapra did not want to be watching the projection then. She glanced across as something at the edge of the projection caught her eye. There was a flickering there — spatial distortions.

“There has been a miscalculation,” said Box.

Chapra waited. She was getting used to Box’s conversational grenades. She watched, without really seeing, as a wedge of midnight entered realspace, opened ramscoop wings then stood on its tip on fusion fire, braking into the Haden system.

“The Separatist ship is here now,” Box told them.

With a flash the projection disappeared and in the same moment the ship shuddered. Chapra clutched at her chair as she felt the gravity shift. Something was out. She could feel the surge as the ship changed direction. A sudden dragging force. An explosion.

“Shuttle in bay six is ready for launch,” said Box.

Chapra clutched her chair. So, why did she need to know that?

“Come on!” Abaron yelled, grabbing her arm. Then it all hit home. They were being attacked. The Schrödinger’s Box was being destroyed. She stood and ran with Abaron to bay six. The gravity kept fluctuating and the way they ran might have appeared comical at any other time, anywhere else. Great hollow booms echoed from deep in the ship, and she heard distant clangs of metal falling. Chapra felt changes in pressure. Her ears popped, which was terror for anyone who knew space. Hull breach. They reached the irised hatch to bay six. It was firmly closed and would not open on command nor at the controls.

“Box!” Abaron yelled.

Chapra shook her head. This was happening, this was real, she had to accept it. She turned. In the corridor; a shape moving very fast. It was Rhys carrying the girl under his arm. The Golem jerked to an abrupt halt by them and released the girl. She reached out and grabbed Chapra’s hand.

“Step away from the door,” said Rhys, and raised his singun. The weapon made no sound. A fleck of black appeared in the centre of the door and the door screamed as it folded; a sheet of paper crumpled by a fist. Then the door, now a wrinkled ovoid of metal, thumped to the floor. Rhys held out the gun to Abaron. “Here,” he said. Abaron shook his head. Rhys handed it to Chapra. The butt felt slick and the gun was heavy. It was horribly real.

“Aren’t you coming with us?” she asked.

The Golem grinned at her and fled away down a corridor that now seemed to be twisting, splitting. More explosions. They ran into the huge bay and gaped out through a shimmer-shield at a passing vast shape, and the burning of hellish fires. The shuttle crouched like an iron sparrow hiding from the raptor outside. Abaron opened the door. Inside, the girl refused Chapra’s help and strapped herself in. Chapra dropped the gun into a wall pouch. Abaron stared at the controls, his hands clenching and unclenching. Chapra pushed him aside and sat in the pilot’s chair. He took the one next to it. As they strapped in, something crashed and violet fire flared to one side of the bay. The shuttle began to slide down a tilted gravity field.

“Now!” screamed Abaron.

Chapra used override to knock out the shimmer-shield. The bay full of air exploded into vacuum, sucking the shuttle out into a Dante night. The acceleration slammed the three of them back into their seats and something went crashing down in the back of the shuttle. Chapra reached and grabbed the control column and using booster steering wrenched the shuttle in the opposite direction from that passing shape. Wreckage was spewing across space, fragments and molten metal, nebulous sheets of fire with no gravity to give them shape, then clear space. Chapra ignited the shuttle’s small but powerful ionic drive. The huge wedge and the fragmenting Box fled behind them. She adjusted their course as now there was only one place to hide. The moons in the system were too small and the only other planet was no option at all it being a gas giant. Chapra tapped controls and one half of the screen showed a reverse view. The wedge was close to the Box, enfilading it with missiles. It wasn’t using lasers on the big ship, nor particle weapons. Missiles were much less wasteful of energy, and much more destructive. Chapra was immediately reminded of the PSR chopping up the sphere of ice in which the Jain had slept. This looked almost surgical — what they saw of it before the screen whited-out.

“What was that?” asked Abaron.

“Laser. Burnt out all our external coms,” said Chapra. She kept the acceleration on and checked a reading from the radar, which did not have enough of its delicate parts outside to be wiped out. Two shapes were accelerating after them. She only hoped they would not have the fuel to sustain that acceleration.

“Smart missiles,” said Abaron, his face white and beaded with sweat.

“Yes.”

They sat in silence watching the trace from the missiles grow stronger, then strong enough for them to see the shape and smooth beauty of these clever weapons. They were close. Chapra was white-knuckling the throttle for the ion drive. There was no way to get anything more out of it. Five wracked-out minutes passed before they realised the missiles were getting no closer.

“How long can we keep this up?” asked Abaron.

“Not much longer. We have to decelerate for the planet.”

“If we do that they’ll get us.”

Chapra nodded and from the instrument readings did a high-speed calculation in her head. In twenty minutes they must begin to decelerate or they would not be able to go into orbit. Not landing was out of the question because there just was not enough fuel for them to keep on running until the Cable Hogue arrived. She realised she had no answers. Unless the missiles ran out of fuel they were dead.

“What do we do?” asked Abaron, obviously willing to defer to her authority. Chapra was about to tell him she did not know, but suddenly she did.

“This shuttle and the missiles are both at maximum acceleration,” she said. She looked at him. “Do you think you can handle the controls. Delicately?”

“What do you want?” he asked.

“On my signal I want you to reduce our acceleration and bring the missiles in as close as you can. Fifty metres. Less if you think you can do it.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Those missiles are probably the same as are being fired at the Box — hull piercers. Detonating them that close to us shouldn’t do us any harm.”

“How do you know that?” he asked dully.

“I’m old. I did other jobs before I studied xenology,” she said.

“How are you going to detonate them?”

Chapra smiled at him, a little crazily, she thought, as she clamped down on that smile. “I’m going to shoot them with the singun.”

Chapra got out of the pilot’s chair and Abaron took over the controls. She went back into the main cabin where the girl watched her intently as she donned a spacesuit. The singun was heavy and she set its controls to the maximum. The singularity would last a full three seconds with each shot. She stepped into the airlock, attached a safety line, then over the suit com said, “I’m going out there now. Start reducing acceleration — gently — in about a minute.”

Out of the artificial gravity of the shuttle Chapra felt the tug of acceleration. It felt to her as if she was leaning out the window of a tower and looking down into fire and darkness. Holding tightly to the singun she rested her arms down the hull and aimed beyond the ionic glare of the shuttle’s engines. Acceleration dropped, then dropped again. Two silvery nubs rose up out of the darkness. She aimed at them and saw the range-finder on the gun going crazy as the ionic halo confused it. She fired and fired again, black bars cut through the glare. She swore, aimed carefully, fired a third time. Her visor polarised. One missile disappeared in a brief flash and the other missile tumbled away. Chapra quickly pulled herself back inside. Her arms and face were burning and she wondered just how many rads she had taken. Inside the shuttle and out of the suit, Chapra rubbed emollient cream on her face. Her arms had been heated inside the suit, but had not burned. She reckoned her face would peel, though funnily enough, the skin under her caste mark was unburned.

“You got them,” said the girl. “We’re safe now.”

“I wish I could agree with you,” said Chapra, stepping up into the control cockpit. She grinned at Abaron, but saw he did not look happy. “What is it?” she asked. He was studying the radar display.

“We’re ahead of it at the moment, but there’s a craft coming after us.”

“Not missiles?”

“No.”

Chapra sat down and began using the onboard computer. “We’ll be able to get into orbit and land before it catches us. We’ll be a couple of hours ahead of it.”

“Will that help?”

“Of course it will.”

Chapra’s smile was set. She thought about infrared tracking and scanning, about the weapons that craft might have. She checked the time piece under her fingernail. They had roughly fifty hours until the Cable Hogue arrived. They just had to survive that long.

In high definition hologram Schrödinger’s Box died. It drifted in space surrounded by a swarm of smart missiles and a spreading halo of dispersing air and water crystals. Occasionally a missile or two would detach from the swarm, dart in through the laser defence to pierce the hull and detonate far inside. The long tail of the ship had broken away as had many of the external sensors and probe ports. There were gaping holes in the hull rimmed with skeletal members black over red internal fires.

“There’s a com laser in the nose section,” said Speck, his hands moving in a caress across the weapons console. A smart missile moved in close, flashing red in coms laser fire. Another went in underneath it like a pack dog going for the underbelly. It flashed and, trailed vapour, detonated above the science vessel’s skin. That area of the hologram went black for a moment, then cleared to reveal a warped and glowing area of hull. “It’s down. Couple more like that to deal with and we can send one of the General’s gunships across.”

Kellor glanced at Conard then returned his attention to the hologram. It wasn’t enough that the ship was gutted: Conard wanted no less than total annihilation, which on a ship of that size was a demolition job rather than an attack.

“There won’t be anyone alive over there,” Kellor said, just for the hell of it. “They’re away in that shuttle.”

“That will soon be remedied. I have some of my best men on it,” said Conard tersely. Kellor smiled to himself. He had met the soldier Beredec and immediately recognised a career mercenary. Conard’s best men were not the usual Confederation grunts. Conard went on, “There is no-one alive over there, but there are AIs. I want them all.” He turned to one of his aides. “Take four men over with you. Let Davis carry the CTD.”

The aide grinned nastily and turned on his heel. Kellor looked at Jurens, who pressed a thumb against his chest then tapped the knife at his belt. Kellor gave a slight nod and Jurens grinned, exposing artificially white teeth in his bearded face. He had lost his original set to an officer just like that aide. Atmosphere thundered against the ceramic undersides of the shuttle’s stubby wings and wide body. Haden was an orange and white arc cutting the screen in two. Around the edges of the screen was a red glow from the heating hull. They had managed to dump velocity with ion engine braking but were still entering atmosphere at design limits. The shuttle gravity was sluggish to compensate for this kind of treatment and they were not completely cushioned from the violence of entry into atmosphere.

“It’s going to have to be the sea,” said Chapra. “We won’t be able to get the speed down enough for a vertical landing. Take too long. I suggest we all get into full environment suits.” She did not comment on their chances of surviving in a sea of boiling water if the shuttle broke up. Perhaps it would be better not to wear a suit at all then death would be quicker.

“Can’t you use the AG units to slow us?” asked Abaron.

“A little, if I tilt them. We don’t want to end up skating across the gravity field else we’ll take as long to slow as if we’d stayed airborne.”

Abaron nodded then went back into the passenger compartment. He was gone for a little while before he returned wearing an environment suit with the visor flipped up and carrying another suit for Chapra.

“I almost forget,” he said.

“What?”

He gestured with a thumb into the passenger compartment. “She doesn’t need one.” Chapra nodded, then handed the controls over to him while she pulled on her suit. In a short time the view through the screen was of the crinkles of mountains, red flat deserts and jungles of light green vegetation. The sun was bright orange, oblate, and its corona filled half the sky with concentric bands of its refracted spectrum. The rest of the sky was a red ochre that reminded of African earth.

“Are you well-strapped in back there?” Chapra asked.

“I am,” replied the girl.

“Okay, be ready to be thrown about a bit. We’re landing on the ocean and internal gravity is unlikely to be able to compensate quickly enough. Could be bumpy.”

“I am prepared,” said the girl, which was not really a little girl sort of thing to say. The edge of the land mass came into view. An orange sea foamed against slabs of rock and wide sandy beaches. Out beyond this they lost sight of the sea as Chapra turned the shuttle to its optimum braking attitude. The constant roar increased in pitch and hot sparks of something skated across the screens.

“I’m using braking thrusters!” she shouted over the noise. The braking thrusters added to the roar and the labouring AG units, normally only used for gentle manoeuvring, made a deep thrumming sound. There was no perceptible change of velocity.

“Going in!”

The noise was terrible. They were jerked forward against their straps, flung back. Spray and volatile water foamed across the screen. Then the nose abruptly dipped and ploughed into the sea. A hand of force flung them forwards again and held them against their straps. Chapra could not get her breath. The pressure was huge, and this was with the shuttle gravity compensating, unless it was out. How was the shuttle holding together? The roar went on and on then slowly started to diminish. The pressure came off, and as it did so, Chapra turned off the AG. She looked up. Spray quickly slewed from the screen’s frictionless surface. The braking thrusters were slowly bringing them to a halt. Outside was a rolling sea. A quarter kilometre ahead of them was one of a wide scattering of jungle-covered atolls. Chapra checked the radar and shivered when she saw how many of them they had missed.

“We’ve got a couple of leaks,” said Abaron. “Automatics are dealing with them.” Chapra studied a schematic on one of the lower screens. There were more than a couple of leaks. She made some adjustments.

“I’m bringing up internal pressure to match,” she said. “What’s the mix out there?” Abaron said, “We could breathe it if it was cooled down a bit.”

“Funny man.”

“I’m a barrel of laughs. By the way, we’re sinking.”

Chapra compensated with the AG; making the shuttle light as a wooden ship so it floated and bobbed on the sea. They both peered through the screen. It was Earthlike out there, yet, only the two atmospheres of pressure kept the sea from boiling. If they stepped outside the shuttle without environment suits the heat would flay them. They might survive for a few minutes while they were being boiled alive. Chapra swallowed dryly. And they must go out there.

“That’s it,” she said, and flicked off the braking thrusters. For a moment there was quiet then she turned on external microphones and the shuttle filled with the sound of sea. Only the sea gulls were missing.

“What have we got?” asked Abaron as he unstrapped himself.

“The edge of the continent is twenty kilometres away. We should be able to get there on AG and thrusters in about an hour.” She checked the time. “Forty-five hours before the Cable Hogue gets here.” She increased the shuttle’s AG and it rose higher, came out of the water, then using the thrusters in short burst she turned it on course for the continent. “You sort out some travelling packs: medical supplies, food, spare power packs for the suits. Jesu! Will you look at that!” Abaron leant forward and looked down at the sea. Tentacles thrashing the sea’s surface and just below the waves a giant nautiloid was dragging down a huge lobster-thing with a long eel’s tail and more legs than seemed probable.

“I’m glad you didn’t suggest swimming,” said Abaron.

Chapra glanced at him. He seemed almost happy. Perhaps he was enjoying the buzz. Davis hurt and the pain-killing patch on the side of his chest was not enough. Perhaps this was because of his previous overindulgence in such patches for recreation, though he wouldn’t put it past Conard to order him under-dosed. He had a hidden supply, but dared not use it. He needed to keep his wits about him to survive the next few days. It would take very little provocation for Conard to set one of his trained dogs on him, and maybe it was the General’s intention for Davis to die up this particular shit creek. His ribs were broken and not only was he likely under-dosed, he had been denied access to the bone welder. That he might come back to the ship with a punctured lung was the least of his worries. He wondered if he would be coming back at all.

“This is not a good day,” said Artris, fingering the settings on his pulse gun. He too was one of Conard’s least favourite soldiers.

“Surprise me,” said Davis.

“There’ll be Golem over there,” Artris told them.

Davis moved all his weapon’s energy settings up to their highest. His ribs started to ache even more.

“Golem?” said Jan, the youngster.

“Cut the chat back there!” yelled Conard’s pet, Talist.

“Guess who’ll be directing operations from the Junger,” mumbled Artris. Talist glanced around from the flight controls but said no more when the bay doors opened. The clang of docking clamps releasing shook the hull and the Junger moved slowly forward on its track. The soldiers closed down their masks limiting all talk to com.

“Out and away,” said Talist. “ETA five minutes maximum.” Once the Junger was out past the doors and sliding into the light of the burning ship it accelerated and corrected. The wrecked science vessel came into view and rapidly grew in the screen. When Davis saw the size of it he once again wondered about the futility of the Separatist cause. This was just a science vessel and it was the size of a city. Polity battle ships were bigger, a lot bigger.

“God be with us,” said Sheena, the other member of the troop. This elicited no reply.

“Weapons check,” said Talist, then, “Davis, you take the CTD in.” It figured. Davis checked over his weapon then took up the chrome cylinder from its clamps on the floor and fixed it to his suit straps. There was no AG in the shuttle but the device seemed heavy. No one said anything more for the long five minutes.

Talist matched the ponderous spin of the Box then carefully manoeuvred the Junger to a cavity in the wall of wreckage.

“You all know what is expected of you. We want the CTD as near to the ship AI as you can get it. Just get in there and get the job done. Any trouble and I want to know about it right away.” Trouble started when they were halfway into the ship on their suit jets.

“What’s that? Something moving above you, Artris,” said Sheena. Artris’s weapon strobed and slagged wreckage, blew it into vacuum. The sound over the radio was like a diesel engine starting. Nearby something silver and spidery darted aside. Davis opened up, a line of flashes down a structural member, a blur of movement, and a silver leg spiralling through vacuum. Golem; without the hindrance of artificial skin, metal skeletons. One landed on Artris and he managed to yell before his breath gusted out through his smashed visor. He hung in vacuum struggling for breath he would not find as the Golem efficiently completed its task by opening up his suit from neck to crotch. Davis got it when it used Artris as a launch platform to come at him. Spewing molten metal it fell past him.

“What’s going on in there!? What’s happening!?”

“Golem. Got Artris. Shit! Over there! Move!”

The static from weapons fire drowned out anything else. They opened up their suit jets and traversed the corridor of wreckage at lethal speed. More Golem appeared out of the tangled metal. Subliminally Davis saw Sheena impaled on a stanchion, her blood a candy floss cloud all around her. He fired in bursts. Metal splashed like solder. Ceramal ship’s skeleton retained white heat, sometimes warped. The CTD

was a heavy pain against his ribs. Jan screamed as a skeletal silver hand slammed him to a halt. Even over the suit radio Davis heard breaking bone. Spinning in mid flight he hit that Golem once and it released Jan. Out of control the boy slammed into a metal wall.

“I’ve got a leak! I’ve got a leak!” he had time to yell before a Golem came running past on magnetic feet and kicked the helmet from his head. Davis tumbled through the air, his suit warning bleeping as a laser flashed across his legs. He was in a chamber near the centre. As he got himself under control he saw a ship’s runcible below his feet. It was operating when it should have nowhere to open to. Perhaps that was where the dark-skinned Golem was going with the silver ovoid of the ship AI: nowhere. Davis aimed at them but did not fire. The Golem stared at him, perhaps expecting to die. Davis glanced at the CTD

display as it told him in glowing letters that it was armed and how so very little time he had left to live. Talist was probably halfway back to the Samurai even now. Davis released the straps and kicked the device away. So the runcible might be open on nothing and no one ever came back from that. But who was to say no one ever survived? To the best of his knowledge no one survived a CTD blast at this range. He slammed on his suit jets and followed the Golem and the AI through the cusp. He entered blackness on the edge of white-hot light.

“You know, we really should think of a name for you,” said Abaron as he released the girl’s safety straps. She smiled at him and sat on the edge of her seat.

“How about Jane?” she suggested.

“Hah!” Abaron surprised himself with that bark of laughter. But then in the last few hours he had been surprising himself a lot. He had never before felt so alive.

“Chapra, what do you think?”

“Think about what?”

“A name for our friend here. She suggests ‘Jane’.”

“Sounds fine to me. Have you got those packs ready yet, Tarzan?”

“Sorry?”

“Never mind.”

Abaron looked down at the two packs. He had tried to cover every conceivable bet, but there was so much they could not take. He put the packs next to the airlock then turned back to the girl. “I think it might be an idea to put you in a suit anyway, Jane. What do you think?”

“It will offer some protection, though obviously I do not need it for the same purpose as yourselves.” Abaron winced, realising he was patronising her. She might look like a little girl, but in that body was an alien mind probably far superior to his own. He pulled a small suit from a locker and handed it to her. Without assistance she put it on and reduced it at all the expansion points. Shortly after he felt the thrusters cut out and the AG go off. Chapra came through from the cockpit.

“Let’s move it,” she said. “We’ve only half an hour to get clear of the shuttle. That other craft is nearly here.”

Abaron pulled his visor down and popped the inner door. He took up both packs and handed one to Chapra. He noted the singun hung on her utility belt. He went first into the lock, and remembering those monsters they had seen in the sea, pulled a short range cutting laser from his pack and held it ready as he opened the outer door.

Nothing immediately attacked. The shuttle was up on a beach of red sand scattered with nautiloid shells up to a metre across, into the cover of which scurried thumb-sized lobster things as soon as he stepped out. Two steps from the lock he looked out to sea at the swarm of atolls and saw the heave and glistening backs of great beasts swimming between them. Inland towered trees the size of redwoods, but with globular blue objects on their branches rather than needles. Jammed between these giants was a tangle of life that on Earth would have consisted of smaller trees, bushes, and vines. The only resemblance these growths bore to such was that they filled the same niche. It seemed a frightening place to negotiate and a perfect place to hide. Abaron wondered what creatures were making the racket of groans and shrieks issuing from there. Soon Jane and Chapra joined him. Chapra led the way into the hot shadows under the trees. There she drew the singun and aimed it at something on the ground. Abaron stepped forward in time to see a giant leech heaving itself out of her way. Half an hour into the tangle Abaron was thoroughly grateful for his suit’s impenetrable fabric and the hard chainglass visor. There were insectile horrors here: blood-suckers and flesh eaters with all their cutlery in their mouths. Beetles as big as hiking boots landed on him and immediately tried to bite him. His chest ached where a wingless mosquito-thing the size of a cat leapt up and tried to ram into him probosces like the barrels of a shotgun. That thing he cut away with the laser before it broke his ribs. Chapra twice used the singun on things charging out at them with intent that did not seem joyous greeting. They bore appearance of Rottweilers crossed with hornets, before the singularity converted them to sludge. The expected danger revealed itself to them when they had been travelling for an hour. The explosion was loud and brief, and it silenced the jungle racket for a few minutes.

“The shuttle,” said Chapra.

“Will they come after us?” asked Abaron, then he fell silent at the sound of boosters overhead. The three of them stood waiting. They could see nothing through the foliage. Nearby an actinic flash then blast was followed by the monolithic fall of a great tree.

“Can they detect us?” asked Abaron.

“Only if our suits leak, and then it won’t matter to us.”

“Suits?”

“They could use infrared and maybe pick up cold spots, even then…” Chapra gestured up at the thick foliage.

The next explosion was close. A lightning flash, and a hand of force knocked Abaron stumbling. It hurled Jane to the ground and knocked Chapra against a tree.

“Oh shit! Run!” shouted Chapra, and she led the way to the right.

“I thought you said they can’t detect us!” yelled Abaron.

“The gun!” Chapra yelled back. “Both those explosions were where I shot those things! It uses an underspace tech to open the singularity! That’s what they’re picking up!” Another explosion behind, this time in a straight line from the last two. Gasping, they eventually stumbled to a halt, and rested at the base of one of the forest giants. When they moved on again it was to the distant and repeated sound of explosions and a loud sawing sound that Chapra identified as a particle beam fired in atmosphere. Shortly after that, sparks and smoke boiled out of the jungle, driving out swarms of creatures. The three had to flee as well — back towards the shore. One look at the white fire consuming the trees was enough to tell them their suits would never survive it. Near the beach, attacking hornet-dogs forced Chapra to use the singun again. Immediately lasers droned in the air and turned the dog-things into exploding ash.

“Stay exactly where you are! You have been targeted!”

The ship slid above them. It was an old-style AG gunship but no less effective for that. Chapra stood with the singun at her side. Abaron waited for her to raise it and for the three of them to die.

“Throw the weapon to your right!”

The ground suddenly boiled in front of Chapra. She threw the singun to her right. The gunship came down on the beach, its gun turrets locked on them every moment. Abruptly Jane screamed. Abaron turned, thinking she had been fired on, saw she had pulled off her visor and hood and ripped open the front of her suit. She was staggering away. Her face and chest were bright red. She screamed again and fell to the ground. Abaron and Chapra exchanged a look, then looked back at the gunship as its hatch popped and four people came out carrying pulsed-energy assault rifles.

“Move forward,” one of them said, then, “You, drop the laser cutter!” Abaron let go of the thing as if it was hot. He had forgotten he was holding it. He and Chapra moved forward as instructed.

“Right, lay face down with your arms and legs spread.”

They did as instructed. Abaron heard one of them move over to Jane.

“She’s dead, sir. No pulse.”

“What the hell did she do that for? She’s just a girl.”

Dead, thought Abaron, no, she had probably just turned her heart off for a moment.

“What’ll we do with her, sir?”

“Just leave hen Find the weapon, it was an EC singun.” Abaron heard the greed in that voice. Of course the Separatists would be very glad to get their hands on that kind of weapons technology. He lay there staring at one of the thumb-lobsters as it checked out his visor with its feelers. He wondered if they would be killed here on the beach or if they were to be questioned first. “I can’t find it, sir.”

“Then try harder you — what the fuck is that!” There was a brief yell cut off by a sucking explosion. Abaron heard the sound of something moving in the sea and thought about monsters. There were two more screams and they carried on; dreadful panicked screaming. Abaron pushed himself to his feet shortly before Chapra. The beach was alive with movement. Worms coiled in the sand and leapt serpent fast. One their captors staggered past, blood pouring from holes in his environment suit, other worms flicking away from him, others attaching. Abaron well knew what kind of worms could penetrate an environment suit. Another sucking explosion and a man disappeared and reappeared as a rain of organic slurry. Stuttering white fire from an assault rifle. Abaron turned and saw Jane cut in half at the waist. She fell away from her hips and legs, face-down in the sand, then calmly propped herself up with one arm and fired twice more. Of the four Separatists little remained but spreading stains on the sand; organic slurry that excited the thumb lobsters. Abaron grabbed up the laser cutter and ran for the craft, expecting to be cut down at any moment. Some of the worms hit him but did not bite. Inside the craft were two more Separatists. Shock and blood loss from hundreds of coin-sized holes the worms had punched into their bodies, had very quickly killed them. What remained of them hardly looked human. Outside the gunship Abaron leant against the hull and tried very hard not to be sick in his suit. After a moment he looked to the sea and saw the Jain resting in the shallows, worm-things swarming in the water all around it. Beyond it, partially concealed by the reflection off the surface, Abaron could see a shell-mouth a couple of metres wide, at the end of a tube disappearing into the depths. He could not really grasp what that meant; couldn’t make any sense of it.

“I thank you,” he said, and nodded to it. The weird head dipped in reply, it seemed. Abaron went to Chapra who was by Jane.

“Get her legs,” said Chapra, holding the girl upright.

Jane seemed quite calm about the fact that she had been cut in half. Get her legs? Abaron glanced aside to where the other half of her lay. Then he looked back to her.

“I can be repaired,” she said.

Abaron picked up the legs, surprised at their weight. Chapra carried the top half. They took Jane to the Jain, who took her in its tentacles, pulled her under the sea, and into the mouth of its machine grown huge there. The worms went with it.

PART SIX

“Tell me about the Jain,” said Diane.

“There is little provable fact. From the few artefacts discovered and from some cultural archaeology it is evident that their technology was… is far in advance of ours,” said Alexion. He did not look away from the information scrolling up on the screen before him. It was just too fascinating: some things proven beyond doubt, others now possible, and so many more questions to ask. Alexion normally did not hold much of an opinion about the current political situation, but would gladly see the Separatists hung who might halt this lovely flow of information.

“Their nanotech is fantastic. It might easily be called picotech…”

“Are they warlike?”

Alexion looked around. “There’s so much space. Why?”

“We are.”

“We’re stupid.”

Diane shrugged.

“I suppose it is possible. God help anyone they declared war upon.”

“Meaning?”

“As I said to Chapra, ‘the Jain moved suns’ and we’re fairly sure of that. I have to wonder if a race capable of that kind of thing would have any enemies left at all.” Alexion returned to his work and Diane grimaced at the back of his head. They would be there soon, ahead of schedule because of the Laumer engines and ready to deal with an enemy they knew. Smith was with them on the off-chance they found an enemy they did not know. She wondered if he was aware of how closely his ideas and summations were being inspected by the Hogue AI. Thus thought of, that AI spoke to them in its gravelly voice.

“Schrödinger’s Box destroyed. Am receiving extreme range runcible transmission.”

“Seal containment sphere. Maximum security.”

“Done.”

Alexion looked around and Diane shrugged once again.

“Best guess as to what is coming through?” she asked him.

The AI answered her. “They are through. I have a Golem android, Box, and an armed Confederation soldier… Disarmed.”

Diane grinned. She turned to go.

“May I come with you? I think my studies have ended for now,” asked Alexion. Without stopping, Diane nodded. Side by side, they entered a drop shaft.

“In time that soldier may come to think of himself as very lucky,” she said. Dropping through the irised gravity field Alexion looked at her questioningly.

“In ship warfare there’s little room for mercy and less room for prisoners. He may be the only one we leave alive.”

Alexion shivered. Shortly after, in the containment sphere, he observed the Golem Rhys holding a pulse-rifle on the Confederation soldier. But the man was not up to much. He was flat on a four-gee gravplate, groaning weakly as blood ran from his flattened nose. Smith surmised that though the man might be glad to be alive, he was not particularly enjoying the experience just then. The night sky of Haden was black and starless but light was provided by strange luminescence under the sea, igniting and going out, lighting large glassy shapes. The two human bodies lay on the sand, swarmed over by finger lobsters and flat black cruciform creatures moving as slowly as starfish. Abaron and Chapra sat inside the back of the gunship with the coolers on and their visors open. They had intended to eat here, but the mess in the cockpit and the smell circulated by the coolers scotched that idea.

“What other jobs did you do before you studied xenology then?” asked Abaron. Chapra grinned. “I was an Earth Central Enforcer for twenty years, then a Monitor for another six.” Abaron tapped the controls before them with the metal spoon he had intended to use. “So you should be able to fly this.”

“Yes, I can fly this… You don’t seem surprised.”

“I’m beyond surprise.”

The communicator beeped and a voice spoke out of it in gibberish.

“That’s Faculan. He’s asking someone called Beredec to respond.”

“I wonder which one he was.”

“Who knows? Anyway, there’ll be more gunships down here before long.”

“What next?”

“Back into the jungle. We—”

“What is it?”

Chapra wordlessly pointed out the screen at the naked figure striding from the sea.

“That didn’t take long, not long at all,” said Abaron.

Jane grinned up at them then disappeared from sight as she went to the airlock. They turned in their seats as she entered the ship.

“You’ve grown,” said Chapra.

Her hair was longer. She was bigger. She had the body of a pubescent girl, only there was a hardness to her musculature that did not look quite right.

“Whole body growth accelerated the repair process,” she said, then, “The artificial human, Judd, will be coming here in his shuttle to lead you to a place of safety.”

“Lead?” asked Chapra.

“It might be prudent to bring this gunship.”

“How long before he gets here?” said Abaron, climbing to his feet.

“Judd will be here in ten minutes.”

Chapra stared at Jane. She looked so different. She was beautiful, and she would make a beautiful adult.

“Do you want clothing?” she asked, then wondered at her impulses.

“That won’t be necessary.”

Abaron grinned at Chapra, who ignored him.

“Let’s get out of here for a while,” she said, looking around at the blood-bespattered cockpit.

“Don’t you need to familiarise yourself?” Abaron asked.

“No need.”

They filed back outside after Jane. The sand was now swarming with the thumb-lobsters and cruciform fish, and watching these scrape up the gory sand they did not attend to their surroundings closely enough. One of the giant wingless mosquitoes attacked Jane. She caught it, almost negligently, then tore it in half without a word before pointed out the shuttle as it glided toward them just a few metres above the sea.

“Strong,” said Abaron.

Chapra only nodded.

The shuttle beached with a deep grinding crunching as the AG cut and allowed the full weight down on the sand. Judd came out through the airlock.

“I am here to lead you to a place of potential safety,” he said. Chapra thought that a strange way of wording it. The Golem also seemed twitchy to her. There was something wrong with it. Had the Jain damaged it?

“We only need to hide for a day or so.” She checked her timepiece. “ECS are punctual if nothing else and I can’t see that ship standing up to a dreadnought.”

Judd stood there blinking at her.

“What’s the problem, Judd?” she asked.

Judd said, “I do not have Box to advise me so I do not know if facts should be concealed from you. I have very little practical or theoretical human psychology.”

Chapra absorbed that but Abaron looked shocked. Chapra remembered how she had felt on first discovering that AIs could lie, cheat, and kill just like humans. The only difference was that AIs did it with firm purpose, and were better at it.

“If it concerns our survival then facts should not be concealed. Trust me, I’m a scientist,” said Chapra, then felt a sinking sensation when Judd did not acknowledge humour. It was bad.

“The situation is not amenable to survival,” said the Golem.

“Clarify.”

“The Cable Hogue arrived forty hours ahead of schedule and now stands within striking distance of the Separatist ship. It will not strike because the Separatist ship is carrying CTDs and is threatening to use them on the planet.”

“Sounds like a stand-off to me.”

“The Separatist in charge is General David Conard. His gunships are even now entering atmosphere. I project that he intends to destroy us and the Jain. If he does not succeed with the gunships he will use atomics. If he does not succeed with atomics he will use the CTDs. If the Cable Hogue intervenes he will use the CTDs anyway.”

“But that’s crazy!” said Abaron. “If they do that they won’t get away from here.”

“Who ever accused Separatists of sanity?” said Chapra, and turned to walk to the gunship. Jane went with Judd. Abaron followed Chapra. We humans should stick together, she thought, we get on so well. Kellor stared at the read-outs. Nothing.

“Any reply yet?” he asked communications officer Speck.

“Nothing for us, and I can’t pick up anything else through those scramble fields.”

“Any idea of what class we’re up against?”

“Not a clue. It could be a shuttle behind that chaff or an Alpha dreadnought. At least they’re holding off.”

“Yeah, but for how long?”

“They’ll hold off,” said Conard. “This is a classic terrorist hostage situation.” Yes, thought Kellor, and we all know the usual messy denouement of such situations: no win for anyone but the fanatics. And this situation was getting messier every moment. First the four soldiers taken out in the CTD blast just, as far as Kellor could see, because they were at the top of Conard’s shit list. Then the loss of contact with the shuttle planetside. Now this. It was time to resolve a thing or two. Before he could turn his attention to that Speck said, “Wait a minute. We’ve got a communication coming through.”

“Put it through on holo,” said Kellor, and turned his chair to a flickering cylinder appearing in the middle of the floor. In it resolved a woman’s face. Kellor thought the captain of the ECS ship very attractive, in an Amazonian way.

“Who am I speaking to?” she asked.

Kellor glanced at Conard. Conard nodded.

“Speck, let the General talk to her,” said Kellor.

Speck operated the controls to the ceiling holocamera. The woman’s image turned toward Conard. In the bridge of the ECS ship Conard would now be projected.

“Conard,” she said, and Kellor immediately noted a hardness to her face.

“Sergeant Windermere, you have risen through the ranks.”

“No doubt they still call you The General.”

“They do. What can I do for you, Windermere? You know the situation and you can do nothing. If you bring your ship any closer or intervene in any way, the three CTDs, which were stolen from the Droon complex on Titan, will be fired at this planet.”

“I had hoped to appeal to some source of common sense there. You realise, Conard, that you won’t get away from this one unless I allow you to go.”

“What do you mean by that curious statement?”

“I’ve been authorised to allow you to pull away and leave unmolested so long as you do it now. So long as you call back those gunships.”

“That would be so fine for you,” spat Conard. “Then ECS can just drift on in and pick up a science to subjugate us all.”

Ah, thought Kellor, now this conversation is getting interesting.

“What science? You destroyed the Jain and its machine when you destroyed the Schrödinger’s Box.”

“I cannot believe that your scientists learned nothing in that time.”

“They learned a great deal and it was instantly transmitted into the net. By now the things they learned are common knowledge to thousands of researchers.”

“I am supposed to believe that? ECS would not allow such technology into the public domain. No. I will make certain.”

Conard signalled for communications to be cut.

The cave was huge. The sea flowed into it and the roof was fifty metres above. Chapra followed the shuttle inside and before it was necessary for her to turn on the gunship’s lights, Judd put the shuttle down on a stony shore.

“I’m not sure I want to go out there,” said Chapra.

Abaron nodded in agreement. On the shore stood two lobster creatures, each about three metres long.

“I bet they’ve got triangles on their backs,” he said to Chapra. They both remained seated as Judd and Jane came over from the shuttle and boarded.

“The other gunships are very close. Why have you remained in here?” asked Jane.

“We were a little worried about them,” said Abaron, pointing.

“They are the equivalent of your PSRs. They are here to demount the guns from this ship and set them for defence.”

“Okay,” said Abaron, and stood.

Chapra noted he had acquired a handgun from somewhere and tucked it in his utility belt.

“Come with me,” said Judd once they were outside the ship, and he led them to the dark mouths of caves worn into the stone at the head of the dark beach. From behind them came a ripping crash. They turned to see that one of the lobster-things had ripped a gun turret out of the gunship. They turned back when Judd took up a veined sphere and shook it to produce a chemical light. As they entered the cave, Jane passed them on her way out. There must have been another entrance. When two Janes came walking toward them carrying objects like living rifles, they began to understand. The Junger twenty-eight was a square-sectioned stubby cross with a spherical cockpit at one end. On the arms either side of the cockpit were sideways projecting gun turrets each containing one rapid-fire ten millimetre cannon and one pulsed laser. The cannon’s rate of fire was adjustable from one to five thousand shells a second. Each spherical shell contained enough explosive to vaporise a human being. The lasers could cut a human being in half. Slung underneath were missiles that could not be used in the close confines of the cave for fear of collapsing it on the ship. The opposition had no such fears. With a low droning the first Junger entered the cave as fast as its pilot dared in the confines. A burst of fire from its right turret gun jerked the shuttle fifty metres into the air and slammed it against the back of the cave. At that point a missile from a demounted launcher hit the Junger. The flash was brief and bright enough to blind. Molten metal and fragments of white hot ceramoplastics hit the walls of the cave. The next Junger went the same way and perhaps because it managed to take out the beached gunship two more followed it in. Rapid fire hit these. Bits of them hit the walls of the cave. When no more gunships followed, the two lobster-things with turret guns mounted on their backs, retreated into the smaller caves at the back of the beach. They were well clear by the time the incendiary missiles swarmed in and converted the main cavern into a furnace. They only came out of hiding when the bombardment had finished. A hot glow from molten spots on the walls lit the way for the soldiers who flew in using AG harnesses. The lobster things made a rain of human wreckage in the steam until there were no more bullets for their guns. They kept on aiming and firing, like the mechanisms they were. Pulsed energy fire cooked them on the beach.

The first soldier to encounter the enemy in the smaller caves hesitated too long. He just found it too difficult to open fire on a naked pubescent girl. The girl raised something like a metre-long razor fish and it repeatedly spat at him. The soldier hung in the air screaming as worms bored through his environment suit and into his flesh. The next soldier shot the girl, hurling her back with her chest burst open and jetting smoke. Then it was his turn to scream when the worms leaped from his comrade and started on him. The General’s aides were both young men, and probably very inexperienced. Kellor had noticed that people who did not feel secure in positions of power tended to gather other people around them who were not too much of a threat. He, on the other hand, felt completely secure and had as his first officer and com officer, Jurens and Speck, who were both hardened mercenaries with years of experience. Kellor glanced at Jurens and gave a slight nod when Talist, the aide Jurens had chosen, went to puke in the toilet just off the bridge, then returned his attention to Conard. There would be no sound from the toilet, but there might be a bit of a mess. Jurens’ preference was a knife for close work. The young man in the hologram was trying not to cry. Blood was pouring from two circular holes in his cheek and in the background other soldiers were screaming.

“Little girls!” yelled Conard. “Fucking worms!”

The whole incredible fiasco brought home to Kellor that there could be only one result now. There seemed no chance of him thieving some of this Jain technology, and he still had no idea who Conard’s contact was. If he judged Conard right, the man would go tactical next, and if that didn’t bring the ECS ship in, Christ knows what would. He glanced aside as Jurens came out of the toilet looking annoyed. Kellor attributed this to the patch of blood on his first officer’s trousers — Jurens made a mess but was normally very good on not getting it on himself.

“We’ll have to use the tacticals,” said Conard.

It gave Kellor no satisfaction to be right. He gave the nod to Speck, who had moved close to the other aide. Speck preferred the garrotte for close work. He was so completely casual as he opened out the shining wire and looped it over the aide’s head. One quick jerk and a ballet twist and step away. The aide staggered, making horrible gobbling sounds and spewing blood everywhere. His head still remained on his shoulders by dint of the garrotte stopping at his vertebrae. Conard spun around and saw the man stumble and fall: the spastic movements, the bubbling tube of an oesophagus sticking out where it should not. He turned back and froze, staring into the hollow-mirrored cube that was the hole-making end of Kellor’s favourite little plasma gun. Kellor smiled. That moment again.

“No tacticals,” he said. “Tell him.”

Conard glanced at the hologram. The young soldier could only see Conard, and was too far gone in shock to know something was wrong.

Conard said, “Fire all the tactical nuclear weapons into that cave.” You’ve killed me, thought Kellor, then lowered his weapon and incinerated Conard’s groin and thighs so the man dropped screaming to the deck. Speck quickly transferred the holocamera to Kellor.

“Obey that order and you won’t get out of there alive,” said Kellor to the soldier. “And if you return now there’ll be a good bonus in it for you.” He knew he’d made a mistake right from the first word. The soldier stared at him for a moment then cut com. Kellor looked down at Conard who had stopped screaming and was now groaning. There would have been no pain at first anyway, thought Kellor, though there was pain now. He deliberately stood on Conard’s thigh so the cooked skin tore away from muscle. Conard started screaming again and scrabbled at his wrist holster. Kellor stamped on his hand then removed Conard’s little gun. He’d almost forgotten about that.

The sounds of battle died though the screaming lasted for some time after. The Janes did not scream. They fought even with the most hideous wounds. Abaron had seen one of them stooping over a struggling soldier, choking the man with something. It was only when Abaron stepped in close and shot the man in the head that he realised the Jane had the stump of her wrist jammed in the man’s mouth. That Jane had nodded her thanks and run back into the fray. Abaron retreated behind the slabs he and Chapra had chosen as their last place of defence.

“What’s happening now?” he asked. “Have we won?”

“You heard what Judd said,” said Chapra. She lay with the singun propped before her, staring out to where the cave was lit by luminescents spattered on the walls and floor. Suddenly she tensed, then relaxed. Judd and two Janes came quickly to join them.

“We must go deeper,” said Judd.

“Oh my God,” said Chapra, perhaps guessing.

The ground shifted and rock began to rain down. Abaron had time to see a wall of fire hurtling towards them before a Jane pushed him down and pressed herself over his head — protecting his precious brain. Without that protection his death might have been less protracted and painful.

“Have you got them on com yet!” yelled Kellor. He knew he was losing it. “For Chrissake try again!” Speck kept sending, kept trying to get something.

“Shut up!” yelled Kellor and fired once, silencing Conard’s crying. He turned back to the com consoles and screens. Tactical nukes, a hundred square kilometres incinerated. Thank Christ the CTDs remained aboard under ship control. He peered at the readouts on another screen. Nothing but chaff and fuzz. Well, if the ECS ship attacked he’d make a fight of it, maybe get away… Then the Cable Hogue shut down its screens and jamming. There was an energy surge. Some kind of particle weapon. All the screens went out for a moment. When they re-established Kellor saw that the remaining gunships were now just metallic fog.

“Get us out of here!” he screamed at Jurens as he reached for the controls to the CTD launcher. Perhaps it would delay… perhaps…

“Oh Christ,” said Speck, dull horror in his voice.

The sheer hopelessness of the situation made Kellor hesitate for a moment, a second. In that second he knew how they had felt, all those opponents, in their moment of defeat. And in that second the dreadnought wrenched the Samurai from orbit, killing most of its crew with the massive acceleration. The flattened and distorted ship left a trail of fire across space, then rode a light-speed gravity wave towards the sun, where the antimatter in the CTDs would make not a wit of difference. The nine minutes of that journey were the longest of Kellor’s life as his shattered body lay hard against the deck. With the ship inside the gravity wave he did not feel any more acceleration. What held him down was a fluke of broken computers and distorted conduits that had re-established artificial gravity at six gees. He couldn’t even scream.

Diana was still boiling. Vacillation and bloody incompetence and when there came the inevitable enquiry she knew they’d manage to make the shit stick to her. If she’d had her own way she’d have gone straight in and they wouldn’t have had a chance to use nukes. She looked at the screen showing the blasted ground the shuttle overflew.

“How far?” she asked.

“Ten kilometres. We should be there in a few minutes, Captain,” said the pilot, obviously a little nervous. Diana snorted. Well perhaps they could salvage something from this mess. She glanced at Alexion, who had remained curiously reticent after witnessing the destruction of the mercenary ship. People took their first taste of war in different ways. His reaction to the ground blast had been a look of extreme pain. His precious Jain, gone.

The shore soon came into view and the pilot brought the shuttle down by the ATV parked there. Troops were standing by the ATV dressed in full environment and radiation suits. Diana pulled down the visor on her gear and headed for the lock. Alexion meekly followed.

“Where is it?” she asked the commander, before he had a chance to salute. The man pointed down the beach. “Okay, let’s have a look.” Diana walked down the ash-covered sand to the figure sat upon a rock.

“Which one are you?” she asked.

Its soft outer covering had been burned away and what remained was a seared metal skeleton containing the sealed mechanisms of its existence. It regarded her with brown lidless eyes set in its blackened skull. Its white teeth were stained, and because its lips were gone it seemed to be grinning.

“I am Judd,” it rasped at her, black flakes shooting from its mouth.

“What happened to them, Judd? The other Golem, Chapra and Abaron?”

“Died. All died.”

“Chapra and Abaron are dead?”

“No.”

“You said they died.”

“Yes.”

Obviously screwed, thought Diana. They might get something from its memory.

“What about the Jain? We know it wasn’t killed in the ship.” As she said this Diana surveyed the devastation and focused on the bloated creatures floating in the shallows. The neutron bursts had almost certainly done for the alien. It was now as much part of history as the rest of its kind. Perhaps Smith could excavate it. She returned her attention to Judd as the Golem raised a hand missing three fingers and pointed with the remaining one out to sea.

“Here. Soon.”

Diana stared down at the sea. Abruptly she stood. Movement out there. She glanced at her soldiers as they nervously fingered their weapons. Something was coming out of the sea.

“Let’s not have any more incidents,” she said loudly.

It was red, whatever it was, and huge. It broke the surface like the back of a whale and ploughed in to the shore. A giant red worm, thought Diana, then remembered the description of the Jain machine.

“No shooting!” She turned on Alexion. “What the hell is that?” It heaved up onto the beach, sending a wave of sea water that washed to Diana’s boots. The mouth was three metres wide, speckled at the lips and iridescent white inside. The mouth of a long and impossible shell. The water drained away and Diana could see nothing deep inside but a gradual thickening of shadow.

“Christ knows,” said Alexion.

Movement. Two shapes walking out — human shapes. Chapra and Abaron strode out of the Jain machine, the remains of their environment suits hanging on them in tatters, visors discarded, hoods pulled back. But were they Chapra and Abaron? How could they be alive? They were standing in temperatures that should take off their skins.

“You’d best come to the shuttle,” said Diana, watching them intently. Chapra stood before Diana. “We are human. He repaired us, rebuilt us.” Abaron said, “I guess he found it easier to alter us to survive here than to repair our suits.” Chapra turned to Alexion. “Alex, it’s good to see you.” She smiled and Diana saw Smith’s strange look of yearning.

“It’s good to see you. New body?”

A weak joke.

“I’m me,” she said, that smile still there. “The Jain is very good at what it does. If anything I’ve been improved. So much is clear now. And this body… ”

“What have you learnt?”

“A fraction. Some figure after the point. There’s so much… I cannot explain… ”

“Try.”

“It will take time. Have you a century or so free?”

Alexion stepped forward, impulsively Diana thought. She caught his shoulder and halted him. He turned to her. “I have to do this. In my research the questions always outnumber the answers. Always. You can’t stop me. I’m not security.”

“Come along,” said Diana. “I should think you want to get home.”

“No.”

She released her hold. His choice. Alexion went to stand with Chapra and Abaron. Chapra grinned at him then returned her attention to Diana.

“We’re staying here. There’s so much to learn. You understand?” Diana felt she might.

“Here, a gift.” Chapra held out her fist to Diana.

With reluctance Diana held out the flat of her gloved hand. Chapra dropped something into it then turned back to the tunnel. Alexion followed, eagerly. As the three of them walked into the Jain machine, Diana saw through a tear in Abaron’s suit a triangle at the base of his spine. She shuddered, and just stood there until they were gone. Eventually the tube filled with sea water and drew back into the sea. She opened her hand to look at the small red shell Chapra had given her. It was shaped like a worm cast; a small coral of convolute tubes. She’d seen recordings; she knew what it was — knew it was the future. There was not much Diana feared. She feared this.