Eventually her tears dried and Jarvellis tried her comunit again. Again she just got silence. The EM pulse from the explosion must have burnt out the suit's radio. Planar explosives had been used, and they did not produce such a pulse. It had come from one of the secondary explosions, either when the pile went or when the disc cut the underspace engine in half. There would be recovery ships up from Viridian in time, but they would come too late for her. Rescue was not an option, and only two others remained: either she died slowly in the suit or… Jarvellis reached down and undipped the solid-state laser clipped to the suit's utility belt. It wouldn't work through the helmet, as the chainglass would automatically polarize. She needed to hold it over her heart. She estimated it would take about a minute to penetrate the suit.

No more grief now. Everything was gone and now there was just her. Then… then she remembered the other life starting inside her, and that only made everything seem worse. She looked down at the laser in her heavy glove. It was just a matt cylinder with a button on one end.

Oh, John…

She put the business end of the laser against her chest and pressed the button. Red light ignited at the point of contact and vaporized ceramal flared away in an orange fog. Any moment now she would be through. There would be sudden pain, then quick death. The laser broke through, but there was no expected pain. The explosion slammed at her chest and flung her hand away. As she hurtled back, she saw the laser tumbling through space on a trail of glittering fragments.

'Oh, fuck you. Fuck you!'

Fifteen minutes of air left, and the display was still heading down. She had achieved the end she required, though not by the expected method. She knew exactly what had happened. The sealant had hardened on exposure to vacuum. The laser had cut through it and then it had broken under the air pressure in her suit. But it went further than that, which was the reason these old suits had been replaced. The epoxy-based sealant, once hardened, lost its flame-retardant properties. Under the blast of air, white-hot epoxy had exploded.

'Goodbye, John,' Jarvellis said, and thought that perhaps the shadows she was seeing at the edges of her vision were due to the sudden drop in air pressure.

Abruptly she realized this was not so, she was seeing a framework of structural members silhouetted against Viridian, a second before she slammed into a wall inside the ring station. As the counter dropped to zero, and she gasped on nothing, she had enough humour left to appreciate the irony of it all.

21

Mika was watching a screen showing a view down the shaft towards the artefact. In the picture Cormac recognized the rear view of Cam, Cormac himself, Gant and Cento. The guardian creature was coming up the shaft. 'Jesus!' yelled Gant.

Cormac waited for his shouted instruction for them to 'Hit it'. Mika froze the picture at the point when the creature was in fullest view. Cormac's recorded shout was stillborn.

'I downloaded this copy from Aiden's memory,' said Mika, widiout turning.

'What do you make of it?'

'Terrifying, fascinating.'

'All of diat,' said Cormac dryly.

She turned to him. 'If I hadn't known the shaft had been made by melting and rock-compression, I would have said that creature hollowed it out somehow; that it was its natural home before the temperature dropped. The shaft is perfectly designed to accommodate it. But for the ice, it would have moved up much faster.'

'And you are saying?'

'The reverse: the creature was specially designed for the shaft. It was a guardian created for that place.'

She walked past him to a bench on which were laid the pieces of the creature which Thorn had brought back. She picked up the end of one silvered leg.

'There is no real defence against energy weapons, but what defence there is this creature had: reflective skin and an effective mediod of heat dispersal. It was also armoured enough to deal with most projectile weapons.' She pointed at the screen. 'Its dimensions were perfect for the shaft.'

'Machine or living thing,' said Cormac, remembering a previous conversation, 'it didn't evolve.'

'No, it has no means of reproduction. It was definitely made? She glanced at him again. 'And its construction is strikingly similar to that of the dracomen. It does not have DNA; it used protein replication.'

Cormac diought about that for a moment.

Dragon again?

'You just said, "Its natural home before the temperature dropped." What did you mean by that?'

Mika put down the silvered leg and picked up another piece of the creature: a flattened ovoid with ribs along one side. 'This is one of its feet. It's very like one of the toes of such lizards as the gecko on Eardi or the srank on Circe. It would have been perfectly designed for gripping onto the rock of that shaft if there was no ice there.' She dropped the foot. 'Also, from what I have discovered thus far, it was reaching the edge of its survivability. Had the temperature gone below one-sixty Kelvin it would have become somnolent. Much lower than that and it would have died.'

'But the dracomen were managing,' said Cormac.

Mika gazed at her collection of body parts. 'This creature was not so complex as them. It did not have the ability to adapt…'

'Questions occur,' said Cormac, looking back at the screen.' Why was that artefact being guarded? And what put the guard there? Whatever did, it did not know the temperature was going to drop. The creature was placed there before the runcible went down. Yet, the dracomen… Were they sent here to retrieve the artefact? Was that Dragon's purpose?' He shook his head. 'If so, why was the runcible destroyed?'

'I believe some other alien is involved,' said Mika.

Cormac turned to her. 'Why?'

'Because of the artefact. I've been checking through the Dragon/human dialogues and other papers. Remember, when you went to Aster Colora - that two-kilometre perimeter? Dragon has no use of machines. Everything it makes is more complex - living. That artefact is not a product of Dragon's technology.'

'Yes… maybe… but the guardian? We run in circles. Every clue leads to more questions… Hubris, what is Dragon doing now?'

'Dragon is still destroying things on the planet. We have no picture now, since one burst destroyed the probe.'

To Mika, Cormac said, 'That's where I hope to get some answers, no matter how cryptic they may be.'

'Dragon tells lies,' Mika observed.

'You can learn something even from lies,' said Cormac, then left her to her work.

Cormac looked down into the huge main bay, at the rows of bubble-metal crates, superconductor cable and sheet, in reels and rolls, the massive shapes of the Skaidon horns in their shock packaging, one of which had killed the technician working on it, and at the two hemispheres of the containment vessel. He watched the technicians moving about the bay, checking this, taking readings here. They were not checking the runcible itself - as that would not be necessary until it was assembled -rather, they were checking the huge amount of equipment that would be used to install it. Most of these technicians carried notescreens. Others carried esoteric equipment, or were followed by robots doing so. The belly of the giant heavy-lifter, its loading hatches open, walled the back of the bay.