With the door closed behind her, she was immediately into her partial-immersion frame, then standing on a virtual plain. Manipulating some floating icons, she called up diverse views and the results of sampling tests transmitted by some of Jerusalem’s drones. Translucent pillars of data appeared all around her, scrolling her requirements around themselves.
The worms living in the icy moonlet that now turned in her virtual sky created burrows similar to those delved by Dragon. Breaking open one icon, she caused a segment of the moon to disappear, and like a huge worm-eaten cheese it dropped closer for her inspection.
Even though information about these creatures was already on file, through a transmission made by the Jack Ketch, Mika still found them fascinating. There was one aspect of them that was plainly similar to Dragon as it had once been on Aster Colora, where the human race had first encountered it: there seemed to be no supporting ecology for them. Mika could only hypothesize that the ecology of which they were a product had been destroyed or was somewhere far from here, and that begged many critical questions. Their lone survival made it unlikely they were just the primitive helminth survivors of some natural cataclysm or had been transported accidentally, therefore they must be very like Dragon in another respect. They must be the product of an ecology in the same way that a Golem android was the product of Earth’s. It was certain that they had not evolved naturally to their present state.
‘Fascinating, isn’t it,’ interjected Jerusalem, appearing beside her.
‘What is?’ Mika asked.
‘Life. But then what is life? Those worms grinding their way through spongy rock—are they life? Is Jain technology life? Am I?’
Ah, philosophy. Mika didn’t bother to venture a reply.
Jerusalem went on relentlessly: ‘In terms of evolved life, those worms are neither one thing nor the other. They have evolved, yes, but prior to that minor change they were not the direct product of insensate evolution.’
‘Pardon?’
The floating metal head tilted, and a long helical molecule arched across the sky like some strange species of rainbow. ‘You have not yet noted the regularity of their genetic blueprint, the lack of equivalents to alleles and parasitic DNA?’
‘Yes, I saw that.’ Mika repressed her annoyance. She had discovered something, but it was irritating to learn Jerusalem had found it long before her.
‘And what is your assessment?’
Mika replied, ‘A manufactured organism of some kind, probably intended for mining.’
‘So it would seem,’ the AI agreed. ‘They accumulate rare metals inside their bodies for no purpose related to their own survival.’ Mika winced—she had missed that aspect. ‘And they procreate only when those metals have reached an internal saturation level that interferes with their tunnelling efficiency.’
“They could be Jain tech,’ Mika offered.
‘They are not Jain in themselves, being simple mechanisms with only one purpose. However, someone using Jain technology could have made them. Some of the tunnels in that moon are over half a million years old. Perhaps the Atheter, or the Csorians?’
Mika considered that. There had been no finds classified as Jain artefacts any younger than five million years of age—that was, she acknowledged to herself, excepting products directly attributable to Skellor. Perhaps unknown aliens had left these worms here, but if so where were they themselves now? Perhaps this was all that remained of yet another race which had stumbled upon Jain technology.
‘We should set up a research…’ The words died in her mouth when she felt that drag into the ineffable as the Jerusalem dropped into U-space. She braced herself for any turbulence, surprised Jerusalem had given no warning.
‘The illegal USER has ceased to function,’ Jerusalem informed her, before she could ask.
Something prodded him to consciousness and, as he surfaced, Cormac could feel Jain tech all around his mind, like a hostile encircling army wielding a forest of edged and pointed weapons. Sharp steel hedged him in—he was poised on the brink of annihilation. Opening his eyes, he found himself bound into the co-pilot’s chair by hard Jain substructure. He could not move his head for the structure bound that too—and penetrated it.
‘Obviously you don’t have a quick death in mind for me?’ he suggested.
The lander was still under acceleration, and an indigo sky liberally dotted with stars filled the viewing screen. Skellor, leaning forward with one hand resting on the pilot’s console, glanced over his shoulder.
‘I don’t even know that I’ll kill you at all. Maybe I’ll rewire you so that you’re in constant agony, or I could subvert you like was done to Mr Crane—turn you against your masters. Maybe I’ll do both.’
‘Oh, you are so spoilt for choices—it must be such a trial for you.’
Agony speared from the base of Cormac’s skull and down his spine. He arched against his restraints, too ravaged by the pain to even scream. It went on and on… and his consciousness refused to leave him. He began to break: thought processes now operating in his gridlink because they were unable to function in his organic brain. He realized there, with arctic precision, that this was how Aphran had carried on; understood this separation. Then, after an age, the pain stopped. Cormac gasped for air, spat blood from where he had bitten through the tip of his tongue, wished he could wipe the tears from his eyes.
‘You see,’ said Skellor, ‘with the Jain substructure supporting your body, I can do that to you for hours without you going into shock or losing consciousness, or retreating from reality. Of course, if I rewired your brain and body, I could do so much more.’
Cormac became weightless in his Jain carapace, and slowly black space scrubbed away the indigo seen through the screen. Eventually the colony ship became visible, and Cormac could feel the lander decelerating to dock. Skellor would now have to move him from the lander to the main ship; perhaps he could do something then. The horror—he understood—of occupying the moral high ground, by being prepared to pay so heavy a price, was that this did not except you from actually paying. He knew that, given time, Skellor could destroy that same morality: could turn him into a whimpering thing who would obey the man’s every whim, could turn him into the complete negative of everything he was, and could make him suffer endlessly. Briefly, through the bulwarks of his mind, Cormac glimpsed a void where all that he amounted to meant nothing.
But he then decided that he must continue to function as if that void could never exist—he must remain an ECS agent to the last.
Skellor’s mental link to him was very close: he could feel thoughts and memories bleeding over, could feel that the man needed little excuse to cause Cormac pain. He decided to be sparing with sarcasm so as not to provoke the man. He also routed the bleed-over from Skellor’s mind into his gridlink and stored it.
‘What are your intentions, other than causing me pain?’ he asked.
Skellor glanced sideways, and Cormac observed dark movement under the apparently human skin of the man’s face. Whorls of scar tissue now filled the holes Cormac had drilled with his thin-gun into Skellor’s body. Those holes penetrated what appeared to be baroque leathery armour which Cormac realized was actually part of the man. One hole at Skellor’s waist seemed to have become cancerous: scar tissue having welled up and spilled over, setting in a fungal growth containing small egg-shaped nodules. Cormac wondered if this meant Skellor was not entirely in control of the Jain technology, though it seemed more likely that the man just did not care how he looked.
‘My intentions,’ Skellor repeated, the question seeming to momentarily confuse him. ‘Perhaps you should try to guess them.’