‘How was it damaged?’ she asked.

‘Tracking directly back along its course.’ Jerusalem’s iconic head appeared beside her—the AI had never disguised the fact that it was capable of conducting a thousand conversations all at once—‘I have detected the debris of an attack ship, though I am yet to determine which one. Also there is a USER singularity eating out the centre of a giant planet nearby. Dragon has just informed me that it destroyed both the USER and the ship guarding it… Ah, the ship was the Excalibur. Other debris in the system would appear to be the remains of the Grim Reaper.’

‘What about the Jack Ketch?’

‘I will inform you when I know more.’

Mika stared at Dragon for a while longer, then turned away. Returning to her immediate research, she eyed the molecule floating before her like an asteroid composed of snooker balls. This was her third. Thus far, the research staff on the Jerusalem had studied over ten thousand such structures to learn their function. Another year working at the same rate and they might even pass one per cent of the total. But Mika knew the rate was bound to change. D’nissan, working with some shipboard AIs and Jerusalem itself, was now decoding the programming languages of the Jain, and already new methods, new approaches were being found. It reminded Mika of the well-documented human genome project back in the twentieth century. Back then, the scientists had predicted the project would take decades but, new computer technologies becoming available, those same scientists had very quickly mapped the structure of human DNA. On the Jerusalem, though, they had the advantage that their work was synergetic: the more they learnt about Jain technology, the more tools it provided them to learn with.

This particular molecule, like those she had already studied, was an engine of multiple function. It self-propagated like a virus, but did not necessarily destroy the cells it invaded. It was small enough to need to suborn little of the cellular machinery for reproduction, and its offspring caused little damage leaving the reproductive cell. However, outside the cell, its function multiplied. It could destroy other cells, cause accelerated division in other cells and make nerve cells signal repeatedly. The molecule was also programmable: its function could be changed once it plugged into other unidentified molecules. Mika realized it was thus just one mote of that part of the technology Skellor used to subjugate human beings.

An hour later, the Jerusalem abruptly dropped into U-space.

‘It seems the party has moved on,’ Jerusalem said.

Mika did not suppose the AI meant the drinks and canapés kind.

They had surfaced from U-space, but for Cormac his perception of the real seemed permanently wrecked—a rip straight through it. Every solid echoed into grey void, and the stale air of the ship seemed to be pouring into that rather than towards some large breach nearby. Gazing at his thin-gun, Cormac saw it was both an object and a grey tube punching into infinity, which, he reflected with an almost hysterical amusement, was precisely what it had been to those he had killed with it. When he entered the bridge, Cento was a perilous moving form casting laser shadows behind it, and when the Golem fired his APW, the fire burned with negative colour.

The blast threw Skellor past Cormac, slamming him up against the quartz screen of the ship like a black iron statue. The screen disintegrated and Skellor disappeared. For a moment Cormac thought the bio-physicist had been blown clear of the ship, but there had been insufficient air left to do that, and anyway Cormac’s torn vision of reality showed him flat laser shadows now clinging to the outside hull, above the screen.

‘Foolish. Trying to kill me, he freed me,’ came over the link Cormac had with the biophysicist, then, after a pause, followed a howl of rage. Cormac pushed down the link, tried to see what Skellor was seeing, could not fathom the vast curving horizon.

‘Why is he so angry?’ he mouthed to Cento, as the Golem came before him.

Cento replied through the comunit of Cormac’s environment suit: ‘Because he is going to die, and there’s no way he can avoid it. It’s as inevitable as gravity.’

Cormac understood now. He saw all the curves, saw the mountain, the eversion the brown dwarf star created in U-space.

‘We are all going to die?’ he suggested.

Just then, something half-seen shot in through the front screen, arrowed through the bridge, and slammed into Cento. The APW flew from the Golem’s hand, bounced from a wall and, turning slowly end over end, headed slowly towards outer space. Skellor, a blackened atomy whorled and distorted around nodular growths in his body, now tore at the Golem.

Cormac could do nothing to help Cento although he fought against the enclosing structure. When he felt the wash of tidal forces through his body, he knew that in very little time that same wash would intensify sufficiently to shatter the Jain structure, but by then the tidal forces would have compressed and stretched his body to a sludge of splintered bone and ruptured flesh inside it. It occurred to him, with crazy logic, that such damage to himself was required as payment for the pain he had already suffered. On another level it occurred to him that he was not entirely rational at that moment.

Skellor, he saw, was not attempting to subvert Cento as he had with Gant. Perhaps he had lost the ability. More likely he had lost the inclination. Extinction looming as close as that vast brown horizon, the man wanted vengeance, wanted the satisfaction of smashing something. But, in the end, none of it mattered. Cormac ceased to struggle. The brown dwarf possessed its own huge inevitability. Then, as the hole where the front screen had been veered away from the dwarf, he spotted another ship through the opening, dark against the further stars, and two lines curving down from it like hooks. The Ogygian jerked once, twice, then suddenly Cormac was heavy inside the Jain structure—being crammed over to one side.

Grappling claws.

Loose objects inside the bridge dropped to the floor, then slid hard sideways. Cormac tracked the APW, caught in the rim of the screen hole, his thin-gun down on the floor by the nearby console—useless to him. Through the screen gap he observed the colonist sphere located at the further end of the craft swing round and down towards the vast brown plain. Then came a vibration through the ship, as of a giant electric saw operating. Blinding incandescence flooded in: a small percentage of lased light refracting from metal vapour. Most of the front end of the vessel was now falling away, severed by a powerful laser.

Cento and Skellor slammed into the wall. The Golem was down to metal, and Skellor had even torn some of that away. Long pink lesions cut into Skellor’s blackened carapace, golden nodules showed in these like some strange scar tissue.

Cormac suddenly felt Skellor’s glee, and picked up the subsequent exchange: Thank you, my liege, Skellor uttered sarcastically over the ether.

You will undoubtedly thank me, came the reply.

Cormac wondered at this madness. It was a foolish move on the part of the AI attack ship to rescue himself and Cento at the risk of allowing Skellor also to go free. His thought encountered amusement. He saw Skellor push Cento to arm’s length, then spin him around and slam him hard into the wall. He recognized that the Golem was now failing.

Skellor whispered to him: ‘The King of Hearts doesn’t work for the Polity any more.’

It was too much: to choose a moral death, then to accept an inevitable one, and then to have both taken away. If only he could strike even the smallest blow. But he could do nothing—was ineffectual. Then, in that moment of extremity, Cormac saw the way. Wasn’t it laughably obvious? Aboard the Jack Ketch Thorn had not hallucinated—had actually seen Cormac move in that way. And Horace Blegg had been correct as well: ‘… your mind will soon find other parts that were never of itself