The agent probably thought he had won—thought that this was the end of Skellor. But Skellor was more than mere human: he could survive this, would survive this.

The temperature was rising. Already some materials inside the ship were beginning to vaporize. The continuous grinding, twisting and flexing of the ship’s structure and the rippling of its hull were generating most of the heat. Bubble-metal I-beams, taking on a cherry glow, stretched like toffee and twisted apart, the inert gases used to foam their metal bleeding away into vacuum. Behind Skellor, the hull separated like wet cardboard, and underneath him the floor bowed alarmingly, then began to slew away. Everything, bar himself and one other item, was coming apart as if utterly rotten. That the Golem chassis retained its shape was testament to Polity materials technology. But even that would not survive the impact to come.

The next gravity wave hit hard and lasted longer, shattering what remained of the ship across a kilometre of space. Pieces of it were now incandescent—boiling into vacuum. Skellor retained his own shape — reinforced it from inside using structural force fields powered by his internal gravitic generator. But something was wrong. That wave had nearly ripped him in two, yet with the theorized output of the generator, it should not have. And he would need everything the generator could give him, as there was much worse to come. He ran a diagnostic on the machine, but found it was functioning at optimum. Separate from his internal diagnostics, he probed inside it with nanoptic fibres, and located the node growing right in the centre of it. He opened the generator, forced the node out, closed the generator and had it up to forty per cent of function when the next wave hit.

Skellor screamed, mostly in rage and frustration — now a piece of diamond-sewn meat stretched out over four metres of nothing. Tidal forces had shredded the remains of the ship, the bulk of it now a falling arc of metallic vapour. Skellor was the largest single chunk remaining, the second-largest being an eyeless Golem skull. He slowly drew himself back together, high above an endless brown plain; became a black human doll full of whorls and knots. Witch-fingered. Much of his substance had been torn away or had boiled into vacuum, and his mind was losing cohesion. Before it went completely, simple physics impinged: he could not survive this; how had he ever thought he could survive this?

Some hours later a fibrous mass containing Jain eggs, which so far had managed to retain their shape, hit the surface. Half that mass turned to energy. All that remained was a baroque silver pattern across the dun surface.

Through tunnelling vision Cormac watched as out of an elliptical port on the side of the nacelle, at the end of a jointed arm, extruded a close-quarters laser. This device looked something like a premillennial machine-gun, though rather than belt-fed with ammunition, it was fed by thick, ribbed power cables. But it served the same purpose, normally being used against smaller opponents who had actually managed to get close to the ship’s hull. It was precisely the weapon required to remove Cormac from the grapple, probably in pieces. He spat blood and looked aside, still seeing into the tear in his perception. Perhaps he could step inside the ship, cause damage… something? No, the whole idea was laughable now. He had done it; he had shifted himself through U-space by an act of will, but right then he had no idea of how he had done it. And what could he do inside the ship, injured and weak as he was? Reality was himself suspended in vacuum with a laser pointed at him and death imminent. Then, through that same tear in vision, something surfaced distantly, something huge.

‘I see,’ said King.

The laser powered up, a hot glow emitting from its sooty workings. It turned on its arm and fired. The cable glowed red, white, blue-white, then the centre of that light exploded into globules of molten carbon. Once again Cormac was weightless as the grapple and a short piece of the cable he was clinging to began to fall back towards the brown dwarf. The laser folded away, all ports closed, and the attack ship receded above him.

‘You saw that I did not gain access to Skellor—or to Jain technology,’ King sent.

‘So,’ Cormac managed.

‘Tell Jerusalem that.’

As he fell, Cormac faded; even the perceptile programs he had been using were not managing to keep him conscious. He saw a vision of curving steel, thought himself near impact with the dwarf star, but realized that was wrong. If he was that close, he would not see a curve to the horizon—would probably see nothing at all.

Then something titanic engulfed him, and claws, three-fingered and gleaming, closed on his upper arms. As they separated him from the cable, things ripped inside his body. Blood exploded from his mouth, and something hard entered his neck. After a numb hiatus, which he read in his gridlink as having lasted seven minutes, came bright aseptic light.

‘This may take some time,’ said the voice of Asselis Mika. ‘I don’t think there’s an unbroken bone in his body.’

Another voice, the resonant iceberg tip of vast intellect, noted, ‘The inside of his head is not much better.’

The lights went out again.

When humans referred to something called a ‘cold sweat’, Dragon had formerly known what it meant only on an intellectual level. Now the entity understood what it meant on a visceral level. In its dealings with the Polity, it had always purposely encountered lesser entities than itself. This was why it had always kept away from the larger-capacity runcible AIs—sector AIs—and tried not to operate within twenty light-years of any place in which Earth Central had shown the slightest interest. Jerusalem was precisely the kind of Polity AI that Dragon had therefore always avoided. Now the entity was reminded why, for Jerusalem possessed the sheer mental power to beat Dragon at its own games whilst also inhabiting a ship body possessing the physical size and power to render it unnecessary for it to play such games.

This was why Dragon had found itself unable to conceal certain facts for very long. The essence of the transmission, after the initial fencing, had been: ‘Tell me everything, and fast’—along with the blueprint of one of the Jerusalem’s internal chambers and an overview of the equipment that could be used there. Dragon was left in no doubt that the ship could encompass, immobilize, then dismantle it to see how it ticked.

That the Jerusalem had dropped into U-space upon learning about the Ogygian was less than reassuring. It meant the AI certainly knew that Dragon would not be escaping and could be dealt with at leisure. The thought of such an AI gaining access to Skellor was frightening. The thought of it obtaining certain items that Skellor would soon be shedding, like a dandelion scattering its seeds in the breeze, was enough to give even a dragon nightmares. But Dragon had no power to affect those events, though one such item, close by, it had aimed to put in safer hands.

Still on course for Cull, the entity linked through to the flying lizard, which had coiled up to sleep in a sulerbane leaf, the recent stress of expected extinction having obviously exhausted it. Receiving instruction, the creature reared up, shook itself and flew over to the carapace remains of Skellor’s last meal on Cull, landed and looked to where the golden egg had fallen. Dragon was so amused it decided to let the lizard live despite its near contact with Jain technology. Where the egg had lain in the dust, now rested a blue acorn.

Dragon wondered what the brass man would make of his new toy.

Others might wonder at the entity’s definition of ‘safer hands’.