Gant glanced over. ‘The brazen bull—particularly nasty. It’s hollow, and the victim was placed inside to be roasted. They put reeds in its nostrils to alter the sound of the screams, so that it seemed the bull was bellowing.’

‘You know,’ said Thorn, ‘I’m glad I don’t live in any system run by humans.’

‘Fucking A,’ said Gant.

Just then a shape appeared, apparently turning above them in vacuum: a ring, composed of a jade-green serpent swallowing its tail: ouroboros. This acted as a frame for something that appeared first as a distant silver dot, then grew to fill the frame and finally came through to block it from view: an androgynous face, bald and metallic, with shadowed hollows rather than eyes. This was a projection, not something actually outside the ship. Thorn and Gant fell silent to observe.

Cormac looked up. ‘Jerusalem?’

‘The same,’ the face replied.

Without any more ado, Cormac said, ‘I went to Masada specifically to collect Mika, since I require her expertise.’

The face tilted as if its unseen body had shrugged. ‘Certain other factors have come into play, Ian Cormac, not least my own requirement of her taking precedence.’

Cormac grimaced. ‘I was given carte blanche by Earth Central, which presumably you have been allowed to override, and presumably for the best of reasons, so I’m not going to argue the point. I would just like an explanation.’

‘Simply put,’ the AI replied, ‘we have decided that understanding Jain technology is more important than apprehending one criminal who happens to employ it. Skellor is certainly dangerous—any Separatist with a gun is dangerous. Do you go after said Separatist or do you go after the arms trade? The answer is simply that you go after both, but that the latter must necessarily take precedence.’

‘A very elastic analogy,’ said Cormac tightly.

‘There are the other factors I mentioned.’

‘Do go on.’

Jerusalem continued, ‘Asselis Mika will shortly undergo major surgery, without which she will die. Once I have carried this out, I will place her either on life-support or in cold-sleep suspension, whilst one of my subminds removes stray, regrowing, and possibly mutating Jain filaments. Were she aboard the Jack Ketch, the same scenario would apply: she would have been useless to you.’

Hearing this, Thorn wondered if his insistence on not going with Mika but boarding the Jack Ketch had been such a bright idea.

‘But then she’s useless to you as well,’ said Cormac.

‘For a period of five to ten days, by which time I will have designed and nanofactured robotic T-cells capable of hunting down and destroying all remaining Jain structures inside her. Obviously, Jack could employ such nanobots. But your search for Skellor—debouching from Viridian—is most likely to be either on the Line or out-Polity altogether?’

Looking uncomfortable, Cormac nodded.

Relentlessly Jerusalem continued, ‘Then the likelihood of my being able to convey some medium containing those nanobots to you is remote, as that would have to be done through the runcible network.’

‘Yeah, okay.’

‘It is also well to remember one other point: Asselis Mika herself believes she will be more usefully employed aboard me.’

Cormac remained silent, his look of annoyance fading to blankness as he folded his arms.

‘Thank you for your explanation,’ he said coldly.

The head nodded once, then slowly receded, and winked out. Briefly the ouroboros reappeared, like a call sign, then it too faded.

After a pause, Cormac turned to Thorn. ‘You heard the prognosis for Mika, so the same probably applies to you a few days down the line.’

Thorn straightened up, trying not to wince at a stabbing pain at the base of his spine. ‘I heard it.’

‘You can take a shuttle across to the Jerusalem.’

Thorn snorted. ‘What would I do aboard a ship like that? I’d rather be in cold sleep here.’

Cormac nodded, then turned to the ship’s avatar. ‘Jack, take us under.’

Immediately the stars and the blackness folded into a deep grey, and Thorn still experienced a frisson at that strange tugging feeling that told him they were on their way.

‘And while we’re here, Jack,’ Cormac continued, ‘let’s see what our dead Separatist has to say.’

Despite his pain, Thorn had been fascinated to learn that this ship possessed its own ghost. He stared as a line of distortion cut through the air outside the drawing room. With a clicking, whickering sound, the automaton Jack shut down, its head bowing and the glint dying behind its glasses. It must have been too much trouble for the AI to maintain simultaneously both the automaton and the projection of Aphran that now appeared.

This was not the woman of whom Thorn had seen images. That woman had been contemptuous, angry, frustrated at no longer being able to fight… in other words, human. This Aphran was something else entirely.

She was naked but, naked or otherwise, Thorn doubted her bones had originally been visible through translucent flesh. She was colourless, her hair long and pale, whereas Thorn distinctly remembered it being brown; her skin was white as milk, whereas before it had carried a slightly Asiatic hue; and her eyes were a demonic, pupil-less black. Thorn could only wonder if this was the result of some strange kind of vanity, for surely, appearing this way, she could be whatever she wanted. Also, the woman was drifting, like a corpse in deep water, her hair and arms pulled back and forth as if by wayward currents. There was a sound too, like delicate wind chimes or a tittering giggle, and a distant moaning.

‘Hello, Aphran.’ Cormac walked over to the edge of the carpet.

She turned and focused on the agent, though Thorn knew that this was all illusion—the woman would be seeing him through the camera eyes Jack allowed her. Thorn glanced at Gant, then stepped away from the lamp post to stand at Cormac’s shoulder. Curiosity was growing inside him, as thick and heavy as the Jain nodes that were already there.

‘Hello, agent,’ Aphran replied.

Cormac seemed at a loss. He parted his hands as if to encompass that same loss, then brought them together and got straight down to business.

‘You told me Skellor is hunting dragons,’ he said. ‘But I think I can safely assume that we’re not talking about the winged and fire-breathing kind?’

‘Dragons and brass men,’ Aphran replied, and tilted her head back as if laughing, or as if in pain. Thorn saw then that the woman did possess some colour—the inside of her mouth was bright red.

‘Well, I know about the brass man. He collected what was left of Mr Crane on Viridian only a short time ago, and that’s where we are now heading, in the hope of picking up his trail. Do you know where he’s going next?’

‘Dragons.’

Cormac appeared to be chewing on something bitter. ‘But where will he find them?’

‘Give me substance,’ said Aphran.

Cormac slowly nodded. ‘Yes, I’ll do that when I think you’re no longer holding anything back. My other option is to let Jack take your mind apart piecemeal, in order to find what I want. Though after taking that course I’m not sure I’d bother asking him to put it back together again.’

‘Cruel,’ hissed Aphran.

‘You are merely a dispensable recording, but more pertinently you are a criminal under sentence of death.’

Thorn absorbed that. Not so long ago the guilt of a cerebral recording was a murky legal debating point. Now all recordings of murderers, made after the murder was committed, came under the same sentence.

‘I have paid.’ In saying this, Aphran changed—aged a hundred, a thousand years in a few seconds, became something twisted, with flames issuing all around her.

Ignoring this display, Cormac asked, ‘Why did Skellor want a smashed metalskin Golem?’

‘Pleases him… angry when I mocked him… burnt me.’