Susan was a standard-format human; in appearance almost a female version of Ian Cormac, though certainly not as deadly. Mika turned her attention to D’nissan, the low-temperature ophidapt man from Ganymede. His visor was down in the neck ring of his hotsuit, and he was drinking what looked like a raspberry coolie through a straw—a drink that would have been hot to him. His pronouncements were usually concise and apposite, which was why, when the situation warranted it, he was Jerusalem’s chief researcher, but he didn’t have anything to say just then.

‘To get Skellor,’ Mika said.

‘It’d be great to get hold of the source of the Jain tech we’ve been studying,’ said Colver. ‘I’m sure there are controlling mechanisms we haven’t seen yet.’

Now D’nissan observed coolly, ‘That’s like studying venom, then wishing to get hold of a snake.’

Mika thought that a bit rich, coming from a man with diamond-scaled skin and fangs.

He looked at her directly. ‘Of course we haven’t seen it all, because what we have got is just a… cutting. If it were rooted and allowed to grow, we then perhaps would.’

‘Yeah, but Skellor… he direct-interfaced with a crystal matrix AI…’ said Colver, apropos of nothing.

‘I would like to see Jain technology operating,’ said Mika.

‘Haven’t you heard?’ Colver asked, interrupting D’nissan, who had been about to speak. ‘We’re going to see that.’

Mika stared at D’nissan.

‘The asteroid,’ he explained, ‘it would have had to be destroyed by imploder anyway. So why not use it to grow some of our specimen?’

‘In red sunlight,’ Mika suggested.

‘Precisely,’ said D’nissan.

Mika was not sure how to react. This was what she had wanted, but she was also aware that they were playing with something substantially more dangerous than fire.

In the invisible grid, Crane shifted a blue acorn to a position adjacent to the lion’s tooth, then moved the coin ring adjacent to the piece of crystal. The rubber dog remained constant beside the laser lighter. This elicited a fragmented image of the same grid occupied by the shells of penny oysters, the interstices of which dying pearl crabs were exploring. Blood dripped from his fingers onto the crushed-shell beach, black in the silver moonlight.

‘Did they all get in his way?’ Angelina asked, looking at the corpses scattered across the sand.

‘Apparently so,’ said Arian. Three of his men moved ahead, spreading out as they stepped into the creosote bushes, while the other eight split into two groups of four, to head in either direction along the beach.

‘Two more here,’ said one of the men, pushing aside a bush with the barrel of his pulse-rifle. Angelina moved up beside Arian as her brother gazed down at the mess. The tangle of blood, bones and torn flesh seemed only identifiable as human because there was clothing mixed in there as well.

‘Two?’ she asked.

‘Well I count two heads,’ the man replied.

Angelina did not like this at all. With Alston dead they could have just moved in and taken over his operation, perhaps having to pay the man’s people over the odds for a while until they got things under control. But there had been no reaction to their approach of the island. The scanners aboard the boat had detected very few heat signatures, and those few detected were fading. It was beginning to look as if no operation remained here.

They moved on through silvery moonlight, and it was only fifty metres inland before they found the next corpse. This man was impaled on the snapped branch of a tree, his feet dangling two metres from the ground, where his blood had pooled.

‘Where exactly is he?’ Angelina asked. ‘We wouldn’t want him to make a mistake about us.’

‘On the other side of the island, on the beach. He’s not moving and all I’m getting is “objective achieved” and some weird images. He won’t move.’

‘Perhaps we should just turn around and leave him here?’

Arian lowered his hand from his platinum aug and stared at her. ‘I think it may be the second link to his control module from my aug. We need a direct optic link to get the bandwidth, and some military programming. Someone like Sylac could do the job.’

Angelina could hear the doubt in his voice. Personally she had no wish to see herself, or her brother, under Sylac’s knives, since the surgery he performed might not render the intended result. The surgeon was a law unto himself and considered the human body a testing ground, or even a playground. Nor did she want either of them to be more closely connected to the scrambled insane mind of the Golem, no matter how much more control they might thus obtain. And the idea of putting that kind of power into the hands of one of their employees would be sheer madness. Already she was beginning to see that Mr Crane was like a black-market pulse-gun from one of the less reputable dealers on Huma—it might work, but was just as likely to blow up in your face. When she saw the mound, she felt her thoughts confirmed.

‘Why the fuck did he do that?’ asked Arian.

Counting heads, they found the knotted mound of corpses consisted of maybe eight people—it was difficult to be sure. Stepping closer to see if she recognized any of the faces, Angelina felt her foot sink, and abruptly stepped back. Her boot pulled out with a slurp, and she saw that the blood had turned the ground into a quagmire. She had killed, she had seen horrible death, and been hard and unaffected by it. But this made her gorge rise. One of their men stepped off to one side, leant against a rock, and spewed briefly before turning back.

‘Up to his house?’ he asked, after wiping vomit from his lips.

‘Yes… to his house,’ Arian replied. Abruptly he reached up and initiated the comunit button on his collar. ‘Falen, Balsh—don’t go round to the other side of the island. Just get back to the boat.’ He tilted his head as he listened to their reply, then said. ‘You needn’t bother—I don’t think there’s anyone left alive here.’

In the moonlight the corpses on the hillside were macabre sculptures: clawed hands frozen while groping for mercy, jags of white bone pointing to the sky, and an eyeless head propped on a rock, gazing into infinity. More of the same occupied Alston’s fortified home, but what struck Angelina more than anything was the lack of pulse-gun burns on the walls. The slaughter here had been quick and absolute. She was also surprised at just how intact Alston himself was, sitting behind his desk there with something gleaming in his mouth.

‘No one else must get their hands on him,’ said Arian, staring at the corpse.

Angelina realized her brother was referring to the Golem.

‘We’ll just hide him away somewhere secure, just… keep him ready.’

So, Arian was beginning to see straight.

‘It’s not like we’ll need him for every operation.’

Angelina kept her mouth closed and her face expressionless.

‘We can handle most problems ourselves.’

‘Where do we put him?’ Angelina asked him.

‘Where such things should always be kept,’ Arian told her. ‘In a cellar.’

‘Yes, of course.’

Angelina would have preferred that place to be the caldera of a volcano.