Open the box.

Fethan sighed, then hinged back the lid. Inside he observed the kind of inert cylinder in which such active technologies were stored. But it took up only half the box. In the shock-packing next to it rested a small lozenge of memory crystal, ringed on its thinner edge with aug anchor and connection points.

Jerusalem went on: During our last communication, Jack informed me of how Cormac accumulates people, weapons—random elements—pieces to utilize in any future battle against Skellor. He does not know how he will use them. All is contingent. He creates a protean counter-agent to Skellor. Reaction being his forte rather than the hard-wiring of preparation.

Yawn…

Very well. The memory crystal matrix will fit into your stomach cavity—the one you used to carry ballot devices while undercover on Masada. You will place the crystal in there, where programmed nanofilament connection will commence.

I don’t need any more memory space.

As you well understand, it is not for you. Loading will take place when you step out of the Skaidon warp on Ruby Eye.

You know, I have the right to refuse this.

I would rather Cormac saw a familiar face and had no reason for suspicion.

What is your game?

I am providing Cormac with one more piece in his… game. One he will know nothing about and cannot reveal to Skellor in any way. The one that might kill Skellor, should all else fail.

Fethan reached down and ran his finger down the stick seam of his shirt. Internally he instructed disconnections. The pilot looked round just in time to see Fethan split his stomach, as if he had just given himself a Caesarean, to reveal a wet red cavity.

‘Don’t worry. It doesn’t hurt.’

The pilot faced forwards again and said nothing. Fethan pulled the crystal out of its padding, pushed it inside himself until it rested against his ceramal spine, then up until it touched just below his chest case — which contained most of his essential being. Immediately he felt the aug anchors and other connections engaging, and withdrew his hand. Little flickers like those experienced by someone about to experience a migraine jagged across his vision. He smelt something at once familiar and mysterious. There came the sound of a distant shouting crowd… muttering close.

What will I be carrying? he asked.

A part of me that has long experience of searching virtual networks and dealing with problems there. Many AIs carry copies of it. Ruby Eye is one of them.

When, some hours later, Fethan stepped from the runcible on Ruby Eye and felt the uploading link connecting, he said aloud, ‘I am legion,’ then internally, I am also a fucking booby trap.

Soon a copy of the killer program which Ruby Eye had sent against Skellor was straining at its leash inside him.

Using gritty sand and seawater, Balsh cleaned his hands of clotted blood. He then dropped the bag into the shallow brine and one by one took out the etched sapphires, cleaned them, and transferred them to a less fouled container.

‘Did you get them all?’ Arian asked.

Balsh looked up. ‘Four point five million. The last few went down into his lungs and that’s what killed him.’

Arian nodded and turned back to watch his men filing down, loaded with loot, from Alston’s residence. He was grabbing as much as he could, but would also leave much behind. Others of his men, having dropped off their loads in the boat’s hold, were returning to the house dragging corpses up with them. Those corpses closest to the shore had gone into the sea, and pearl crab activity had consequently increased.

‘Took him a while to die,’ Balsh added. ‘He’d emptied his bowels, and managed to tear off most of his fingernails in the struggle. The Golem also managed to smash most of his teeth as it fed the sapphires inside him.’

Arian wondered just what had made the Golem kill the man like that. The instruction had been a simple, ‘Kill Alston, and any who try to prevent you doing so.’ There had been nothing about making the man eat his own money, nothing about piling up the dead into tangled sculptures, and nothing about methodically killing every other human on this island. Accessing the control module through his aug, he still got ‘objective achieved’, a grid reference showing the Golem’s location as unchanged, and some jumbled imagery of shapes moving about in the void. It made no sense.

‘Angel,’ Pelter stepped over to his sister as she returned with the looters, ‘is there anything else worth grabbing?’

‘Plenty,’ said Angelina. ‘But maybe it would be best to get out of here before some Polity sat-eye takes a close look.’

Arian nodded. ‘True. Are the charges set?’

‘Ready to burn,’ Angelina spat over the ignition code from her aug to Arian’s.

‘Then all that remains is for us to collect Mr Crane,’ he said.

Angelina stared at him as if he were quite insane. His people, bringing their load to the boat, stopped to hear what her response might be.

‘Let’s just leave him where he is,’ she suggested.

Arian shook his head. ‘A subverted and upgraded Golem Twenty-five? Leave it here with the corpses of Jesu knows how many of its victims? And believe me they would find those bodies.’ He looked around at the watching men. ‘We’re not ready for the kind of attention that would attract. You think the Polity agents and monitors crawling around Cheyne III are too many now? If they found this, we wouldn’t be able to move for them. They’d trace every scrap of DNA on this island and mind-ream everyone involved, innocent or otherwise. You really want that?’

There came a general muttering of dissent.

Arian went on, ‘So we collect Mr Crane and take him home with us.’

When the last of the men had returned, Arian sent out the code and observed the growing glow from the centre and other points of the island as each slow-burning thermoxite charge ignited. Alston’s house was burning, those grotesque sculptures were burning, but still there would be a great deal of evidence of massacre here. Arian just wanted to disguise precisely how Alston and his people had died. As they took the boat around to the other side of the island, flames were belching tens of metres into the sky. Mr Crane came meekly when called—a demon constrained by a spell—and stood utterly still while Balsh extended a hose from the boat to wash the Golem down. Then Crane went down into the hold.

‘I hope you’re not having second thoughts,’ Angelina said.

‘Oh no,’ said Arian. ‘We put him away.’

Angelina reached out and gripped his shoulder. ‘Arian, this is no defeat. We just regroup and move on. There’s that new arms supplier who says he can provide us with some serious hardware—the kind on which you only have to pull a trigger.’

Arian turned to her. ‘The silver-haired guy—the one you want to fuck?’

‘That’s him,’ Angelina replied. ‘We don’t need Polity killing-machines.’

Perhaps trying not to think about the horror they had just seen, Arian said, ‘Yes, he seems the kind of person we need. Perhaps through him things will change, get better.’

They did—but for whom, it was a matter of perspective.

A day later, they walked Crane down a stairway concealed below a statue of Arian’s father. In the dank room at the bottom, the firm instruction to ‘sit down’ was repeated and enforced in five-second cycles. Crane sat on the single chair and did not see where Arian placed the module—not that he could subvert the order to sit, within five seconds, nor had a mind to. Arian and his sister backed out of the door, followed by the two men bearing mini-grenade launchers. The door was locked and bolted and sealed and hidden… Mr Crane adjusted his vision to infrared, and in mouldering darkness sat watching the door.

— retroact ending… -