Darkness, filled with a grid of light, four-dimensional in reality and memory, two-dimensional in representation. The icons shifting in random but ever firmer pattern; some holding their place for a while, then moving on when combinations of the other pieces made that place untenable. A blue acorn turning in void, while a small rubber dog looks on in amusement. Blood and death across an endless virtual plain. Crane, brass hands clean of gore, moves a piece, finds a connection; then an infinity of possibilities dissolves and sanity takes one step closer.

— retroact ends -

In some of the time that anyone else would have spent in cold sleep, Skellor hardened and refined the structures inside him, tracked down errors and erased them, collated and organized the information stored in the crystal part of his mind, and discarded all he considered irrelevant. But more frequently now he was coming across anomalies growing in his Jain substructure. It was doing something, changing in a furtive manner, diverting resources to create nodes within its framework. Allowing one of these to develop for a little while, Skellor encountered multiple layers of complexity, internally referenced, beginning to attain physical independence almost like a tumour. He probed and he tested and he studied, but the object defied analysis. In the end, he had to burn it inside himself. And as he destroyed it, he felt a murmur of rebellion from the rest of the substructure.

‘You will have answers for me, Dragon,’ he said to the grey of U-space.

From behind came the clink-clink of small sounds as Mr Crane repositioned his toys. Skellor expelled smoke from his mouth and ignored those sounds as he repaired the damage the burn had inflicted. From his wrist he extruded a tentacle, which writhed through the air, groped across the console before him, and found a universal power point. With his other hand he picked up a pack of food concentrate from the container open beside him, and began to eat the lot without unwrapping it.

‘You know about this Jain, and I wonder if it was the reason for your reluctance to return to your masters,’ said Skellor, when he had consumed the concentrate.

With repairs made, and all the collation, organization and deletion up to date, he dropped himself to a low ebb similar to sleep, and closed his eyes for the memory of it. Mr Crane wore out a blue acorn, and wore grooves into the metal deck with his piece of thermocrystal carbon. Time passed. It does. Eventually lights flickered on the console, and one amber light came on and stayed on. Skellor opened his eyes, nodded his head once, and the Vulture rose out of underspace into the actinic light of a close sun, released a cloud of miniature detectors and U-space transceivers, then turned automatically into an arc that would take it to pre-programmed coordinates. Skellor felt some satisfaction in this, then more when his instruments detected similar devices beaming their reams of data down towards the planet the Vulture approached.

All satisfaction fled when he turned his attention inwards and detected another of those nodes growing inside himself. He bellowed, his mouth full of fire. He breathed smoke and red-hot patches showed in the tough material of his chest. And as he performed this cautery, the grublike ship he occupied descended from the night sky, leaving a vapour trail like a deletion across the distant swirls of interstellar dust and nascent stars.

‘You will have damned answers,’ he told the vista that opened out to him.

The Vulture decelerated over mountain chains, deserts and dusty plateaux. Telescoping compound eyes briefly noted the ship’s passage, dismissed this object as inedible and irrelevant, and returned to the lifetime pursuit of consumption, or the avoiding of it. Other eyes: blue sapphires positioned in the mouths of pseudopod cobra heads made the same observation but a different assessment, and their long snakish necks withdrew into the ground.

The ship overflew a city gleaming with light, and was observed there by Galilean metalliers who had been looking for such a thing for a long time, and in that city great excitement ensued. It planed over the Sand Towers and ahead, in his virtual vision, Skellor could see his final destination: a vast multicoloured point—the nexus of many streams of information. It was a microsecond before he realized that one of those streams was issuing from the Vulture itself.

‘What the hell?’ he asked, his speech infinitely slower than the probe he sent into the Vulture’s systems.

Well, I can’t say it’s been fun, but I’m out of here.

Skellor tried to find some link from that message to whatever it was that skulked in the systems of this little ship. Then he realized what it must be.

I killed you.

Wrong, bozo. Happy landings.

The Vulture AI must have struck a deal with Dragon, for Dragon had formed a wide-band link down which the AI was transmitting herself. Skellor sent kill programs in, but they found only emptiness, the AI sliding to a different location in silicon vastness as it continued escaping like water draining down a plughole. Skellor withdrew—the AI would not have communicated without the sure knowledge that it could escape him.

Happy landings?

Just as that parting shot fully impinged, the side thrusters of the Vulture came on at full power, then the fusion engine attempted ignition with half its injectors shut down and blew one side out of its chamber. Fire cut a hole through the back of the ship, severing vital power ducts to rear gravmotors. And, spiralling and tumbling, the Vulture fell towards the Sand Towers.

In less than a second Skellor regained control of the Vulture’s systems, shut off the side thrusters, and turned on the extinguishers in the back section of the ship. But half the AG was gone and the ship out of control. Making rapid calculations, Skellor input a program to the thrusters. They began firing, seemingly at random, but over long seconds the effects became evident. The ship stopped tumbling, then its corkscrewing course straightened, just in time for it to strike the side of a butte and glance off in an explosion of sand and fire. Directly ahead now there was nothing but a head-on smash into sandstone.

Twenty degrees to the right lay the only viable option: a canyon about a half-kilometre long. More calculation, thruster fire flipping the Vulture onto its back, secondary explosion of the fusion engine blowing the other half of its chamber. Chopping through the side of a butte, which slowly collapsed behind it, the Vulture entered the canyon upside down. Skellor turned it on thrusters, also using forward thrusters and what grav-planing he could manage, to slow the ship. At the last moment the ship turned. It hit side-on, throwing up a wave of dust and sand, churning up a trail a quarter of a kilometre long. Travelling at two hundred kilometres an hour, it hammered bottom first into the buttes at the end of the canyon, but rather than be buried in an avalanche of sandstone, remained where it was as the entire butte collapsed away from the ship like a felled tree.

The airlock opened onto the acrid taste of salty dust and Skellor climbed out to stand on the side of the Vulture. He looked about, then spat ash onto the hot metal he stood upon. Behind him, Crane hauled himself out and awaited instruction. The dust and the heat generated by the impact drew attention from all around. Nearby, the two-metre-long second-stage sleer had seen it all, and registered only prey. Skellor did not see the beast. Concentrating on his virtual vision of the tight-beamed lines of communication to and from Dragon’s location, he saw them all winking out like searchlights struck by enemy fire. From those transmitters built inside himself he attempted to open a line of communication between himself and the alien entity. It was immediately blocked.