‘There’s always danger,’ Tanaquil observed. ‘Does this have something to do with the spacecraft we saw?’

‘One has come,’ said the dragon.

‘In that ship? Yes, I saw that.’

‘You must flee.’

‘What?’

‘You must all abandon your city and flee. He is in the Sand Towers and he will come. Go north, and come to me on the Plains, that way.’

‘Oh great!’ interjected Gyrol. ‘Go to the Plains and get fucked over by all the sand dragons there.’

The head turned towards the policeman. ‘We are all Dragon.’

Tanaquil could not believe what he was hearing. ‘Abandon all this—when we’re so close? What is this one that we should fear it? We’ve got weapons up in the Overcity that could turn most of the Sand Towers to dust.’

Now the cobra heads began withdrawing.

‘I have warned you, and I can protect you. Flee or die—your choice.’

The pterodactyl head began to withdraw too.

‘Wait! You’ve got to tell me more!’

The head paused and fixed Tanaquil with its smaller sapphire eyes. ‘He is one man, and he commands a technology that could turn you all into slaves. You cannot fight him, so flee.’

The head withdrew into sandstone, suddenly gone.

Only later, as they returned, did Gyrol ask, ‘What did it mean, “We are all Dragon”?’

Tanaquil had no answer for him.

Every time the asteroid swung the Jain sample back into the red dwarf’s light, that sample digested more minerals and metals, and it grew. Already it was five metres across and one metre deep into the rock. Encircling it on the surface, and moving back with it using stick-pad feet, three telefactors transmitted data back to the Jerusalem. Through a nanoscope, that one telefactor held poised over the edge of the mycelium, Mika watched. But now, rather than be confined to her work station, she had joined Colver, D’nissan, James and fifty other scientists in one of the Jerusalem’s exterior input centres. Though she was glad of the company and of how they bounced ideas about in such proximity and in such an atmosphere, she was aware that this was just another form of quarantine. And because Exterior Input was isolated from Jerusalem’s full processing power, she could not use VR tools, and sorely missed them too.

‘I could direct a telefactor from my own work station,’ she had pointed out.

‘As could all the others,’ Jerusalem replied. ‘However, all this spreading of signals could be unhealthy. I will allow information to leave Exterior Input only when it has been checked for viral subversion.’

‘Slightly paranoid,’ she suggested. ‘You allow study of the mycelium on the bridge pod to be conducted from separate research cells.’

‘The bridge pod is being kept at minus two hundred Celsius, in near absolute vacuum, and its only energy input is from the instruments used to study it. Even then, the mycelium perpetually tries to grow outside the boundaries laid down for it, and to subvert any equipment in close proximity. All samples from it are kept at minus two-twenty for contained study, and if there is any kind of subversion evident from them, they can be ejected from the ship in less than a second.’

Mika did not ask how much of the surrounding area Jerusalem might eject as well. She was aware of how self-contained was each research cell. Subversion from a Jain sample probably meant the whole cell would end up outside the ship.

‘Okay,’ she had replied. Perhaps it would be safer to conduct research outside her own work area. Surely, Jerusalem would not eject the whole exterior input centre? She looked around. No one here wore any kind of augmentation, which showed just how seriously Jerusalem took the possibility of viral or nano-mechanical subversion. Jerusalem would not allow human custom or protest to influence it, and here, in this situation, must be prepared to think the unthinkable.

‘Wow,’ said Colver from beside her. ‘I’m getting fast outgrowth down fault AFN three four two.’

‘That means the mycelium probably now has some kind of radiation detector,’ said D’nissan. The man was in the deep-scanning sphere, its interior adjusted to his environmental requirements, the scanning equipment directly linked into his nervous system.

‘Why’s that?’ Colver asked.

‘Check your geoscan. Fault three four two is its quickest route to a deposit of pitchblende. It’s going after the uranium and radium.’

‘Then it can plan, think by itself—it’s sentient.’

‘Not necessarily,’ said D’nissan. ‘This could be no more than the biologically programmed response of a tree root. Though I’ll allow that there is greater complexity in this mycelium than there is in you, Colver.’

Colver winked at Mika. ‘He reckons his brain works better than mine because it operates at a lower temperature. I think he resented me asking him to blow on my coffee.’

‘I heard that, Colver,’ said D’nissan.

Mika enjoyed the repartee—it reminded her of many such occasions with Gant and Thorn. Here, though, were the same as people whose motivations she fully understood, because they were her own. Then, observing a structure disassembling a quartz crystal into microscopic flakes and conveying them into the rest of the mycelium, she said, ‘It uses everything.’

‘So it would seem,’ said Susan James. ‘There appear to be no waste products. It just incorporates all materials it comes into contact with and continues to grow.’ She took her face out of her viewer and looked around at the rest of them. ‘All it requires is energy and materials, which fact begs certain questions.’

‘Those being?’ D’nissan asked her from within his sphere.

James explained, ‘The total archaeological finds relating to the Jain wouldn’t fill a barrel, yet here is something that has the potential to occupy every environmental niche in the galaxy. Why have we seen so little of it? Why aren’t we overrun—and why haven’t we been overrun for the last five million years, from when the earliest Jain artefacts have been dated?’

‘Perhaps the Jain themselves, if they were a distinct race, shut down their own technology, wiped it out, and perhaps now only some bits they missed are just coming to light,’ suggested D’nissan.

‘Rogue technology?’ wondered Colver.

Mika thought it time for an interjection of her own. ‘Perhaps it’s something that goes in cycles, like a plague, or even plants within their season. When conditions are right for it, it grows and spreads until it has used up all available resources, then goes dormant again?’

James disagreed: ‘But, as we can see, everything is a potential resource to it, so it would have to use up everything!

Speculatively, D’nissan added, ‘It could have been around for even longer than we thought. Perhaps there never was a distinct space-borne race to attribute it to, and those artefacts we classify as coming from the Jain, the Atheter or the Csorians are all that’s left of the same technology that destroyed their civilizations.’

Jerusalem then interjected, ‘We have found no older remains of this technology than those we already attribute to the Jain. The most likely explanation is that this is the product of a distinct space-borne race to which we gave that name. Your theories fit but, as James has opined, a reason is needed for the technology being “seasonal”—why it does not just continue growing and spreading while there is still energy left in the suns.’

‘Conditions right for it, as Mika said,’ said Colver. They all turned to look at him. He grinned and went on, ‘Meaning us.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s parasitic and, even though it can eat rocks, rocks don’t move. Maybe Mika is right: it goes dormant, but maybe it only does that because it’s killed all the hosts it can use to spread it around. So having wiped out one space-borne civilization it shuts down and waits for the next.’