None of them had an answer to that. The silence stretched taut until D’nissan announced, ‘It’s just reached the pitchblende.’

Along with the rest of them, Mika immediately turned her attention to the main screens showing cameras feed from the telefactors, as well as from the many pinhead cameras positioned all over the asteroid and in the surrounding space. It happened in a matter of seconds. The mycelium had just been steadily increasing in size, its growth much like that of a dot of penicillin, then suddenly it extruded a pseudopod which opened out into a star of smaller tentacles, and grabbed a telefactor. Half a second after that, a klaxon began sounding, warning of viral subversion.

The woman, Arden, walked to the edge of the precipice and reluctantly raised her binoculars. She was always reluctant to use the toys Dragon provided for her. The binoculars were warm, scaly, and sucked against the orbits of her eyes with an eager kiss. She supposed it was foolish not to trust the entity in such small matters, since it had saved her life when the tribe, finally deciding she was too old to keep up, had left her behind under one of the funerary dolmens with a bottle of sleer poison and the intricately fashioned bone inhaler with which to take it. The unibiotic that Dragon gave her had cleared up the infection that had been plaguing her for some years, and soon she was back to her accustomed health.

A smear of darker colour lay between the Sand Towers because of the storm. Seeds that had lain in the sand for months were instantly germinating. Arden knew that in a short time those canyons receiving the benefit of such moisture would be choked with chaotic plant growth, and crawling with the things coming to feed on it.

The droon, lured down from the Plains by this expected bounty, had climbed to the top of a sandstone butte to survey its new territory. Squatting like this, with its four legs folded underneath its secondary thorax, its tail coiled around it, and its four manipulators clenched close against its primary thorax as it swung its great ziggurat head slowly from side to side, it seemed contemplative. But she knew it was looking for prey. Something that weighed over four tonnes, and even in this squatting position topped five metres, needed a lot of food. The binoculars came away with a sucking squelch and, without turning, Arden knew that she was not alone.

‘Did you tell them?’ she asked.

‘I told them,’ Dragon replied.

‘And the reaction?’

‘As expected.’

‘They’ll not abandon their city nor their project, then.’

Arden turned and gazed up at the pterodactyl head looming over her, then tracked the long ribbed neck that curved down to one of the many burrows riddling the plain. She felt suddenly old, which was unsurprising because she was a damned sight older than even the nomad tribe she had joined twenty years before had ever supposed.

‘What are you going to do now?’ she asked.

‘I have warned them. Now I must defend myself. Skellor believes he has come here for information, but Skellor does not know his own purpose.’

‘You could tell the Polity he’s here? If what you say about him is true, then they’ll definitely come.’

‘A Polity ship could kill two birds with one stone, probably from orbit with a planet-breaker. No, I deal with my own problems.’

‘Yet you helped the metalliers build up their technology. You told them where to find the ores they needed, and about the deep layers of coal. You filled in missing knowledge so they could complete their plan to get back in control of Ogygian, and then contact the Polity themselves.’

‘I would be gone by then.’

‘And, of course, some merit points for helping out this human colony wouldn’t go amiss?’ Arden observed.

‘All of me is not well regarded.’

Arden nodded to herself. ‘Of course, human regard for you would be increased if your regard for humans was more evident.’

‘I abandoned the experiment.’

Arden let it go. Sometimes Dragon was the ultimate sophisticate, sometimes seemingly as naive as a child. Upon arriving here, it had immediately begun recombinant experiments with humans and the local fauna. Had it been trying to create its own particular version of the dracomen? Arden didn’t know. Ostensibly, Dragon had ceased such experimentation at Arden’s request, but she suspected an underlying lack of contrition. Dragon, she guessed, had found another interest, for it was about then that the earthquakes had begun.

‘You know my own personal regard for you could be increased substantially,’ she said, playing the same tune she had played for a long time.

‘Your ship is five thousand kilometres from here. It would take you many months to reach it.’

‘If you let me go.’

‘You may go.’

Arden was stunned. Dragon had instantly known of her arrival on Cull and, by the many methods available to it, had watched her leisurely exploration of the planet over twenty years. Only when, five years ago, the Plains nomads abandoned her to die had Dragon revealed itself. Then, having saved her life, it had not so much forbidden her to leave this plain under which it concealed itself as just made it nigh impossible for her to do so. Now, You may go—just like that. She repeated her thoughts to him.

‘And you may stay,’ was all the reply he gave.

Arden guessed that, with the shit about to hit the fan, Dragon no longer cared about the possibility of her telling the Polity it was located here, though she had promised not to do so. Probably, the outer universe now impinging here, in the form of this Skellor creature, had made Dragon decide it might be time to leave. Confused about her own feelings, she turned back to gaze out across the Sand Towers. Almost without thinking, she unhitched the pack from her back, opened it and took out the one item of Polity technology she had retained all those years.

The holographic capture device—a squat ten-centimetre-diameter cylinder, with its inset controls—had been old even when she had acquired it, but she preferred it just as in ancient times some people preferred cameras using photo-active plastic films instead of digital imaging. She removed, from one end of the recorder, its monocle, which she pushed into her right eye. Gazing through a fluorescent grid towards the squatting droon and manipulating a cursor control on the holocap, she acquired the creature for recording, then took out the monocle and tossed it into the air, whereupon it sped away on miniature AG to fly a circuit of the droon to record its every sharp edge. Now, beyond that creature, she observed something else flying towards them.

‘Ah,’ said Dragon, ‘our friend returns.’

Soon the flying creature was more clearly visible. It was a bird: a vulture. Coming to circle above them, it slowly descended, then came in to land beside the dragon burrow. Both Arden and Dragon turned to regard it.

‘His ship’s hidden by chameleonware, and now he’s heading on foot towards a minerallier encampment,’ said the bird.

‘You’re safe yet,’ Arden observed to Dragon.

‘Yes,’ said Vulture, ‘but there is a rather large metal-skin Golem heading this way.’

‘It will only come so far as I allow it,’ said Dragon, swinging its head to peer out towards the Sand Towers.

A U-space tug, shaped like the engine and one carriage of a huge monorail, accelerated away from Ruby Eye, towing on long braided-monofilament cables an object that, though substantially larger, resembled a World War I sea mine, even down to its detonating buttons. When it dropped into underspace, it did so with unusual effect: a hole opening before it and snapping closed behind its spherical cargo, ripples spreading out through space from that point. Then, as the ripples settled, another ship followed… then another.