Colver and James turned to listen in. D’nissan then asked, ‘So what are we dealing with here?’

‘Seeds, and possibly something more than that.’ She paused in thought for a moment. ‘The mycelium I extrapolated and engineered from the sample I possessed was not complete, and reached this stage of its life too quickly. The seeds it produced were sterile.’

Colver raised a frigid eyebrow, then looked around. Everyone had felt the slight lurch and seen systems adjusting: the Jerusalem was moving.

Mika continued as if not noticing. ‘On Masada, just after the dracomen first came, I described them as a race rather than just biological machines because they had gained the ability to breed. Ian Cormac contested that by saying there is little distinction between evolved life and made life. He was right. This,’ she waved a hand at the screens, ‘like dracomen, can breed, though its reproductive method is something like that of an annual plant.’

‘Lots of little baby mycelia then?’ asked Colver.

D’nissan interjected, ‘You said “breed”. This seems little more than Von Neuman reproduction—as with all nanomachines.’

‘Oh, I know what I said.’

‘Then some kind of cross-pollination between separate mycelia? Until we did this there’s been only the one Skellor controls.’

‘No, not that.’

‘The word “breed” implies something more than just reproduction,’ D’nissan pointed out.

‘Yes, it does.’ Mika hesitated. She could not empirically prove her theory, but felt it to be true. She should not be afraid; she must venture this. Turning to Colver she said, ‘You opined that it is parasitic on technical civilizations because they spread it around, and once wiping them out, it shuts down.’ Colver nodded. She went on, ‘I think it goes further than that. The mycelia are breeding with us. Their breeding partner is a civilization and they’ll take from it everything they can utilize, destroying that civilization then seeding—those seeds remaining dormant until found by another intelligent species.’

All the screens now flicked to a retreating view of the collapsing planetoid.

‘Jerusalem, what’s happening?’ D’nissan asked.

‘Mika’s seeds are rapidly approaching maturity,’ Jerusalem replied, ‘as are those structures inside the planetoid that look suspiciously like some form of organic rail launching system. There are already objections to what I am about to do, but I consider it a sensible precaution.’

A black line, subliminal in its brevity, cut towards the planetoid, then all the screens blanked. When they came back on again, a ball of fire was collapsing in on itself, strange geometric patterns running in waves across its surface, dissolving and reforming. Again the screens blanked on a secondary fusion explosion. This time when they cleared, streamers of white fire were burning themselves out to leave a gaseous lambency above the red dwarf star.

The Ogygian had a long cylindrical body around which the landing craft were docked, a front sphere that had previously contained colonists and cargo, and a dart-like tail.

The crew’s quarters were in that tail, which was a thickening of the ship’s body with, extending from it at ninety degrees, three long, evenly spaced teardrop-section pillars holding out from the ship itself the lozenges of the U-space engine nacelles. The wider cylinder at the juncture of those three pillars contained an octagonal tube, usually spun up to simulate gravity. Around the forward end of the cylinder ran a ring-shaped screen, girdling the narrower body of the ship, and accessible to the eight segments into which the inner octagonal tube was divided. Seven of those segments were living quarters and recreation areas for the crew. One segment was the control bridge, which also still contained the captain.

What remained of the man sat in a control throne positioned in a horseshoe of consoles before a section of the quartz screen which looked out along the body of the ship towards the front sphere. Behind him, running down either side of the room, were control consoles for navigation, repair systems, the reactor, ion drive, main ship’s computer and the complicated U-space engine controls. The captain’s throne was stained, and the surrounding area coated in places, with a waxy substance—the result of his long slow decay right here. Cento, Fethan noticed, had seemed loath to touch the greasy controls, prodding at them with the barrel of his APW before reluctantly putting the weapon aside and getting down to work. It was a fastidiousness Fethan had never before seen in a Golem.

Moving back from the images of the bloated lunatic jabbering away to himself, as Cento speed-read the captain’s log, Fethan sat in the chair before the main computer and studied the console and screens. After a moment, he inspected the row of small round holes that took the carbon rods, which were at that time the favoured form of portable memory. Plugged into one of these was the optic cable from a small palmtop Cento had brought aboard. Its screen was now indicating that the device had downloaded everything from the ship’s computer. Fethan detached the cable and allowed the palmtop to wind it back into itself. Now he stripped off a glove and, after sending an internal signal, twisted the end of his right forefinger and detached its syntheflesh covering.

Are you sure this will work?

The thing prowling tigerish inside him snarled something, then pulled itself into focus for simple human communication.

A snare is positioned in hope, not expectation.

I didn’t mean that. I meant are you sure you’ll be able to download through my nerve channels? I’d have thought the bandwidth too narrow.

I compress myself for transference.

Fethan inserted the metal end of his forefinger into the same hole from which he had detached the optic cable. He felt the kill program routing through: sliding via a hundred channels into the software of his mind, and springboarding into his artificial nervous system. His shoulder and his arm began to ache. That had to be psychosomatic because he had not felt pain in more years than he cared to remember. And slowly Jerusalem’s hunter-killer program loaded into the colony ship’s computer, erasing old data and programs, inserting itself wherever it could find room, to wait in the dark like a trapdoor spider.

When it was over, Fethan realized he had closed his eyes. He opened them, withdrew his finger from the socket, and noted that the metal of his finger end had grown hot enough to discolour. He blew on it until it was cool enough for him to slip on and click its syntheflesh cover back into place. It would have been nice, he felt, if that had been the full extent of his involvement.

All done now? he asked.

All done, replied the kill program still inside him.

Some time before, Fethan had foolishly hoped that he might only have to do something like this once. But in an age when humans could be copied and transcribed, loading copies of a kill program from himself was child’s play, though perhaps not a game anyone would want their children to get involved in. He then turned to see Cento standing watching him.

‘Do you have a suitable explanation for this suspicious behaviour?’ asked the Golem.

‘Jerusalem… and that’s all the explanation I can give, so…’ Fethan brought his finger up to his lips.

Cento grunted, then turned to peer at one of the other consoles—Reactor Control. Fethan glanced over and saw that the previously dead console was now alight. Then abruptly all the consoles in the bridge began springing to life, and even the lighting hemispheres in the ceiling flickered on.

‘Seems to have saved us some work,’ said Cento.

Now they heard a low rumbling, and the stars began to swing across the quartz screen.

‘Attitude control,’ said Fethan. ‘Probably just an automatic system.’