‘Fuck,’ muttered Anderson. ‘Brain isn’t in its head.’

Tergal leapt forwards to grab Anderson, and began dragging him to cover just as a volley of white mucus thumped into the ground, running in a machine-gun line straight towards the knight. Some of this muck flicked the fusile and sent it dissolving through the air. Struggling upright, Anderson shrugged free and grabbed his automatic weapon. Both men began firing as the monster stepped fully into view. Pieces of its carapace flaked away while the droon jerked in irritation, but it was like firing on a monolith. As the beast began to hawk up another mess of mucal acid, they turned and ran for the next corner of their grounded hiding place. Tergal flinched at a hollow thud on the metal wall right behind him, followed by the spattering of acid all around. As they rounded the corner, the whole structure shifted alarmingly as the monster thundered into it.

‘Keep going!’ Anderson bellowed behind him, tugging at the straps to his greave. He abandoned the piece of armour, now bubbling, on the ground. Tergal levelled his weapon just below the monster’s head, hoping to hit something vital. As he emptied his clip and ejected it, Anderson caught up with him. Another jet of acid splashed off the nearest edge and they again dived for cover.

‘This is getting absurd!’ Tergal yelled, noting how hysterical his voice sounded.

Yet another corner rounded, and then they were running along beside the second long side of the wedge. Behind them, the droon’s tail slammed hard against the same metal wall, the latest ejecta of acid splashing the ground right beside it, throwing sand-coated globules past them. Then suddenly there sounded a loud crashing and scrabbling. Maybe the droon itself had also decided this circular chase had gone on long enough.

‘It’s on top,’ Anderson gasped.

Suddenly Tergal did not want any more adventures, and he now really wished he wasn’t participating in this one. He stared at Anderson in bewilderment, then looked up to the upper surface of the grounded container, expecting to see the droon rear above him at any moment. Abruptly, Anderson seemed to go berserk, turning to fire his weapon at the metal wall. Tergal just stared at him. They were going to die horribly, painfully, and any time now.

‘Fire over there as well!’ Anderson bellowed.

Tergal did as instructed, wondering if this might really scare the droon down. It seemed sheer madness, but then their bullets seemed impotent anyway.

‘Me!’ Anderson yelled. Abandoning his empty weapon, he tucked his arms in and pulled the chinstrap of his helmet tight. Then he ran at the wall, and dived head first. With a loud crump, Anderson was halfway through the metal, his legs waving in the air. Suddenly Tergal understood: the combination of droon acid and bullet holes… Then he was up behind, shoving the knight’s feet. The man finally wormed through and fell inside with a crash. Tergal stepped back, glancing up just as a shadow drew across him. Then he ran at the hole and, slimmer than Anderson, sailed through in a smooth dive, though he landed on top of the knight. They both struggled upright and, in a very strange room lit by a milky radiance, moved quickly away from the hole. The tiered prow of the monster’s. head slammed into ruptured metal, as it tried to force its way through. Finally it became utterly still for a moment, as if assessing the situation, then withdrew.

That was the beginning of a very long night.

A floating mass of wood splinters, lumps of torn and tangled steel, fragments of cast iron and slivers of glass were now mostly what remained of his macabre collection. Scattered through this debris were cogs from his automaton and, strangely, the completely undamaged bowler hat. Jack mourned the loss, then in the next microsecond he began assessing other damage. He soon found, as expected, that he had broken no bones. Certainly, the massive acceleration had split his hull in many places, ripped things inside him and caused numerous fires, but that only meant humans could no longer inhabit him—which was not something he really considered a disadvantage. His structural skeleton, composed of laminated tungsten ceramal, shock-absorbing foamed alloys and woven diamond monofilament, was intact, and after being distorted was slowly regaining its accustomed shape.

Clear of the planet, he left a trail of leaking atmosphere as his initial acceleration carried him beyond the effective range of beam weapons deployed by the Grim Reaper and the King of Hearts. Those first hits had melted some of his hull, but fortuitously the cooling effect of atmosphere leakage and heat transferral all around his hull by its layered superconductor grid had very much limited the damage. Now Jack assessed his situation.

The Grim Reaper and the King of Hearts were located between him and the USER, and he had little chance of getting through to the device and destroying it without them intersecting his course. He also noted that, rather than going after Skellor on the planet’s surface, they were now coming after him. Obviously the two AI attack ships were here to obtain Jain technology, and without either Jerusalem’s or Earth Central’s approval. Certainly they would not want Jack getting near the planet to put a spanner into their machinations. But surely by fleeing he had removed himself from that equation? Apparently not. Their pursuit of him could only mean one thing: their equation did not include living witnesses.

Jack considered his options. He could accelerate out of the system on conventional drive and they would never catch him, and then, as soon as they turned off the USER to make their escape, he could drop into U-space and head for the Polity. He did not like that option. Ships like him did not run, having certain inbuilt psychosocial tendencies jocularly described as a ‘Fuck you complex’. Initiating his fusion engines in a twenty-second burn, he altered his course towards a Jovian planet in the system: a planet with plenty of large moons and a double ring of asteroids and dust—a perfect killing field for either himself or for them. His preference being for himself doing the killing.

What is happening? What is happening? came a singsong query.

Surprised for a second time, Jack tracked back through his internal systems, thinking something had shaken loose. Something had—but not because of any physical damage. The memcording of the woman Separatist, Aphran, had somehow broken out of contained storage and, though controlling nothing, had spread sensory informational tendrils into some of his systems. Truly there was a ghost in the machine. Jack, as much as he felt such things, experienced a frisson of fear. A purely human memcording could not do something like this, so he surmised that though there was nothing physically Jain aboard, something of the programming code of that technology had become part of this ghost.

It seems that some Polity AIs would like some Jain tech all of their own to play with.

Jack linked to each of Aphran’s invasive tendrils, and tied them into a VR framework he always kept ready to use, then spliced part of his own awareness in there as well. He stood then as the hangman on a white plain, and Aphran appeared, naked and pure white, floating in diaphanous fire before him.

‘Then they are the dangerous interfering machines I always thought them,’ said Aphran, at last showing some of the attitudes of her past.

‘I also am such a machine,’ reminded Jack.

‘Machine, machine, machine…’

Jack began to make programs to counter those informational tendrils: those fractured and loosely linked segments of wormish data. He saw that only total excision would work, for the agent required to counter this invasion would be unstoppable once started. It would eat its way into containment and destroy her utterly. Suddenly, Aphran was down on the white surface, the fire gone from around her and an environment suit clothing her white body. Jack wondered if, in her current strange madness, she had considered him to be a male human she could influence by her nakedness or sexuality. Certainly she now possessed more control over her appearance and her mind. She was no longer the damaged thing he had uploaded. She had healed inside him.