‘Please, don’t kill me,’ she said.

Feeling then the breath of a communication laser touching his hull, Jack remembered something of Cormac’s almost instinctive reasoning. Aphran was an unknown, and as such could be dangerous to more than himself, and in his present situation it would be foolish for him to destroy potential weapons—he needed every edge he could get.

‘Hide yourself and observe,’ he told her.

A USER had been employed in the system; that was certain because he had set his gridlink searching for local U-space information traffic to key into, and found nothing all night. As for radio, or any of the other radiations the hardware in his head could receive or transmit, he was getting little return there either. From the city there came the perpetual murmur of something indecipherable, wavering randomly across various frequencies, and Cormac supposed the people here must be experimenting with primitive radio. He was getting a beacon return from the Jack Ketch at longer and longer intervals, which meant the ship was departing the planet and could not or would not reply. He had also briefly received beacon returns from the two other ships Jack had warned of, and did not try to contact them.

We have no back-up, Gant observed from the lander. Perhaps we should pull out until we find out what’s going on.

Gant had also been unable to get any response during the night. There had been none even from Fethan and Cento, and Cormac wondered if they were dead or just staying low profile because of some sort of danger up there.

In morning twilight, with two metallier guards nervously leading the way, Cormac headed towards the roadhouse. Kilnsman Astier had instructed both men to do exactly as Cormac asked, and no longer be so trigger-happy. They now both carried their weapons slung and with the safeties on, and seemed disinclined to disobey Astier’s order—probably because they had faced an unkillable man who, underneath his skin, seemed to be made of metal, and witnessed how dangerous was the weapon at Cormac’s wrist. But also because their kilnsman had been returned to them miraculously alive. One of the two accompanying guards kept checking his own right hand, and flexing fingers that the previous day had been lying severed in the sand. It had been a very minor task for the autodoc aboard the lander, but Cormac understood how something like that impressed less… advanced cultures.

To Gant, Cormac sent: We’ll assess the situation here, and do just that. Catching Skellor has always been problematic—like hunting in a woodpile for a poisonous snake.

With a blindfold on, Gant reminded.

Yes—his chameleonware.

Cormac didn’t really need that reminder. He was starting to get edgy now: he didn’t know enough about what had happened and, with the vital resource of the Jack Ketch and that ship’s telefactors unavailable, could only judge things by what he learned here on the ground. He had set his gridlink to try and crack the encryption Jack used in his signal to his ‘factors, but there was no guarantee of success or that the telefactors would become available again any time soon.

As the two men led him up the stairs to the road-house, Cormac considered what he had learned both last evening and this morning. Astier, and the man who had lost his fingers, had been endlessly curious; hungry for knowledge—an inculcated metallier trait, it would appear. But while Cormac regularly answered their questions, he also probed and learned much.

The metalliers were standard-format humans, and must have been descendants of the colony ship’s crew. Others here were ‘dapt colonists, and a small number was a mixture of both—mostly mineralliers who lived in both metallier and colonist domains. This lack of interbreeding, Cormac soon discovered, was the result of opinions of racial superiority on both sides. The colonists rightly considered themselves superior because they were hardier, though it amused Cormac to discover they thought they were pure-bred humans. Interestingly, it was the metalliers’ physical inferiority that had led them to evolve a more technical society, not their vaunted mental superiority. However, Cormac was surprised to learn that the prevalence of weapons here was not the result of interracial conflict, but because conditions, until recent technical advances made by the metalliers, had been very harsh. And the present apparent militarism was a direct result of orders from Chief Metallier Tanaquil. Someone had warned that personage about Skellor, and Cormac really wanted to know who. But right now he needed to talk to someone who might have actually seen Skellor.

‘Mineralliers Chandle and Dornik?’ The two awaited him at a table in the roadhouse refectory. He noticed that the man, Dornik, was a full ‘dapt, whilst the woman, Chandle, showed only a hint of genetic adaptation—whenever she blinked down nictitating membranes.

The male seemed about to blurt something out, but the woman rested a hand on his arm to silence him and asked, ‘And you are?’

‘Ian Cormac’

Just as if saying his own name provided some sort of key, he felt something slide into place in his head, almost with the sound and feel of a piece of a 3D puzzle fashioned out of lead blocks. A communication channel opened, and he felt great relief, but only momentarily. It was not Jack. Cormac was now in contact with the telefactor earlier sent to Dragon’s supposed location. In doubled vision, he now observed two of the strange mounts these people used bolting riderless along the edge of the hard-field wall. He would have to come back to that, however, as the woman was now staring at him, awaiting some reply. Diverting to storage the information he was receiving from the factor’s sensors, he then replayed the last few seconds recorded in his gridlink:

‘A strange name, and a very brief answer to my question,’ the woman had said, gesturing to the window and towards the lander outside.

‘I am from what is called the Polity, and am here hunting the same person as these fellows.’ Cormac indicated the two guards.

‘You’re a policeman from Earth?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

Damn.

A second signal keyed in from a telefactor lying tilted on a mountain slope. Even though the machine was half blinded, Cormac still saw a vision of hell: molten rock and glowing embers, fires consuming seared vegetation in a deep valley and throwing up columns of black smoke. Then a third signal keyed in from one high in the air over endless desert, and a fourth from a ‘factor slowly tracking through tumbled stone ruins. He shunted all they were sending to storage and awaited the fifth signal—from the telefactor investigating the nearby city—but it stubbornly refused to come. He returned his attention to the woman, who sat there seemingly at a loss as to how to continue after his affirmation.

He enquired, ‘Kilnsman Astier questioned you about any unusual people you might have seen. You said you did see someone, but were apparently reticent about exactly what you saw. Could you describe this individual to me?’

‘I’m not even sure he was real… things I saw… but now…’ She gestured towards the window again.

‘Tell me it all,’ said Cormac. ‘Leave nothing out — and be assured there’s not much I won’t believe.’

Chandle then told him about her encounter with a man who could make himself invisible: what he said, how he looked, when it occurred. As she went on to talk about the explosions in the Sand Towers, he held up his hand. ‘I know about that. Can you tell me any more about this man?’

She shook her head. ‘He just disappeared—heading towards the city.’

As Cormac stood from the table, Chandle asked, ‘What is he?’

‘Something horrible,’ Cormac replied.

Heading towards the city.