‘I have a new game for you to play. Win it and you die, lose it and someone else begins to live.’

‘Oh, it’s all just plus points for me then,’ said the ex-ship’s AI acerbically.

‘Do what I want and I will consider all debts repaid, and you will then be free.’

Vulture wondered for the nth time about just flying away, but was not so stupid as to be fooled by her apparent freedom—no doubt there was some sneaky little program sitting inside her, ready to press in the point of a dagger when she did not choose to cooperate.

‘How about if I say screw you?’ she asked, just to be sure.

Dragon tilted this one head, milky saliva dripping from one side of its mouth. ‘Then I take back the flesh you have borrowed, even though it has no thumbs.’

‘Okay.’ Vulture hopped back along the length of her grid; one talon, two talons, then a beat of her wings to carry her up on top of the rock she frequented in order to check that the telefactor had not moved. ‘Tell me about it.’

Dragon described a game—a kind of three-dimensional chess and Rubik’s cube all in one—and how Vulture must play it. The description came across in no human language or machine code previously known to Vulture, but she understood it, was fascinated, and a little horrified by what it all implied for an AI like herself. It meant there was a hell for her kind.

‘But why?’ Vulture eventually asked. ‘Why not just destroy the damned machine?’

‘Because I can,’ Dragon replied cryptically.

Cormac held up his arm and, with merely thought, recalled Shuriken to its holster. Okay, he’d found the snake in the woodpile; now the trick was to pull its fangs without it biting him, blindfolded. ‘Set it on auto—the direction we’re going.’

Gant did as instructed, then scrambled from his seat.

Cormac stepped over to a plastic box secured along one wall and opened it. Inside, neatly packed, was equipment he might need. He quickly found two APW carbines and tossed one to Gant.

‘Narrow focus, and try not to hit anything that’s keeping us in the air.’

Gant adjusted the weapon accordingly and peered at the ceiling.

Cormac placed his own carbine at his feet and from the box removed a smaller brushed-aluminium case. He opened that to reveal the three innocuous-looking cylinders of CTDs. Taking one out he studied its detonator: a programming miniconsole and a single touchpad. Pressing his thumb against the pad, he got ‘Ribonucleic coding …’ on a little screen, then ‘Accepted’ and the miniconsole activated. Just then, violet light ignited inside the landers as Gant punched holes through the ceiling where silvery filaments were growing in the metal. The lander filled with smoke and with flares of disintegrating metal.

Cormac dredged calm from deep inside himself. Setting the CTD for timed detonation, he gave it one minute and shoved it under a folded environment suit. He then took out two AG harnesses.

‘Here, put it on.’ He tossed one harness to Gant, then took up a carbine. Just then came the whoomph of the door seals disengaging. Instead of using the carbine, Cormac drew his thin-gun and fired at the locking mechanism, turning delicate components into a bubbling mess. Then, on narrow focus, he used the carbine to punch holes randomly around the door.

‘Now, that’s not fair,’ came a familiar voice from the com console.

He’s into the system, Cormac sent to Gant.

Get your harness on, Gant sent back.

Cormac quickly obliged. Something was now worming through the holes in the roof: a woody member jointed like an insect’s leg. As he again took up his carbine, Cormac saw something else scuttle for cover across the floor.

Spin us and blow the front screen.

Gant stepped into the cockpit and hit the requisite controls. Cormac grabbed a nearby handle and hung on. With a roar of engines, the horizon began to slip to the left. G-forces dragged him sideways, his feet coming off the deck, then swung him towards the screen. Violet fire lit up the inside of the lander and the screen departed in a dusty cloud with a huge sucking inhalation. He released his hold and tumbled through the air.

Tricky fucker, aren’t you? said Skellor over Cormac’s gridlink, as the agent manipulated the controls of his AG harness.

Go fuck yourself, Skellor.

In a moment, he had stabilized himself and could see the lander still heading away. He turned in mid-air, trying to locate Gant, then saw him far below—still falling.

Gant! What are you playing at!

Not… working… came the dead soldier’s reply.

Cormac watched him plummet, strike the edge of a butte, and tumble down in a shower of rubble into a canyon. The horizon then ignited like a flashbulb, and Cormac began a rapid descent himself, knowing what was coming. Twenty metres from his landing, the wind slammed across and tossed him cartwheeling through air filled with stinging grit. Slowly regaining control, he ran with the wind until he could safely descend into a canyon, and there, in the shelter of a tilted sandstone slab, he awaited the passing of the brief storm. Later, he was glad to see Gant stomping towards him, though dismayed to see how much of the dead soldier’s syntheflesh had been ripped away. But that was a small price to pay.

‘We got him,’ said Cormac, standing up.

Gant slapped Cormac’s weapon away, grabbed him by the throat and hoisted him up off the ground.

‘Guess again, shit head.’

The titanic Jerusalem dropped into U-space with a nickering, grinding disturbance of reality, as if a smaller ship was just acceptable but this was going too far. In void that was hostile to tender organic linear minds and which drove their possessors to extremities like plucking out offending eyes, and when discovering that didn’t work, groping for some implement to dig deeper, the great ship accelerated beyond human calculation. Jerusalem itself- a mind using quantum computing and functioning in ways that defied evolutionary logic — looked upon this immutable infinity and considered it good… and home. However, the AI realized it would shortly be in for a rough ride.

In 3D translation, the view ahead was one of a roiling grey sun everted from the surrounding greyness like some huge tumour. It could appear as small as Jerusalem willed it, for here the AI had to apply dimension, not measure it. However, the sphere was two hundred light years across in realspace, and no amount of logic juggling was going to put Jerusalem at the centre of it, anywhere. What was required was unalloyed brute force.

Most Polity ships just could not penetrate the maelstrom created by a USER, but then most ships possessed three or four fusion reactors and a minimum requirement of U-space engines and hard-fields that could be powered up, with replacements in storage. Jerusalem put all eight hundred of the ship’s reactors online, to provide vast amounts of energy to stabilize phased layers of U-space engines in its hull and reinforce its scaling of hard-fields. In time, and in no time, it hit the USER sphere of interference like a bullet hitting an apple. But this was one very large apple.

Pocketing his toys, Mr Crane stood up and then, almost guiltily, scrubbed out the eighteen-square grid with his boot. The large bird which had taken off from a distant outcrop and was now hovering overhead would not normally have attracted his attention, but his journey had shown this to be a world where the fauna barely got above ground, let alone into the air. But that was not what brought him to his feet. He could sense a change in the static electricity levels in the air, and now a figure was walking towards him, on the other side of the barrier. Then the way was open.