‘Dammit!’

‘Problem?’ asked Smith.

Cormac concentrated and brought his immediate surroundings back into focus. He really didn’t need the distraction of that other perception now.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Just a little impatient.’

Smith gave him a blank look — no doubt registering Cormac’s momentary departure from usual behaviour. Though they had already seen combat together, Cormac was coming to the conclusion that he didn’t entirely trust this Golem. It seemed an old distrust of AI was stirring inside him, though it was odd how this didn’t apply to war drones. Maybe that was because the likes of Arach didn’t pretend to be something they weren’t.

Drawing closer to the trees, Cormac saw that his first idea about dropping through the canopy might not be feasible, for it was too dense. However, the trees were wide enough apart… He spun the shuttle, coming in backwards while using the main engine to decelerate. Crop debris and cinders blew past. Once the vessel was down to below a hundred miles an hour and mainly using antigravity to stay in the air, he spun it back round again and used tertiary thrusters to bring the speed down still further, then nosed into the forest between two massive trunks pocked with dark holes and as twisted as ancient olive trees. Checking coordinates he saw that the first of the concealed buildings was a mile ahead, and very shortly it came into sight — confirming the veracity of his earlier weird glimpse. Something flashed in the forest: weapons fire, maybe explosives.

Cormac brought the shuttle in to land, fast, retaining attack plans in his mind and adjusting them incrementally to the movement of the heat signatures inside that building complex. Three of them were labelled ‘Human?’ but were surrounded by others that possessed no label at all. The whole picture kept blurring and changing. That, Cormac realized, was also part of King’s problem: the shooting was creating its own heat signatures, and it also seemed likely there were fires breaking out in there.

With the shuttle now settling, blowing up clouds of red and gold leaves and what looked like the husks of giant chestnuts, Cormac hit his belt release and stood. Already the side door was opening and Scar heading towards it. The dracoman did not reach it first, of course, for Arach took the ceiling route above him and dropped with a crash on the ramp just as it hit the ground. Then Arach was out amid the swirling leaves, two hatches opening in the top of his abdomen and two Gatling-style cannons folding up into view. Exiting the shuttle last, Cormac strode down the ramp then whirled round, simultaneously sending an instruction through his gridlink. The autogun on the top of the shuttle spun and targeted him for a moment, which was worrying, then settled into a search pattern. That meant it would recognize them when they returned, but anyone else approaching would receive a few warning shots, before being cut in half by pulse-fire.

‘Okay, head out, you two,’ he said, as he turned back to them.

Arach and Scar immediately departed for the loading entrance situated on the forest road. He and Smith meanwhile headed over to where a set of double doors stood open, the ground before them well churned up, and some kind of heavy autohandler standing idle to one side.

Assessing distances, Cormac said, ‘We’ve got two off to the left, about thirty yards in. The others are starting to reposition — they know we’re here.’

Smith lovingly adjusted the settings on his proton carbine. Cormac pulled up his sleeve, called up a list of programs in his gridlink before sending one to Shuriken, then pulled the star from its holster and tossed it out ahead of him. For a moment the weapon seemed dead in the air, then it steadied and whirled up to speed, extending and retracting its chainglass blades in anticipation. Then, as if deciding to behave itself, it pulled back and hung in the air, humming a couple or yards above his shoulder.

‘They’re approaching the door now,’ Cormac noted.

Smith brought the stock of his weapon up to his shoulder and froze to a motionlessness that simply was not human. Cormac folded his arms and just watched as a ragged figure stumbled into view. It was a woman, badly burned, pink blobs where her eyes should have been. She brandished a large spanner and, without hesitation, started forward with plain intent. Cormac considered giving her a warning but knew that though this had once been a human being it wasn’t now. Out of curiosity he allowed his perception of the real to slip, and again his surroundings took on that odd transparency. He now saw inside her body: her internal organs where exactly they should be, but now all entangled with ropes of Jain technology. She looked packed with snakes.

He glanced at Smith. ‘Take her down.’

The Golem fired one long burst, cutting from head to groin, and blasted the woman back through the door in two burning halves. One chunk of her impacted the next figure coming out. He merely shrugged the burning mess aside and came on. More difficult to judge this time, since he looked quite normal on the outside. But inside, again, he was full of snakes.

‘Halt right where you are!’ Cormac ordered, then glanced questioningly at the Golem, who opened fire on the man, spreading his burning fragments to light up the interior of the building beyond. That Cormac had instinctively concealed his new ability from Smith showed his growing distrust of AI. Perhaps this reluctance was due to his frustration at the Polity’s insufficiently aggressive response to the threat of Erebus, as much as his feeling that the AIs had some unknown agenda.

‘Definitely infected,’ affirmed Smith, tapping a finger against the side of his head. ‘No human would have temperature and density readings like that.’ Cormac filed that fact away for future reference. There was no time now, but it was possible for him to run a program sensitizing his eyes to infrared, and adding a small ultrasound scanner to his equipment might also be a good idea. He could then pretend he was using current Polity technology to see those snakes too.

‘Okay, let’s step it up now — and switch over to com.’ That was a bit of a misnomer, for none of them really used the standard military comunit. He himself could transmit and receive through his gridlink. Smith and Arach contained equipment for that purpose too, as did Scar, though the dracoman’s way of sending and receiving signals had a biological basis.

On the schematic perpetually updated in his mind Cormac saw that the other two had also encountered expected opposition, for the heat map in the zone they entered now became blurred and chaotic. As he stepped past burning and sizzling remnants of what had once been human beings, he held his breath against the oily smoke and barbecue smell. Once through the doors, he used a gridlink program to ramp up light amplification, and then peered around. The interior of the building extended for a hundred yards with gantries looming up above on either side. Ranged about on the floor space were various sorting machines and conveyors, and he also noted a hopper full of fig-like objects — probably the contents of those spiky husks scattered outside. There were no warm bodies present inside this building but their own, but four were approaching its far end from the complex beyond.

‘That gantry.’ He gestured to the one on their right, wondering if he even needed to say that since they all knew the assault plan. Smith headed off to some nearby stairs, bounded up them un-humanly fast and shot ahead along the gantry. Cormac advanced at a more leisurely pace, meanwhile onlining a program he’d only recently discovered in Shuriken’s control suite — uncertain if it was original or had been added by Jerusalem when that AI had repaired the weapon. Now another image appeared in his mind: triangular and seemingly diamond-rimmed, and viewed from a perspective somewhere just above his head, for he was looking through Shuriken’s eyes. A brief programming prod sent the weapon skimming ahead of him. Simultaneously, he checked the position of the four heat signatures, and saw that Smith was now directly above them.