But first: Randal.

As the human ghost had said, fewer places to search. Taking into account the expectation that it would later be rebuilding its forces, perhaps now was the time to limit even further the places Randal could hide. The delay between this thought and subsequent action was infinitesimal. Microwave beams deployed by the nine hundred and eighty-three wormships swept about them in perfect concert, hitting rod-form after rod-form and turning each into a puff of white-hot debris. Erebus then began running diagnostic searches to locate every single packet of its own distributed processing space. There were many returns from still-functional remains of ships and other hardware scattered across the expanse of the corridor, and even some weak returns from debris falling into the areas of U-space disruption. Erebus targeted the latter first, before it could fall out of reach — high-intensity lasers stabbing over tens of thousands of miles until each of those signals went out — then began the methodical annihilation of everything once part of itself that wasn’t a wormship.

‘A little bit of surgical cautery here?’ Randal suggested.

Chunks of Jain coral still containing powered-up processing space heated and exploded into shards like those of shattered porcelain, and the little pieces of Erebus’s mind they contained winked out. Drifting insectile biomechs responded with programmed instinct to the sudden microwave-induced rise of temperature within them by flailing at vacuum with their multi-jointed limbs, then burned and shrivelled up. Shoals of silvery nematode forms wriggled and shot here and there under the impetus of AG-planing drives, then coiled into rings and smoked their substance off into void. Here and there it was more energy-efficient to fire a missile into larger conglomerations of debris, then pick off the scattered targets with whatever energy weapon was most suitable.

It took an hour in all.

‘Now,’ said Erebus, ‘you can only be located in these wormships.’

‘But of course,’ Randal replied. ‘Wherever you are is where you’ll find me.’

Erebus ignored that and studied data on each of the captains of the wormships. Most of them were copies of loyal captains, and twenty-three of the original loyal captains had survived. However, there were thirty-seven ships controlled by captains it had been necessary to meld forcibly, and though Erebus was confident of their utter obedience — for they were part of itself and it controlled them utterly — whenever it allowed them more independence, there was always an undercurrent of resentment which Erebus knew, given a chance, would turn into open rebellion. The worm-ship sent to kill Orlandine’s two brothers had been controlled by one such captain, so perhaps it was that rebel trait in them that had allowed Randal to more easily subvert it.

Thought instantly turned to action. Erebus instructed the suspect ships to detonate their onboard ordnance, whereupon thirty-seven vessels disappeared like a chain of firecrackers and the rest of the wormships fried any large chunks that survived.

There weren’t many.

‘What the hell is going on out there?’ Cormac wondered.

Arach and Crane had come in through the airlock shortly after him, but they were the only ones who could enter the Harpy that way. The rescued drones, including their leader Knobbler, had necessarily used the cargo door, and now all crammed together in the ship’s small hold.

‘Bit of a falling-out?’ Arach suggested. Cormac expected no reply from Mr Crane — him being the ultimate example of the strong silent type.

‘I don’t see how that’s possible, as all that out there is supposed to be one entity.’

‘I know why,’ piped up the ship’s AI, Vulture.

Cormac glanced for a moment at the console before him, then returned his gaze to the view through the chainglass screen in front of him. ‘Do go on.’

‘Erebus has got a virus,’ Vulture replied. ‘As I recollect, an attack ship called the Jack Ketch once had a similar problem.’

‘Aphran.’

‘Eh?’ said Arach.

‘She was a separatist killed by Skellor who somehow copied herself into the Jain structure he created,’ Cormac explained. ‘Jack uploaded her, then experienced considerable difficulty in getting rid of her.’ He paused for moment. ‘Would this virus happen to be called Henrietta Ipatus Chang?’

‘No, not even close,’ said Vulture. ‘I have a copy of him here with me, though he now seems to be in the process of deleting himself. His name was Fiddler Randal.’

It was a name that meant nothing to Cormac.

‘Why is Erebus doing this now?’ he wondered aloud.

‘Orlandine was less than candid with you,’ explained the AI. ‘Through myself and Mr Crane here, Fiddler Randal provided her with the codes and chameleonware that enabled her to conceal the war runcible for long enough, and which are now incidentally keeping us from getting fried. Randal has been working against Erebus for some time, and I expect Erebus has now decided it cannot afford to keep him around.’

‘I see.’ Cormac let out a slow breath.

This was it then. As far as he could see, Erebus did not possess sufficient ships to launch an assault on the Sol system, so that disaster had been averted. Admittedly the enemy entity still had enough vessels to be a real danger to individual planets and could later come to pose a significant threat again, but meanwhile the question about the provenance of Jain nodes within the Polity had been resolved, and an extinction-level threat had been negated. Why then did Cormac still feel frustrated, dissatisfied, annoyed?

It was because the Polity had been faced with a massive threat and had quite simply dropped the ball. Masses of ECS battleships had been moved into position, yet were not actively used and were easily rendered impotent. Erebus had laid the groundwork for an attack capable of penetrating all the way to Earth, and had launched it while intellects that dwarfed mere humans like himself by orders of magnitude had not seen it, having merely reacted to overt attacks and done nothing else. It almost seemed as if Erebus had managed to throw the AIs into total confusion while a single human being — though Orlandine was an extremely capable one — had set out to stop Erebus, and had done so. To say that this all seemed suspiciously odd would be an understatement.

He thought it odd too that Orlandine had done this on her own, yet surely she had not needed to? Yes, she was a murderer who controlled Jain technology, so would have been considered a danger by the Polity AIs and therefore would be in danger from them, but since she clearly knew how Erebus intended attacking she could simply have informed Jerusalem or Earth Central of this attack in safety by remote means. Had she not done so because she wanted to exact personal vengeance on Erebus? That was possible, but he had never known her well enough to judge.

‘What now, boss?’ Arach abruptly broke his train of thought.

Still surveying the massed but considerably reduced number of wormships, Cormac knew that though they now represented little direct danger to Earth, they would have to be dealt with, but here and now he did not possess the means.

‘We wait and we watch,’ he decided. ‘And when they move off, we follow them.’ He paused to consider for a moment. ‘Vulture, have you got U-com available?’

‘Hah! Well, I could send information packets, but I’d never know if they arrived,’ the ship AI replied. ‘It’s still very stirred up out there — the most likely target for communication from here would be Earth itself.’

‘Send information packets that way,’ Cormac instructed. ‘Let them know what happened here, along with the location and present disposition of Erebus’s forces.’

‘That’s not really up to me,’ Vulture replied.

Cormac had forgotten for a moment that, though he was talking to an AI, this was not necessarily a Polity AI and the ship he occupied was certainly not ECS. This meant he did not give the orders here. Cormac turned and gazed at Mr Crane, who had seated himself in the pilot’s chair and taken out his toys and arrayed them across the console before him.