‘I take it you are the captain?’

Crane nodded briefly, then jumped a small rubber dog over a lump of crystal as if he was playing some obscure version of draughts.

‘Will you let your ship AI send those packets?’

‘It’s done,’ said Vulture abruptly. ‘I’ve sent them on spiral dispersion so there’s a chance of at least one hitting home. Under Mr Crane’s instructions the packets do not reveal their source. Mr Crane seems wary of letting Earth Central know about us.’

‘Good.’ Not in the least puzzled as to why he was keen on anonymity, Cormac continued to gaze at the Golem. ‘Can we then follow Erebus’s fleet when it moves off — as it is sure to do?’

‘Dodgy, apparently,’ Vulture replied. ‘Erebus is sure to reformat his chameleonware, recognition codes and his scanners, therefore we won’t stay hidden for long.’

Cormac ground his teeth in frustration. Maybe, if they got close enough to one of those wormships, he could transfer himself across, maybe plant a U-space transponder aboard one of them? Just then a massive detonation lit the cabin briefly, before the screen blacked out. When it cleared a moment later, twelve more wormships had turned into clouds of glowing gas.

It seemed Erebus had yet to finish cleaning house.

Orlandine slumped, utterly exhausted, peering down at the holes in the front of her spacesuit. The mycelium inside and spread all around her had repaired the holes punched through the interface sphere when it ran straight into the blast front sent out from the destruction of Erebus’s planetoid, and it had now nearly finished repairing the holes in her body. When it was done with that, she would set it to banishing the fatigue poisons from her body, then maybe she would feel a bit better about her current situation.

She was alive, so that was definitely a plus. The possibility that her strike against the planetoid would be insufficient and that enough wormships might survive to overcome the war runcible’s defences had been factored into her calculations. But she had considered this only a remote possibility, and more acceptable because the chance of enough wormships remaining to be able to hit Earth had been vanishingly small. Though she had not miscalculated in the second case, she certainly had in the first. She had been arrogant.

Erebus’s planetoid had halted before entering the corridor after detecting ionization that should not be there — ionization caused by her duel with the King of Hearts — then had loosened its internal structure before proceeding, which had substantially reduced the effectiveness of her attack. But, most importantly, it had turned up in the first place with something like one third again of the predicted mass. She had greatly underestimated Erebus’s ability to reproduce its wormships.

But I am alive…

Yeah, but there was no air left inside the sphere, and its self-contained power supply was down to half. At present the mycelium was feeding her oxygen cracked from the molecular make-up of the sphere’s insulation, and of course its ability to do so was limited by that power supply and by the other limited power resources within this interface sphere.

Erebus didn’t kill me…

Her first thought, as the blast lifted her interface sphere from the war runcible, had been, That went well, but it could have gone a lot better. Her sphere then tumbled away through vacuum and the approaching swarm simply ignored her, for to them this sphere tangled in scaffold was just a lump of debris. Their main target remained, however, and it was still firing at them. Some half an hour later the last of the wormships passed quite close to her, continuing to ignore her. She had time to breathe a sigh of relief just before the blast wave of debris struck.

‘So what now, Orlandine?’ she asked herself out loud.

‘I think you die,’ a voice replied in her head.

He must have escaped the virtuality. She had no idea how and cared less.

‘Ah — I’d forgotten about you.’

‘Well, you’ve had a lot on your mind,’ Randal replied.

Despite her tendency towards being a loner, she almost felt glad of the company in the present situation.

The last of the Jain-manufactured scar tissue drained from her largest wound, which only an hour ago had been a three-inch-wide hole caused by a piece of Jain coral punching straight through her torso, through her liver, then out through her back to lodge in her carapace. She now set the mycelium to clear away those fatigue poisons. In a moment she felt optimism returning, but it was leavened by the hard cold practical realities of her situation.

‘I don’t think Erebus stands much chance now of getting through ECS defences in the solar system,’ Randal observed.

‘So your vengeance and my vengeance have both been achieved,’ said Orlandine as she began to analyse how best to use her remaining resources. ‘Doubtless ECS will now not rest until what remains of Erebus is hunted down and obliterated.’

As she saw it, she had only limited options. She could use her remaining energy to place herself in stasis until such time as the underspace disturbance died down, then call for help. The only problem with that was that ECS ships would certainly be the first to reach her, and in the Polity there was no statute of limitations on murder, there were no mitigating circumstances, and there was no way of obtaining absolution for such an act unless you could resurrect the dead. Also the AIs would never trust someone who controlled Jain-tech. If they didn’t execute a death sentence upon her immediately, that would only be because they wanted to study her first.

‘You are almost as arrogant and stupid as Erebus,’ said Randal.

‘Oh, thanks for that,’ she replied distractedly.

She could place herself in stasis and use her remaining power to sort data from the inert sensors on the sphere’s surface, then, if a ship happened nearby, she could raise herself from stasis and direct to the ship her call for help. The chances were that she could then overpower her rescuers. Unfortunately, the statistical chances of a ship coming within range before her power supply ran out — a ship that was not a part of ECS, since they would be the ones primarily traversing this area in the near future — were just about a Planck length above zero.

‘Of course, to call Erebus arrogant and stupid is merely to damn myself.’

That got her attention. ‘What?’

‘You heard.’

‘If you could explain?’

‘I’m not really Fiddler Randal,’ replied Randal. ‘I’m based on a copy of him but I’m really that part of Erebus that disagreed with everything it was doing. I call myself Erebus’s conscience. I guess, that being the case, it could be argued that Erebus really did murder your brothers.’

‘What the fuck?’

Even as she spoke the words, she understood what the presence in the sphere with her was actually saying. Immediately she began running diagnostics and searches within the sphere’s hardware and software, then prepared HKs, worms and viruses: all the killing and deleting programs at her disposal. Oddly, she located the distributed code that was Randal very easily, as if he was making no attempt to hide.

‘I was able to control parts of Erebus — of the other part of me, that is,’ said Randal. ‘I sent the wormship to Klurhammon, and it was I who gave its captain his instructions.’

‘You manipulated me?’

‘You’ve hit the nail on the head.’

There seemed nothing more she could say. She felt stupid, frustrated, and grief began to well in her throat. Briefly she considered capturing Randal and enacting some hideous vengeance upon him, but she was not some psycho and that was not how she operated. She launched those programs and quietly watched as they wiped Randal out. He began to fade from her consciousness and, as he went, he said just two words: ‘Thank you.’