The missiles carried electronic warfare equipment, yet all they were doing was acting as signal relays and amplifiers. Down on his knees now, Cormac saw through the screen as they reached Erebus’s forces. He realized that the AIs of the two ships had somehow keyed in to what Erebus had earlier been using to destroy its own ships and were now giving it a helping hand.

The remaining wormships all started unravelling, and within mere minutes became a hailstorm of fragments in which nuclear fires began winking on like animal eyes opening in a forest. The shrieking from the Harpy’s console now took on a different note: it contained an element of intelligence and knowing despair.

The virtuality was at first infinite, but then it gained dimension and began to shrink. Erebus stood on the white plain, all his being shattering around him. The entity felt like Kali losing her arms, the Kraken its tentacles, and its holographic representation merely reflected what was occurring out there in vacuum. Erebus experienced its captains being seared out of existence by the programs it had created, which Randal had let loose and the Polity missiles were now amplifying and rebroadcasting, and it felt whole ecologies of data-processing just dropping into oblivion. The black form at the centre of the representation of itself writhed as its extended self rapidly collapsed and died. In the virtuality all that black tangled structure was imploding, spraying virtual ash that just sublimed away in this ersatz real. Faces there, once perpetually frozen on the point of screaming, shrieked smoke from their mouths and dissolved. Things half organic and half machine wriggled amid their multiple umbilici and broke apart, dissolving too. Then all was gone, and all that remained was something bearing a resemblance to a crippled human form, one seemingly ragged around the edges, drilled through with holes, somehow insubstantial, damaged, incomplete.

Time grew thin and frail but, in this last moment, Erebus felt somehow clean.

‘At least I am rid of you,’ it said, though the words were mere spurts of code between disintegrating hardware gyrating through vacuum.

‘Do you think so?’ said Fiddler Randal, now standing right before it.

‘You will die anyway.’

‘Undoubtedly,’ said Randal, and stepped into it.

They were one in an instant. Millions of broken connections re-established. Files overwrote files, programs melded, some collapsing into nothing, some establishing easy connections. The ragged form stabilized, acquired clean lines, became a naked human male seemingly fashioned of midnight glass, standing alone in a shrinking realm.

‘I am Trafalgar,’ it said.

The realm collapsed to a pinpoint and then winked out.

Cormac gazed at the filtered glare of the nearby sun, nodded to himself, then turned to Mr Crane.

‘Get rid of it now,’ he told the Golem.

Crane tilted his head in acknowledgement, his brass hands pressed down on the Harpy’s console. He made no other move, but Cormac was aware of the sudden surge of information all about him, and gazing through the ship he observed the activity of the Jain-tech at the juncture between the Harpy and the legate vessel. A series of thumps followed, jerking the Harpy sideways, and then, trailing tendrils like a root-bound stone, the legate craft fell away, impelled by the blasts from the small charges Knobbler had placed out there. The larger ship now swung round, and Cormac could see the legate craft now silhouetted against the arc glare of the sun, into which it would eventually fall.

Next, Cormac returned his attention to the third vessel out there — only recently arrived. It gleamed in the close glare of the blue sun, and Cormac recognized it at once as the one Orlandine had used to escape from one of the Dyson segments — a seeming age ago when he had been less wise, and less bitter. He eyed the Heliotrope for a little while, noting the burn scars on its hull, the heat-generated iridescence and the fact that one jaw of its pincer grab was missing and the other warped.

‘Knobbler, your companions have arrived,’ he said out loud, knowing the war drones in that crammed hold-space back there could hear everything clearly here in the cockpit.

‘Oh, have they really?’ Knobbler replied in his head, every word dripping sarcasm. Of course the drones back there knew the Heliotrope had arrived, since they had been in contact with Cutter and Bludgeon for some time.

A sudden shifting and clattering ensued, and he glanced down as a warning lit up on the console: cargo-hold doors.

‘Where will you go now?’ he asked.

‘The border,’ Knobbler replied.

There was only one border the war drone could possibly be referring to: that place called the Graveyard by those who occupied it, that uneasy territory lying between the Polity and the Prador Third Kingdom. It was a place well suited to those he now saw departing the Harpy and heading out towards the Heliotrope. He glanced down at Arach.

‘Do you want to go with them?’ he asked.

The spider drone fixed him with ruby eyes. ‘Don’t you need my help?’

‘I would certainly appreciate it, and I know that the danger is not something that bothers you, but you do understand what I intend to do now?’

‘I understand,’ said Arach. ‘Something has to be done.’

Cormac nodded and looked up straight into the black star-flecked eyes of the brass Golem. He nodded once, and the Harpy’s, steering thrusters fired up, turning it away from the sun, then the fusion drive ignited. The little ship seemed to draw away with ponderous slowness, but Cormac was in no hurry. He no longer served ECS, and as far as any in the Polity knew, he had died during the heroic battle against Erebus.

He recollected that moment, some while after every wormship had fallen to fragments, when he had decided it was time to get in contact with Jerusalem. Perhaps his disposition had grown sunnier on seeing Erebus completely defeated, and such feelings of optimism had grown upon seeing the King of Hearts limping out of the gradually receding zone of U-space disruption.

‘Open a channel to Jerusalem,’ he had instructed.