‘Sorry, boss,’ said Arach, now scuttling ahead of him along the ceiling through smoking cables and heat-distorted metal.

Second blast from Crane, up at an angle through the ceiling, another reactor closed down, power lines shorting out like huge welding rods in the structure above. Cormac was then up and running onto a grated floor with pieces of metal spraying up around him. Rail-gun fire from below. Drones fast repositioned. Crane firing again, then again. Smoke belching from ventilation ducts, and something clattering along behind the right-hand wall.

‘Golem!’ Cormac shouted, though these weren’t unexpected.

The first was a silvery blur shooting up behind Crane. Without looking round the big brass man chopped out with one hand and the skeletal Golem folded over it with a clang. He turned, slammed it into the wall, stepped back and fired, the thing flicking about in proton fire until it came apart. Skeletal fingers came up through a grating ahead of Cormac. He stepped carefully aside then shielded his face as that area of floor disappeared. Leaping the burning cavity Arach had excavated, he glanced down to see more skeletals crawling up through quadrate internal structure, then Crane was right behind him, firing down. The big brass Golem leaped after him, landing with a crash, burned through the wall to the left, to the right, then up at one o’clock. That should have shut down all the reactors here. Firing came from ahead as Arach entered the core area, then from behind as Crane turned. Cormac slowed to a walk, gazed through Shuriken’s sensors as the throwing star slammed into the chest of the skeletal on the other side of the adjacent wall. He held out his hand as he stepped into the core area, whereupon Shuriken rounded a partition, folded in its smoking blades and settled on his palm. He retained the device for in a moment he would need it again.

‘I got him covered,’ said Arach.

The core was claustrophobic, a chamber with a peaked dome, fibre optics and S-con power cables coming in through ducts all the way round to terminate at a ring of five cylindrical pillars. On these, at waist height, were five lozenges of crystal braced with black metal and clamped into place from above by things that looked like ancient engine valves. Each of these crystals could contain a runcible AI apiece, or perhaps the mind of a big ship like the Jerusalem, but they were merely sub-minds of the thing lying in the very centre of the circle. From the five pillars optic feeds ran along the floor into a central pyramid with its tip chopped away. Sitting on the uppermost flat surface was a grey sphere the size of a tennis ball, its exterior irregular and its substance slightly translucent. Clamping it in place from above was a column of bluish crystal, mushrooming out where it connected at the lower end.

Ten minutes.

That was Cormac’s estimate of the time they had left before the outer Golem caches opened up and those skeletal killers came swarming into this place; ten minutes also before internals could reconfigure to bring new drones to bear. Really, the security here was not that great, but then no one had ever expected heavily armed intruders to be able to transport themselves this deep inside.

Cormac moved forward past the sub-minds and gazed intently at the grey sphere. Earth Central, oddly, was old. Quantum processors were no longer made so small, since greater stability and ruggedness resulted from using a wider lattice crystal, like that found in modern runcible complexes, ships, drones and Golem.

‘So, rumours of your demise were exaggerated?’ enquired a voice he recognized of old.

Cormac was not prepared to banter, especially with something that had so deliberately spoken with the voice of his now dead mentor and superior Horace Blegg.

‘You allowed Erebus to attack the Polity,’ he stated.

‘I allowed nothing. I merely limited the extent of my response.’

Something flickered in the air between Cormac and that grey sphere. He didn’t react as he knew this was no weapon — merely a hologram projected from fibre heads in the floor.

‘Millions have died because you limited the extent of your response.’

A line of light cut down and out of it folded Horace Blegg. ‘But is that a crime?’ he asked.

‘For evil to prosper, all that is required is for good men to do nothing,’ said Cormac, for it was something Blegg had once quoted to him. ‘Are you Blegg, or are you just Earth Central’s mouthpiece.’

The old oriental shrugged. ‘We know that I am both.’

‘Why allow this attack?’ Cormac asked.

Blegg shook his head. ‘I made you well, Cormac. You would have been a perfect replacement for the one whose image you see before you.’

Though Cormac did not want to be distracted, he was.

‘Explain that.’

‘Well, do you consider your ability to transport yourself through U-space an evolved one? It is not. I chose you long ago when I first began taking apart Jain technology and built the replicating biomechanisms you first saw as this form I’m in, as Horace Blegg.’

Cormac waited.

Earth Central continued: ‘Through a series of Horace Bleggs I developed the technology, only incorporating U-space hardware when I finally chose my subject. Do you remember the Hubris, Cormac?’

He did; it had taken him to Samarkand, a world thrown into cold by Dragon’s destruction of the runcible buffers there. ‘I remember that ship.’

‘Not the ship, Cormac, the AI,’ the image before him corrected. ‘Hubris installed the technology in you during that journey to Samarkand, while you were in cold sleep, and it has slowly grown in your bones ever since. It took some time, for the complexity is great, but I knew it was working once you started gridlinking bare-brained.’

‘I am to believe that?’

‘How else do you explain yourself?’

It was a distraction. His time here was limited and it was passing quickly.

‘Why did you allow this attack?’ he repeated.

‘Ever since the war with the Prador, humanity’s pace of development has slowed almost to the point of stagnation. Development only accelerates under threat, and we know that complacency kills.’

‘Trite.’

‘It is a dangerous universe, Cormac, one in which a decadent and lazy human race could at any time face extinction.’

‘Millions died,’ Cormac repeated.

‘But I did not kill them; I merely did not save them.’

‘That’s a very fine line.’

‘Are you here to destroy me, Cormac?’ the hologram enquired. ‘Very few will notice any difference, for the moment I cease to function, one of my sub-minds will take up the reins. It will take only a matter of microseconds for it to assume my duties.’

‘But it won’t be you.’

‘Another fine line.’

Cormac bowed his head for a moment. ‘Perhaps I can accept that doing less than you are able to do is no crime.’ He raised his head. ‘She said she would not be allowed to live “while the betrayer still sits on his throne”, and of course then I didn’t understand what she was talking about. Now I do. You crossed the line when you sent your own people to the Trafalgar, so that ship’s AI could use them to initiate Jain nodes. In that you are culpable of murder. I’m here for the sake of Fiddler Randal and Henrietta Ipatus Chang, and others whose names only you know.’

‘Ah, that,’ said Earth Central. ‘So you are a moral creature, Cormac?’

Cormac stepped forward through the hologram and flung Shuriken. The throwing star shot from his hand, extending its blades only a little way, then whirred up to a scream. It hit the pillar above the Earth Central AI, and the pillar shattered, a rain of blue glass clattering down and spilling through the gratings underfoot.

Cormac swept up the ruler of the Polity in one hand.

Something was rising up from the depths of Lake Geneva, and weapons turrets had already risen like giant steel fists from the hedging mountains. It didn’t matter. Cormac knew he could pull his companions out in an instant now, back up to that old orbital museum against which the Harpy was docked and hidden by its own chameleonware. That same place where Cormac had paused for a while to walk and gaze upon the exhibits — artefacts from the true beginning of the space age. He recollected how the curator there, a human without augmentation, had taken an interest in him and asked where he was from.