A distant whine, as of disturbed mosquitoes, came from the surrounding slopes. This was followed by dull, almost inaudible concussions. Forge and the others must have decided to use the seeker bullet function on their multiguns. There would be a mess up there. The bullets entered their targets to detonate inside.

The woman before Yannis raised her hand to her ear, then abruptly dropped it, her expression giving nothing away. Comunit in her ear. She wouldn’t know for sure her troops were dead, but now she was out of contact with them.

‘But of course you never really intended to sell me anything,’ Yannis said.

Hit the Golem.

With a sawing crackle the blurred turquoise bar of a particle beam stabbed out seemingly from mid-air behind him. His internal face visor shot up from the armour underlying his envirosuit, so he was now viewing the scene through just a narrow slot. The beam struck the ersatz big man and turned him to fire. Instead of being thrown back, the Golem stepped forward, its clothing and syntheflesh slewing away. A briefly revealed metal humanoid stood against the blast for a moment — then flew apart.

The woman was now on the ground, her arms wrapped protectively over her head. Her remaining two heavies were crouched in firing positions, their weapons wavering between Yannis and the unseen source of the particle beam. Both of them kept shooting anxious glances at what was left of their companion; their edge was gone and they knew that opening fire might now be suicidal.

Yannis shrugged. ‘You try to cheat me, and now your Golem is gone.’

Get rid of those two, Forge.

Yannis awaited the expected arrival of the seeker bullets, but nothing did arrive.

Forge?

‘We’ve got a problem — there’s something else out here,’ said Kradian-Dave.

Something in the voice of the man sent a shiver down Yannis’s spine, but he believed in his men’s competence. Let them sort out whichever of this woman’s troops they had missed.

Harpy, kill the two armed males.

The particle beam stabbed out twice more and screaming the two men flew apart like fat-soaked rags held before a blow torch. Yannis stepped forward, but abruptly the woman heaved herself upright and drew a gas-system pulse-gun. She fired straight into his chest, sending flames and smoke rising up before his face. Damn, another envirosuit wrecked. He stepped into the fusillade and slapped the weapon from her hand, then grabbed her by the throat and heaved her up off the ground.

‘I am very annoyed,’ he said. He would have liked to spend some quality time with her, but the firing of Harpy’s particle cannon might have already been detected, so ECS agents could now be on their way. He began closing his hand, the motors in his armour kicking in as his fingers dug into her neck. She began flailing about and kicking, but that came to a convulsive halt as his fingers broke through flesh, crunching a handful of windpipe, muscle and fat. Ripped arteries sprayed blood, one jet spattering along his arm and on his visor. He discarded her, then shook the mess from his gloves.

‘Do you have your problem under control?’ he asked.

No reply.

‘Forge? Kradian?… Lingel? Sheila? Prescott?’

Some kind of com failure? Maybe someone up there had been using an electronic warfare technique?

‘Harpy, give me satellite feed,’ he demanded, trying not to get too nervous about this. Even so, he backed up a little way and took up his shooting stick.

The feed clicked in.

‘Close shots of the last locations of my crew,’ he instructed.

Three of them weren’t where they were supposed to be. Forge and Prescott were… well, he assumed that he was seeing Forge and Prescott, but it was difficult to tell with the bits of them spread all around and spattered on the surrounding rocks. It looked like they had been hit by seeker bullets, but they must have been of some new and powerful armour-penetrating kind for the two men had worn the same sort of motorized armour as did he.

Time to get back to the ship.

He pulled up his shooting stick, which was an apt description for it also served as a weapon, then quickly headed back towards Harpy, However, just then, a strange sight gave him pause. He aimed at this thing with the stick and tracked its course to the ground.

A bird?

In a flurry of feathers it landed amid the smoking and strewn remains of the Zil’s passengers and began pecking up bits of flesh.

A vulture?

Yannis vaguely recollected something from childhood lessons on Terran ecology.

But how was that possible? The air here could not support Terran life, and whatever large life forms survived crawled through tunnels in the ground scraping up rock sulphur and digesting primitive forms of algae out of it.

Then something else caught his eye and he looked up.

Standing over by the Zil was a big big man wearing a long coat and a wide-brimmed hat. As if Yannis seeing him had been some kind of signal, the man began taking lengthy strides towards him. Harpy gave him an outline which immediately began flashing.

Golem.

Yannis read the side display: Golem Twenty-Five prototype, ceramal armour, further modifications unknown. Rescan. Rescan.

Hit it.

A text reply nicked up in his visual cortex: You are within target acquisition frame.

Yannis quickly stepped to one side, but the Golem suddenly moved horribly fast, almost a subliminal flicker, and was then strolling in from a different direction.

You are within target acquisition frame.

He moved again.

The Golem moved again.

Rescan. Rescan. Rescan. Viral return—

The display in his visor shut down. He stepped aside again, but the Golem just continued striding in.

Hit it! Hit it!

Nothing.

Yannis turned and ran, but before he’d even managed two paces a big brassy hand slammed down on his shoulder, spun him round, closed on his neck and hoisted him from the ground.

He heard, ‘Particle weapons leave a metallic aftertaste.’ The voice seemed to be coming from somewhere below him. It was not the Golem talking for he was looking straight into its implacable face. Around his neck he felt something creak, then his neck armour collapsed with a cracking sound like thunder to his ears. His last thought as his head, now disconnected from his body, thumped to the ground, was, Metallic aftertaste?

Gazing out through Heliotrope’s sensors, it was with a feeling of bitterness that Orlandine contemplated the massive object sitting out there in vacuum. This was not the kind of project she’d had in mind upon her return to the Polity, but now circumstances had changed. The computer virus from the wormship had changed them, for it had provided her with a definite purpose.

Her purpose was vengeance.

When, by destroying a massive USER based on an icy moonlet, Orlandine had opened the trap holding both her and the Polity fleet that Erebus first attacked, she had been leaving the Polity for pastures new. Somewhere, towards the inner galaxy, she had intended to build something grand with the fantastical technology she now controlled. Procrastinating for some time, she then realized that, no matter how grand it might be, the thing she built would be worthless with only herself to appreciate it, and so she had returned to the Polity. The remote place where the wormship found her had been her selected construction site. Not any more.

Using every devious precaution she could think of, she studied the computer virus transmitted by the wormship and came to the conclusion that it bore some similarities to a memcording. Then, because it possessed all sorts of strange visual, audio and seemingly sentient components, she allowed it to run in a secure virtuality. Immediately, in this virtuality’s albescent space, something manifested and spoke.