‘Then show me this attack plan,’ Orlandine instructed.

Randal made a packet of information available to her. After taking sufficient precautions she opened it and absorbed all it contained.

‘You see where, with a suitable weapon, you can bring Erebus down?’ Randal pointed out.

‘I do,’ Orlandine replied.

‘But when the time comes for this, you’ll need the updated codes to enable you to configure your chameleonware to Erebus’s scanning format — to hide yourself.’

‘You’ll provide these?’

‘I cannot here and now, because they’ll have changed, and I am no longer in contact with my other selves.’

‘So how do I obtain them?’

‘In my estimation you cannot, since your task will take all of your own resources,’ Randal replied. ‘However, I have prepared for this, and another individual will bring these codes to you at a prearranged rendezvous.’

‘This individual is?’

‘Highly capable and… motivated. And more than able, with the technology he possesses, to take on elements of Erebus’s forces even without the codes and chameleonware to conceal him. He will follow a predicted and vengeful course sure to eventually bring him into contact with one of those elements, somewhere, whereupon one of my other selves will contact him.’

‘Who is this individuAI?’

Randal told her.

‘That is… dubious.’

‘It is the best I can offer,’ Randal supplied firmly, and Orlandine had to be content with that.

Later, after taking many precautions, Orlandine connected to the AI nets of the Polity and learned more about the attack on Klurhammon, her homeworld, where she was born. Still there was part of her that did not want to believe what Randal had just shown her. Desperately trying to obtain detail about what had happened to the population back home, she learned only that millions had died. She decided to take another more dangerous risk, accessed her inbox on the AI nets only to find ten quite large messages all labelled ‘A gift from an admirer’ and snatched these from under the nose of the ECS hunter-killer programs that had been placed in the vicinity to track her down. Nine of the messages were exactly the same, each showing in startling detail the horrible scenes she had already witnessed. The tenth contained something she recognized at once as a virus, another Randal — which she deleted.

She believed it all then, and hatched her plans, which led her here to this all but empty reach of interstellar space — empty but for that one massive object out there: a war runcible.

‘Well this brings us no closer to knowing why Erebus ever came here,’ said Cormac.

Smith had a medical pack open and was positioning a field autodoc over the injured woman’s arm stump. With a nerve blocker in at the shoulder and her severed veins being sealed, the woman already looked better and was gazing up at her and her companions’ rescuers with curiosity. Cormac, meanwhile, studied the other two rescuees.

One was a young man, maybe a teenager, though of course someone’s precise age was a difficult thing to divine when one’s appearance could be chosen. The other looked older, but of similar appearance to the younger, with jet-black hair, dark almost-joined eyebrows and a hatchet of a nose that had certainly not been the beneficiary of cosmetic surgery. Like the youngster he was a haiman — the man was shirtless so Cormac had already seen the connector sockets down his spine — but unlike the youngster he did not wear a carapace. The more youthful one had a carapace clinging to his back like a giant iron woodlouse. He also wore a full assister frame, which provided additional limbs extending at the waist.

Cormac allowed that other new perception some play, and detected Polity technology laced through their bodies: the gridlinks capping their brains inside their skulls, the numerous optics and wires threaded along bones, and the electro-optical nerve interfaces studding their flesh. The sight of it disturbed him on some deep level, for perhaps it was just too much like those snakes in the flesh he had seen earlier, so he quickly returned to gazing upon solid reality.

‘Thank you,’ said the older one.

‘It’s what ECS is for. What’s your name?’

‘Carlton Egengy.’ He gestured to the other. ‘My brother Cherub.’ Then he glanced down to the woman lying on the floor. ‘We didn’t have the time to get acquainted.’

‘Jeeder Graves,’ she supplied.

‘Out on the Chester Flats?’

She nodded. ‘That’s the place.’

Cormac could not help but feel a little irritation at this exchange. It was inconsequential and did not advance his mission at all. Then abruptly he felt himself focusing back on it. At the end of his last mission he had regretted not getting to know those around him, those many soldiers who had died, some of them protecting him from the suicidal impulse he had felt after seeing his colleague Thorn incinerated right before him. He deliberately ran the names of the three before him, internally, through his gridlink, to see if he had anything on file. Nothing came up. Next he took the risk of attempting to query the local server, routing any reply he might receive through sealed processing space filled with programs for dealing with Jain worms and viruses. As expected, there were a few attempts made to get to him through the link, easily dealt with by his new defensive software. But there was nothing else — nothing at all. A further query rendered an interesting result. Yes, there was a great deal of corruption from all the Jain-tech in the area, but that should not have randomly erased everything. All Klurhammon’s files, all the information stored here about this world, were totally gone. He shook his head. He had allowed himself to be more human, and that had rendered the clearest intelligence of all. Serendipity? No, luck.

‘King, the whole net for this world seems to be down,’ he sent. ‘Much that is pertinent to this place has been deleted.’

After the usual delay, the AI replied, ‘I see. I had not noticed that since I was deliberately avoiding any connections to the local servers. I suggest that henceforth you do the same.’

‘No pain, no gain,’ Cormac sent back, feeling some satisfaction that he had been first to spot the lack of retained information here.

In reply he received something that sounded like an electronic snort.

Cormac turned to his companions. ‘It seems that Erebus’s aim in attacking was to wipe out all the stored files here pertinent both to this world and its population.’

‘And it was successful?’ wondered Smith.

‘It was successful,’ Cormac confirmed.

‘That don’t help us a lot,’ said Smith, and nodded over to where Arach was peering down at the charred remains of one of the Jain-infected humans. Something was moving there in crusted skin and liquefied fat. ‘Maybe we can get some answers direct from the tech Erebus left here?’

‘Doubtful.’ Cormac shook his head. ‘If Erebus was covering up something here, it wouldn’t leave clues lying around like that. More likely we’ll just find booby traps.’

‘I don’t think that was all it was here for.’

Cormac turned. It was the haiman youth who had spoken.

‘What do you mean?’

‘The android — I don’t think it was here just to erase information.’

The elder was looking at his brother curiously. ‘You said nothing about an android, Cherub.’

Cherub grimaced at his brother. ‘We were both too busy trying not to end up dead to have time to talk about it.’

‘Go on,’ said Cormac.

The youth shook his head. ‘It landed by the city—’

‘Describe the craft.’

‘I don’t need to. I can send you an image feed right now.’

‘Then do so.’

Cormac’s gridlink picked up the query for linkage, as it had been picking up so many others from the surrounding area — queries he had instructed it to ignore. Signal strength was right for it being from the haiman youth before him, but he ran it through the same defensive programs as he did with anything else he allowed into his gridlink on this contaminated world. The boy had sent two visual files, which was risky, since it was possible for harmful stuff to be embedded in them. No riders as far as he could see, so running viral and worm-scanning programs all the while, he studied the files.