‘Now what?’

‘Now I land,’ Dragon replied.

Even in the brief time it had taken for her to retrieve the memstore, Masada had grown huge. Mika made her way back to the acceleration chair, strapped herself in and tilted it right back. She didn’t expect there to be any problems, but if there were, she would rather survive them without the need for further repairs to her body by Dragon. Soon the sphere was clipping atmosphere, and what started as an intermittent whistling turned to a constant roar as vapour trails unravelled above her. Amid the buffeting, she could now feel the tug of gravity from below running athwart that produced by the gravplates of the conferencing unit. The Dragon sphere rolled slightly, as if to give her a better view, and she now gazed down upon the face of the planet with the horizon blurring in cloud above her head. For the next half-hour, the sphere became completely immersed in cloud, finally breaking through only a few miles above the surface. Mika gazed down upon a mountain range snaking along below, then felt a tug of nostalgia upon seeing the familiar chequerboard of ponds, then the wild boggy flatlands covered with flute grasses.

Dragon abruptly decelerated, the roar from outside turning to a rumbling thunderstorm. As they descended, and as the ground raced up towards her, she briefly feared that Dragon intended burying her conferencing unit in boggy ground, but the sphere tilted up again at the last moment. Outside the air filled with boiling clouds of steam and shreds of flute grass. Mika felt disorientated, since she was being pulled by the unit’s internal gravplates, which rested at an acute angle to the gravity of the planet. The humanoid Dragon head slid into view above her, with a pseudopod on each side of it.

‘Time to step outside,’ announced Dragon.

Mika unstrapped herself and made her way unsteadily towards the airlock, while the head and pseudopods disappeared back inside Dragon. Under the combined effect of two gravity fields, it was like making her way precariously down a steep slope. Once inside the airlock, she carefully closed her spacesuit helmet, since the air outside was too thin for any human to breath. After the airlock opened she tried to convey herself with some dignity to the boggy surface a few yards below but still disorientated lost her balance and fell onto the ground in a heap. Cursing, she struggled to stand upright on a mat of rhizomes, then inspected the black mud spattered all over her suit and began stumbling through the papyrus-like flute to reach a wide area where the vegetation had been flattened.

‘If you would follow the locator,’ suggested Dragon’s voice in her helmet, as a separate frame appeared in one side of her visor. She turned to her left until the frame was centred, then set out determinedly. After a moment the frame winked out.

‘Where, exactly, am I going?’

‘To the location of the Atheter artefact.’

‘I take it there are no hooders in the vicinity?’ Mika asked, referring to a local life form whose feeding habits were a legend of horror.

‘Do not be concerned — I am with you,’ Dragon replied.

‘What?’

‘Down here with the tricones.’

‘Oh.’

Tricones were molluscs that lived deep in the mud. The latest research claimed them to be organisms biofactured by the Atheter race for the sum purpose of grinding up the remnants of their civilization here, just as the hooders were claimed as biofactured war organisms whose sole purpose now was to ingest the remains of every gabbleduck that died. So Dragon was down in the mud, doubtless spreading pseudopods throughout the area and quite possibly even feeding.

As she trudged over a series of rhizome mats, pushed through stands of flute grass and avoided or hurdled the gulleys formed by breaks in the ubiquitous mats, something began to come into view ahead of her. After a moment she recognized a domed roof constructed of photoelectric glass — a material often used in Polity buildings. Next, the whole building became abruptly visible as she pushed through a last stand of flute grass and stepped up onto a yard-thick layer of plasticrete. It was a simple open structure: a low dome supported on a ring of pillars. There appeared to be nothing inside it, and no sign of anyone else about.

The plasticrete trembled a couple of times, doubtless being tested by something below, then the rhizome mat behind Mika tore open and, covered in black mud, a Dragon pseudopod tree sprouted and opened its limbs, then coiled over and down to slide in beside Mika. She glanced briefly over at its humanoid head then set out towards the building, Dragon keeping pace with her as more of its trunk slid out of the ground behind. Finally she walked between the pillars onto a floor made of ceramal gratings. She noted there were consoles set into some of the pillars, but other than these there seemed to be nothing else of significance here.

‘So where exactly is this Atheter artefact?’ she enquired.

‘Look down.’

Mika abruptly felt quite stupid, as she had known the artefact to be a large disc of incredibly tough memory crystal, so the shape of this building should have given her a clue. She peered down into the layer immediately below the ceramal gratings and, showing here and there through the mud trailed in by casual visitors, some of them quite possibly gabbleducks, she could discern areas of translucent green crystal.

‘Seems a rather careless way of preserving it,’ said Mika.

‘I really wanted to be just dumped on the surface, but your AIs insisted on providing some sort of protective building,’ said a deep and liquidly amused voice from behind her.

Mika didn’t turn round for a moment, because she could see that whatever it was cast a very large shadow to one side of her. Dragon did turn, however.

‘But they conceded the point about you not becoming an object of veneration for the remaining religion-inclined human inhabitants here,’ said Dragon. ‘And therefore put you in the floor.’

Mika now turned to see the massive pyramidal shape of a gabbleduck, squatting right at the centre of the grated floor, its multiple forearms folded across its chest, its bill dipped onto its chest. It gazed at Dragon with a tiara of emerald eyes ranged just below the naked dome of its head, then turned slightly to fix its gaze on Mika.

‘Why are we here, Dragon?’ she asked nervously.

‘Take out that memstore and turn it on,’ Dragon replied.

Mika complied, noting that while the gabbleduck did cast a shadow, something about the line between it and the gratings it squatted on was not quite right, and she realized it was a projection. The moment the memstore came on, its normal menu screen blinked out and something started loading.

‘And this is?’ she asked.

The gabbleduck replied, ‘It is a story about a civilization’s fight for survival — and of its eventual self-destruction.’

‘Just like the one Dragon has of the Maker civilization.’

‘Yes,’ admitted the gabbleduck. ‘It’s a story that repeats itself.’

‘And who needs to hear these stories?’ Mika wondered.

‘Now you’re getting the idea,’ said Dragon, grinning.

There was no time to sleep and, in reality, sleep was something Orlandine could easily forgo, allowing the hardware in her carapace and the Jain nanotech in her body to clean things up, repair any damage, make all those necessary adjustments usually made during that outmoded pastime. However, Orlandine did sleep. She slept for the half an hour it took Heliotrope to finally close on the war runcible and then dock. She slept at an accelerated pace, cued for lucid dreaming, the subject of her dreams already mapped out… though perhaps an apter description might be nightmares.

She was aboard the Cassius Station, of which she had been overseer, and her lover Shoala was leading her by the hand towards the Feynman Lounge for another period of ‘human time’. She felt strangely light, and it took her a moment to understand that this was because in this dream-initiating memory she no longer wore the carapace that was now permanently bonded to her.