‘Oh yeah?’

‘Ours is not to reason why—’

‘Yeah, no need to go on.’

‘It seems,’ Cormac now replied to Smith, ‘that we’re just about to get bloody.’

Once the two spheres had again dropped into U-space, Dragon retreated into itself and refused to communicate. Mika tried accessing the memstore recounting the Atheter story but found it kept knocking her out of the circuit… almost like it resented her intrusion. Instead, she returned her attention to the data being collected by the probes deep inside Dragon. As she had noted before, there was something going on here that went beyond Dragon’s control of its U-space engines.

Her screen now showed the shifting of large amounts of material, massive energy surges and a great deal of computing… of thinking. Perhaps Dragon was busy doing things it felt constrained from doing while it was under direct Polity observation. The alien entity had, after all, broken its Maker programming and was now free to do and be whatever it wanted, but what did it want? She began running analyses to try and make some sense out of all she was seeing. After a few hours she had worked out that Dragon was building numerous additional layers of skin below its scales — layers of super-conducting meshes and all sorts of complex metallic compounds — and that it was also constructing large tubes that ported at the surface all about its equator. That was as far as she got in her quest when abruptly the entity surfaced to the real.

‘Are we at our destination?’ she asked.

There came no reply. However, the journey till now could not have taken them that far, and somehow she felt that Dragon’s journey would be a long one. Exterior view was still available, but all she could see was star-flecked space and the other Dragon sphere rising over a scaled horizon. Turning the scanners outwards rewarded her with more detail. They were in orbit about a dead sun: there were no planets here, just a massive ring of asteroidal debris. The scanners revealed that the two spheres were closing in on an asteroid shaped like a mile-long chicken egg with a large chunk excised from one side. The images were not particularly clear, for this asteroid lay on the other side of her own Dragon sphere and the scanning equipment had been designed to scan the sphere itself rather than anything beyond it.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.

Still nothing.

‘Well, screw you,’ she said. ‘If you won’t tell me, then I’ll just take a look.’

She had hoped this at least would elicit some response, since the idea of taking her intership craft out did not appeal to her, especially since last time it had nearly resulted in her death. However, she was uncharacteristically feeling pissed off and stubborn so, closing up her suit, she headed for the exit and was soon outside.

Halfway over to her craft she suddenly wished she’d stayed safely inside, for, just a few paces out from her, she glimpsed a flicker of movement. Concentrating her gaze she watched a hemisphere of smoke, or dust, expand and disperse. At its central point, on the surface, she saw one large scale with a glowing crater in it measuring about a foot across. A line of similar hemispheres then bloomed in the distance. Meteor activity. Mika knew that even something the size of a sand grain, travelling at the kind of speeds materials could attain in vacuum, might easily cut her in half. She had two choices now, get quickly into the intership craft, which, like all Polity craft, would have some kind of anti-meteor laser, or return to the unit, which would have even better defences. She chose the craft.

Even as she launched from Dragon’s surface, a screen display warned her, ‘Travel at present is inadvisable due to increased meteor activity.’ A few tens of yards up from the surface something puffed to dust over to one side of her craft, then she glimpsed the green bar of a laser picked out by that same dust. She tried to ignore it and concentrate on flying the craft to a point where she could gain a better view. As a precaution she avoided the area directly opposite the other sphere, since there lay the gravity phenomenon that kept the two spheres linked together like barbells. Suddenly it felt as if the craft’s steering had failed for now it seemed to be wobbling its way through vacuum. She closed her eyes for a moment and then, when she reopened them, focused only on the instruments before her. No variation in her vector. Now looking down, she noticed the Dragonscape was heaving like the torso of a woman in labour.

Soon the asteroid rose into view, but it took a moment for her to realize why it seemed so familiar. Then she saw it looked a little like Deimos — though of course this object was bare of the mining facilities that covered that moon of Mars. She swung her craft high and, seeing the gap between Dragon and the asteroid was still closing, positioned herself for a better view of the contact point. Some frustrating work with the controls finally enabled her to start autopilot, the craft maintaining its position relative to her own Dragon sphere’s centre point. When she eventually looked up, what seemed like a shadow was now growing at the contact point, until she eventually discerned an asterisk-shaped break in Dragon’s surface. As she watched, the legs of this thing extended and extended to cover nearly one full hemisphere of Dragon, then great blades of thick skin began to fold out like the sepals of a flower. From this cavity rose a massive trunk, hundreds of yards wide, tangled all over with pseudopods. Mika had seen this thing before when the two Dragon spheres had connected to share their knowledge — before trying to kill each other. The sight frightened and awed her.

Nearly reaching the asteroid, the trunk abruptly divided at its end into six enormous branches. The sight reminded her of a Terran tubeworm spreading its fronds to feed, and she thought maybe that wasn’t such a bad analogy. These six branches eventually closed on the asteroid and began drawing it in. Mika returned her attention to Dragon itself, and saw that the cavity was now about a mile wide. She could just see inside, where massive ribs rimmed a huge chamber like the ridging inside a reptile’s gullet. There were snakish things moving there, and great veined organs pulsing and shivering. Gleams of blue and red were scattered throughout it, like the lights inside the huge bay of some industrial ship. Yet this cavity still did not seem big enough to swallow the entire rock but, even as she watched, it shuddered and expanded further, then the surface of Dragon rippled as the whole entity expanded too.

Dragon drew the asteroid right inside itself, where bands of red flesh swiftly drew over it and things like living drill rigs, uncoiling masses of umbilici as they descended, dropped to the rock’s surface. The sepals closed across, but they did not meet each other. Even while Mika watched, pseudopods began sprouting around the edges of the star-shaped cavity and extended themselves across the intervening gap, joining together like webs cast by a spider, gradually stitching it all together. Then her craft accelerated. Dragon was moving again — that centre point had shifted.

Over the next hour she watched as skin was stretched and drawn together, leaving a star-shaped hole some hundreds of yards across. After a further hour, debris began geysering out from this aperture: boulders, flakes of rock at least a yard wide, amid lumps of conglomerate and dust. Dragon excrement. A little while after witnessing this, she noticed another asteroid drawing near, then gradually her view of that was occluded by the other sphere. A rock each then.

‘So you stopped off for lunch then,’ she commented, as a giggle ejected itself from somewhere below her sternum.

The hauler Clarence Bishop was a brick-shaped craft a mile long, most of its hull taken up by a series of massive square cargo doors. To the rear, separated from the bulk of the ship by bubble-metal pylons, was a massive ion drive. Manoeuvring thrusters jutted from the main body wherever they would not interfere with the smooth opening of the cargo doors. In a small rear hold sat a U-space engine added fifty years before, when the ship’s captain, Hieronymus Janger, had accrued enough wealth to move from insystem to interstellar hauling. In such a large ship one would have expected a large complement of crew, but most of the vessel was taken up by numerous holds packed full of cargo. Janger himself and a bolshy AI called Clarence were the only occupants.