Scanning, Cormac requested via his link.

The scan data came through piecemeal owing to the interference and constant electronic attacks. Cormac cursed and resorted to his U-sense to fill in the gaps. He mapped hollows, energy concentrations and movement, from which he built up a schematic of what lay ahead. He then formed a protean attack plan and saw it instantly applied. An explosion flung chunks of Jain coral through the air and opened up the wormship core. Soldiers stormed inside, and tanks and gun platforms entered wherever access was wide enough. Scar guided their platform in behind Smith’s adapted tank and one other to which it was still paired in wheel formation. With the still-functioning particle cannons of these twinned tanks incinerating any intervening structure, they advanced. It seemed like they had entered the interior of a ceramic wormcast, tunnels and cavities opening all around them from which unidentifiable things shrieked and skittered. He saw star-limbed monsters, created thus for travelling fast in this environment, jetting explosive bullets from between their glass mandibles. He glimpsed skeletal balls rolling out and unfolding into shapes disquietingly similar to Arach — before Arach himself destroyed them. Orders relayed to the atmosphere gunship resulted in the whole structure shaking about them as the big craft above began demolishing those areas of the wormship core irrelevant to Cormac’s purpose but certainly still containing enemy mechanisms.

As he processed the information now being presented to him by the various scanners mounted in tanks or carried by soldiers, and sometimes relayed directly from Golem sensoriums but mainly from his own penetrating sense of his surroundings, Cormac grew distant from the frenetic part of himself he labelled ‘autogun’. Briefly he wondered if this was how AIs and haimen felt when they created sub-minds and sub-personae, but there was far too much to do now for him to indulge in such idle speculation.

T3 and 5 concentrate fire on your 6 elevation 3… units 3, 5 and 7 advance and secure area designated 12 axial on globe grid…

He issued orders faster than human speech, also running subprograms to enable him to issue separate orders simultaneously. Modelling the ebb and flow of the attack in his gridlink he looked for openings, weaknesses, the best way to apply the forces at his disposal with the aim of getting Smith’s tank safely to that energy-dense concentration of matter lying deep within this core structure, though necessarily distancing himself from the lights constantly going out in this model as people and machines died all around him. Gradually, the attacks from Jain-engineered organisms ebbed around his own particular group, since it was of prime importance to protect Smith and his tank, and their reason for being here. Final barriers crashed down with the sound of shattering porcelain to reveal a chamber fifty feet across, in the centre of which was suspended some glassy concoction like a giant synapse, protrusions connecting it all around to the chamber’s walls.

And something was moving inside it.

Then suddenly all enemy movement within the ship’s core ceased.

Through the eyes of others Cormac saw biomechs simply freeze in place, automated weapons that a moment before had leapt out at them like trapdoor spiders now sagging and dying. Firing still continued for a while, but it all came from Cormac’s own forces. In reply to his query, someone in the gunship above informed him that all enemy movement for miles around had also ceased, all the Jain biomechs frozen.

Just now, Cormac thought with cold clarity, the legate right there ahead of us has obviously realized we are here to capture it, so it will destroy itself. We will be very lucky if such destruction does not include us and the entire ship’s core.

But nothing was happening.

Smith, Cormac sent, needing to add no more.

The two tanks ahead finally separated, and Smith’s vehicle accelerated, smashing its way through glassy struts. A stream of superfluid jetted towards the synapse thing like the beam of an energy weapon, but merely splashed against it and rained down. Surrounding struts shattered and the central structure tumbled. Still playing a stream of liquid helium upon it, Smith followed it down. It hit the chamber floor and shattered, spilling out something bulky and metallic. Focusing in with his gun sights, Cormac could see no sign of a legate.

‘Scar, take us down there,’ he ordered.

Soon the gravplatform was crunching down into what looked like the wreckage of an immense greenhouse. Smith’s tank settled over to one side, its superfluid gun still directed at a grey bulk amid the wreckage. Cormac unstrapped himself and stepped down to the floor, enviroboots crunching on the mess. Interference was dying all around him, while outside channels began to open and bandwidth to grow.

‘What is that?’ he wondered.

‘Still alive — I think,’ Arach replied.

Cormac turned to the drone and to Scar. ‘Stay put but be ready to get out of here fast.’

They reluctantly obeyed as he moved forward.

Drawing closer to the grey bulk he observed something like a huge coiled grub, with cold fog billowing from it. Maybe this was merely some sort of protective coating with the legate inside? Drawing his thin-gun, perhaps more for reassurance than any real expectation that it would be effective, he advanced to stand directly over the strange object. Gazing down at it, he mentally peeled away various layers to get to the core. There was something humanoid inside… something rather too humanoid. The grub-thing abruptly opened out to reveal what was bonded into its inner surface. A skeletal human face, with Jain tendrils penetrating all around its head like a Medusa hairdo, turned to gaze up at Cormac with its utterly black eyes.

‘Oddly,’ began the woman entrapped there, ‘it was his final destruct order that enabled me to break his hold… at least for a while.’ She blinked, licked her lips. ‘But now I find I am anxious for this all to end.’

‘Stay alive and help us defeat him,’ said Cormac, catching on at once.

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘While the betrayer still sits on his throne I won’t be allowed to live, and anyway I don’t want to. You have precisely ten minutes from now to get your people beyond the blast radius.’

Betrayer?

Cormac glanced towards the single barrel of Hubbert Smith’s tank, from which depended a neat line of icicles.

‘That won’t work,’ the woman advised him. ‘Get out of here now.’

‘We’ll take you with us.’

‘One of the many CTDs here sits inside what is left of me,’ she said.

Cormac didn’t have any difficulty believing her, for within the grublike object that both held her and of which she had become a component, he could see a dense mass sitting amid the spread-out parts of her body.

‘Who are you?’ he asked out loud.

‘Run now,’ she replied dreamily.

Cormac reached out and scraped a fingernail down her cheek. He was damned if he was going to leave here with absolutely nothing — there was a good chance that this little scrap of tissue under his fingernail would be able to at least tell them who she was. Then, inside her, he spotted movement: changes in electrical activity around the CTD.

‘Okay, out of here!’

Smith’s tank flipped up to rejoin its partner, the two tanks slamming together like cymbals. Cormac turned back towards the AG platform, expecting obliteration at any moment. He needed to be on that platform and away, so, without conscious consideration, he stepped past the intervening space between them, his boots slamming down on the ceramal deck. A Gatling cannon spun towards him, and Scar turned with teeth bared.

‘Go! Now!’ Cormac ordered as he quickly strapped himself into the gunner’s seat.