‘Certainly,’ Randal replied.

‘I take it that the coordinates we’re now heading to were supplied by you as well?’

‘Correct.’

‘So Crane trusts you now because the information you supplied before was verified?’

‘He’s a trusting sort of soul.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Then maybe he more fully understands the technology I now inhabit than do I. Few manage that, but maybe he can because he is a product of a technically evolved civilization, and in addition because he was supplied with a version of Jain-tech devoid of all its traps.’

‘From Dragon.’

‘Precisely.’

‘But what do you mean by product?’

‘As you are well aware, Jain nodes do not react to artificial intelligences. What is the difference between such intelligences and their naturally evolved creators?’

‘There are many differences.’

‘Let me rephrase the question: how, on an informational level, do you distinguish the two?’

‘Top down and bottom up,’ Vulture replied.

‘Exactly,’ said Randal. ‘Humans and others of their like have evolved moderately logical thought processes through natural selection. Their logic is a skin over chaos. The machine mind is built with pure logic from the bottom up. Therefore machines have to pretend to own that same chaos, so they model it, hence human emulation in Golem.’

Vulture wondered where the hell all this was leading. It seemed insane to be having a debate like this while being pursued by two homicidal wormships.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘so you’ve established that there is an identifiable difference, though I would argue that the rules of natural selection still apply in the realms of artificial intelligence, though faster. It is argued by some that AIs like myself are simply posthumans. But let’s move on now.’

‘Jain technology does not react to AIs, because it was biased that way by its makers: the Jain AIs. Perhaps they decided that evolved intelligences needed to be cleared out of the way so that the products of those messy organic intelligences — AIs — could get on with ruling the universe.’

‘Products like Erebus?’ Vulture suggested.

‘Erebus is flawed.’

Vulture quickly replayed the conversation and realized that, interesting as it all was, it didn’t really explain much.

‘So you gave Mr Crane information enabling him to wipe out fifty of Erebus’s wormships — a mere fly speck. And now you’ve given him coordinates. Why?’

‘Chameleonware.’

‘Explain.’

‘Another version of myself contacted someone else who, hopefully, by now has fashioned or obtained the means to rub out more than mere fly specks. However, to be successful, she will need the latest chameleonware format and recognition codes that Erebus is using.’

‘Hopefully?’ echoed Vulture, then, reviewing what had just been said, added, ‘We don’t possess that ‘ware and those codes now. It’s all changed.’

‘But the ships pursuing you do.’

Vulture considered how, now he was an integral part of the Harpy, an escape pod would be of no use to him at all.

‘She?’ he queried.

‘Her name is Orlandine, and she controls Jain technology supplied to her directly by Erebus.’

‘But she is no AI.’

‘She was, however, a rare product of evolution sufficiently intelligent to take apart a Jain node while avoiding all its traps.’

‘And I’m supposed to believe this.’

‘Whether you believe it or not is irrelevant, as Mr Crane believes it.’

And there it was really. Vulture could not change their destination. He must trust a virus, a Golem android of questionable sanity and, should he ever survive the wormships, a Jain-infested human. Vulture wasn’t at all optimistic about the outcome of all this.

When Dragon finally closed down her outside view from the cyst, Mika felt unutterably weary and drifted into sleep on the soft fleshy floor, where she dreamed of gabbleducks and woven cities and the bitter wars of a civilization fighting infection. When she woke again, in an instant like the time before, she opened her eyes on painful brightness — her view meanwhile re-established. For a moment it seemed Dragon was hovering over a snow-covered midnight plain. However, as the two spheres descended towards that same whiteness some internal detonation turned it orange and threw objects deep within it momentarily into silhouette. Then she began to get a sense of scale and realized they had reached the accretion disc. She decided she must have been put to sleep for the rest of the journey, and this rather begged the question of why Dragon had woken her to witness the twin spheres’ destruction of the five wormships. Maybe this was just more evidence to be added to the dense mass already residing in her skull?

Gazing at the view she felt a sudden deep fascination because, though having witnessed most stellar phenomena, this was not one of them. Also, if Dragon could be believed, this place swarmed with wild Jain technology. Her hands itched to be controlling the instruments she could use to study both this great object and everything it contained.

‘Did the conferencing unit survive?’ she enquired.

It again took a while for Dragon to reply, so perhaps the entity was more concerned with carefully watching everything going on outside than tending to the curiosity of the primitive little being it carried inside itself. Finally, the ceiling of the cyst split open with a liquid tearing sound, showering her with magenta juice. Above, a gap opened up through a mass of what looked like coarsegrained white muscle fibres, then gravity within the cyst abruptly shut down.

The smell from outside the cyst was intense: cloves, putrefaction, hot reptile and raw meat. Mika wrinkled her nostrils and swallowed, sure she could become inured to it, but when she started to experience difficulty breathing realized the air out there wouldn’t keep her alive. She closed up her suit helmet and with relief enjoyed her own air supply, then pushed up from the floor and floated right out of the cyst through an eye-shaped tunnel leading into wider spaces. Here hellish red glows lit up glimpses of crowded organs or mechanisms, and frequently she saw the shifting flashes of sapphire pseudopod eyes. It occurred to her that, without any sense of up or down, she might soon lose her way, but Dragon anticipated her.

‘Follow the remote to the surface,’ came its voice over her suit radio.

Peering ahead she observed a diamond-shaped fleshy object peel away from the curved heavily veined surface and flap sluggishly out into the gap in front of her. Bringing her boot down on the same surface, she altered her course to follow it. But as she did so, and gazed around at things she had always wanted to study, close up, something occurred to her. Dragon had told her that the conferencing unit might not survive what was to come, and she had assumed it had been referring to their coming adventure within the accretion disc. Now it seemed likely Dragon had been alluding to the imminent encounter with the wormships. Dragon must have known for some time that they were still following and therefore made preparations to destroy them. Mika felt annoyed Dragon had not told her about this, though she wasn’t sure why, since, amid all the other stuff Dragon did not tell her, it was hardly in the minority.

The flapping remote, which reminded her somewhat of a large skate from Earth’s oceans, continued doggedly. Mika caught hold of a solid glassy strut shaped like a chicken’s wishbone, one end of which disappeared into darkness while the other connected firmly to what looked like an iron acorn extending ten feet across. Through a cavity beyond this object the intermittent strobing of blue light revealed a great cylinder, both of its ends lost to sight. She guessed this must be one of the Dragon sphere’s equatorial weapons. Pushing off again she drifted past a cliff of solid flesh from cavities in which peeked objects like the heads of tube worms. Mika guessed their purpose was to collect for digestion or disposal any dead material drifting through Dragon’s innards.