The remote finally led her to where progress was blocked by great lumpy bags some ten feet across interconnected by numerous gutlike tubes. Her diamond-shaped remote landed on one of these bags and all its kin began to jostle against each other like nervous sheep, then opened a way through. Mika found herself falling back gently towards massive black rib bones, and realized she had come close enough to the sphere’s surface to experience Dragon’s minimal gravity. Settling against one such bone she watched the remote crawl to the newly opened passage and flop inside it, but that being too narrow to fly through, it then progressed with the gait of a wounded bat. She launched herself towards the same passage and followed it inside. Eventually they entered a tunnel, through numerous thick and intricately constructed layers, and Mika was now able to see Dragon’s armour at first hand. She rested a glove against a layer of thick brassy metal, observed further strata holding what looked like glass shock absorbers each as thick as a finger, studied another layer with the appearance of soggy fruitcake, and yet another beyond it with the bluish metallic gleam of superconductor. One of the lumpy bags oozed in to block off the passage behind her and, glancing back to watch this she saw myriad threads jet across the gap and bind together. It seemed Dragon was now sealing off this access to its interior.

Now the gas within the space she occupied fogged and began to draw away into numerous protruding tube ends. Checking her suit readout she watched the pressure drop only momentarily then begin to rise again. When something like enormous eyelids opened above to expose a metal surface inlaid with curved lines meeting at the centre, she deduced Dragon was equalizing the pressure here with what lay beyond that metal surface.

Mika hauled herself up towards what she now recognized as the underside of the hatch leading into the conferencing unit. With a steely slither the irised hatch opened, so she pushed up to the lip and pulled herself over it, then rolled over to lie flat on her back, heavy as lead now on the functioning gravplates.

‘Full outside view,’ she panted.

Something black roiled overhead, the glint of stars was only occasionally visible just above the draconic horizon and, even while she watched, this mass appeared to draw visibly closer.

‘So, Dragon, I take it we have finally arrived,’ she said, directing her voice towards the hatch. No reply, so, after checking the external atmosphere readout before opening her helmet, she sat upright and immediately noted the small impact craters in the floor surrounded by aureoles of metal once molten but now again solidified. Glancing up she could just about pick out, against that roiling black, the patches that the automated repair system had extruded into place. Had she still been here inside when the two spheres went up against the wormships, there was a very good chance she would no longer be alive.

As she removed her gloves and powered down her suit, the diamond-shaped remote rose into view with a sound like flapping leather. However, the moment it crossed above the gravplates it dropped and hit the deck like a huge piece of steak. It lay there struggling weakly, then extruded two stalk eyes which it directed towards her as if in accusation. The eyes were piercing blue, and Mika stared at this draconic creation for a long moment before she stood and walked heavily over to her console

First she adjusted the light amplification to give her the same view she’d seen from within the cyst. The black mass above quickly shaded to grey, then to white, as if she was gazing into a fog bank. Then she called up feeds from the scanners positioned all about the conferencing unit. In moments she was getting images from wide EM scans penetrating deeper into the mass, and data about its constituents. Mostly it seemed to consist of sparse hydrogen, rock dust and snow, though not necessarily snow composed of water ice. Mika began to identify some larger objects out there, then, discovering that the view behind was exactly the same, realized they were actually within the accretion disc itself. Outside the conferencing unit a thin fog seemed to have settled. While she studied this a white laser stabbed up, and something erupted into red fire where its beam impacted. There followed more and more explosions, and on the surface outside she saw meteor strikes while simultaneously the defensive green gas laser of the unit began lancing out to intercept and vaporize falling debris. Returning her attention to her console screen she recognized some of the approaching objects Dragon was firing upon. There were rod-forms out there, also pieces like the remains of destroyed worm-ships — even a distorted lens-shape, that being another variety of Erebus’s combat ships. But that wasn’t all: there were things like fragments of coral, tree branches, weirdly distorted spiral shells, insectile horrors looking like something sculpted ineptly out of pieces collected in a scrapyard. The variety was bewildering.

Then came the blinding turquoise flash of one of the equatorial cannons, and the lens ship exploded, many of the smaller chunks of Jain-tech turning to ash.

‘The intensity of these attacks will increase for a while,’ Dragon observed.

She looked over; there was no sign of a head or pseudopods in the conferencing unit. She assumed Dragon must have reactivated her suit radio, but a check of her wrist display showed that the suit was still powered down.

‘But there should be less of them as we go deeper,’ Dragon added.

Right, thought Mika, talking inside my head now.

It became the least of her worries when she saw on her screen the monstrous horde now heading straight towards them.

Knobbler turned off into a wider side corridor more suitable for his bulk while Orlandine headed for the drop-shaft at the far end of the current one. Sending instructions to its control panel, which, like just about everything else aboard this massive beast, was now infested with Jain-tech, she stepped into the shaft and the irised gravity fields wafted her up two floors. She stepped out into a small control centre under a domed chainglass ceiling. A horseshoe of consoles occupied the floor of the circular room, and right in the middle of them a scaffold supporting the control sphere Knobbler had fashioned for her. Its door stood open, a few steps leading up. Orlandine mounted them, entered and ensconced herself in a familiar environment.

Though having remained connected by electromagnetic means to the Jain-tech within the war runcible, Orlandine knew this was not at all ideal. As soon as the Polity tech of the sphere engaged with her carapace, her horizons expanded, and when the Jain mycelia of the runcible, which had earlier invaded this sphere, connected with the part of itself already inside her body, those horizons became vast. She could now see the massive device all at once, in its entirety, from the numerous sensors positioned around its hull and also within it. She could not only see all this visually but across a broad chunk of the EM spectrum, with the option of using even more esoteric scanning methods like gravity mapping. But even that was not all.

Orlandine controlled nearly everything and could equally assume control of all those things currently in the remit of the drones aboard, like the runcible’s weapons. The positional thrusters and fusion engines evenly dispersed about the runcible lay at her virtual fingertips. The four remaining U-space engines she could start at will, though, with one engine missing and the others not yet balanced, that would result in the runcible arriving not only turned inside out — but at four separate locations. Almost negligently she set into motion tuning and balancing programs to extend the coverage of those four engines so that they would work in concert. Then there was the matter of the runcible gate itself. As she assumed that space Bludgeon had previously occupied and never really used, she began to appreciate the massive complexity of the technology. The base control programs loading to her carapace, she saw, were presently at four per cent of her memory/processing space, and when fully loaded in a few minutes they would take up a full eight per cent, but when she started actually using the device, that figure would rise to nearly fifty per cent.