Now heading to his cabin, he felt a slight jolt as King of Hearts rose on AG, then further jolting, compensated for by the gravplate floor, as it accelerated. Pausing to steady himself against the corridor wall, he considered other deaths. There were more than he liked to think about, but one in particular was on his mind at that moment.

It had struck him as odd that the sub-minds running this world until a new runcible AI was initiated had experienced such difficulty tracking down the record of the female captain of the wormship whose destruction had resulted in Scar’s death, since her DNA had been recorded in Polity databases. Because of this delay he had made some queries himself through his gridlink and quickly obtained a copy of that record — meanwhile learning that Hubbert Smith already also possessed a copy he had not passed on. Perhaps it was his growing distrust of AIs that kept Cormac quiet, and he made no comment when Smith later transmitted it to him as if only just having received it himself. Comparing the two records, Cormac soon found inconsistencies.

Hubbert’s copy of her record named her Henrietta Ipatus Chang, known as Henry to her friends, who on the whole were mostly silicon-brained and heavily armoured like Arach, though she did occasionally associate with humans of the same inclination as herself. She had joined ECS at the youthful age of eighteen, and was fighting and killing Prador in the many vicious ground conflicts during that war by the time she was twenty. She had exited the end of the Prador war as a human version of the war drone: disenfranchised by peace, unable to fit in to this new society nor particularly wanting to fit in either. Throughout the war her best and few surviving friends had been drones and Golem, so when many of them decided to leave the Polity aboard the dreadnought Trafalgar, she had asked to join them. It seemed that the Trafalgar AI — which had now become Erebus — had allowed her and certain other humans to join the exodus. Apparently there had been as many as eighty-three of them amid the horde of AIs which defected. Presumably this explained how Henry had ended up as a component slotted into a wormship.

The problem was that the copy of her record that Cormac obtained first was different. This earlier version had it that she had never felt disenfranchised and never in fact joined Trafalgar’s exodus. After the war she had continued serving in ECS for another twenty years and had been involved in many subsequent police actions throughout the Polity. Later she was seconded to some black ops mission about which the details were unclear, whereupon she was subsequently listed as missing in action. But this was not the worst of it. When Cormac checked again through the planetary sub-minds, he found that the original record had now been deliberately altered. There were levels of subterfuge here Cormac very much did not like, which now only increased his suspicions about the motives of the Polity AIs in this matter. His suspicions about Hubbert Smith had also been confirmed.

Moving on, Cormac finally reached his cabin and noted that the screen was switched on. It showed the curving planetary horizon already dropping from view, and he realized that King had been using more than the gravplates set in the floor to compensate for the kind of acceleration needed to get them out here this quickly. The glare of the sun lit up several glinting objects, then shadow quickly fell across the scene, as the attack ship put the planet between itself and that distant furnace. But the view was clearer now, and Cormac could see that King of Hearts would have to fly with particular care here. Cormac had only ever witnessed so much space junk around devastated worlds the Prador had hit during the war that Henry had fought so hard in. Could this conflict be turning into something as catastrophic as that? At present it was still defined only as a Line war since, though many whole worlds had already been attacked, they represented but a small fraction of the Polity. However, Erebus possessed the capacity to turn this into something more cataclysmic, and Erebus’s agents could be anywhere.

Orlandine Taser 5…

She should be his primary focus now, not the unrecoverably dead, not numberless regrets, not nebulous feelings of guilt or suspicions over the motivation of Polity AIs. He really needed to find her, for it was evident that she controlled Jain technology and had now gained control of a weapon that in some areas of the Polity was considered a myth… but then again on some Polity worlds there were those who claimed the entire Prador-human war was simply a horror story created by the AIs to keep human beings in line. As much as Cormac had come to distrust the motivations and agendas of those who now ruled, he himself couldn’t deny the reality of that war. Too much fallout from it still remained, as a young ECS groundtrooper he himself had been involved in clearing up some of the mess, and only later, as an ECS agent, had he come to appreciate its truly gigantic scale.

True… if my memories are actually true, he speculated, then told himself to shut up. He must drop that subject from his mind or else go mad. Just focus on the now: how to find Orlandine.

Underspace was theoretically supposed to possess neither distance nor time. You could enter it at one point in the universe, then exit it a thousand light years away just an instant later — or even before you entered it. That was the theory but, as ever, the reality was a lot more complicated. U-space did have dimensions, though whether they could be described as width, depth, breadth and time was debatable. Entering it in one place and leaving it an instant later a thousand light years distant was theoretically possible, yet the same rules applied there as in realspace: the quicker you wanted to move it from point A to point B, the more energy you needed to inject, this increasing in proportion to the mass of the object in question. That was why it took longer to travel X light years by ship than it did for a human to travel the same distance by runcible, or indeed for information to travel by U-com. Travelling through that same continuum, the ship was a massive object carrying its own power supply with it. The human, by contrast, was a very light object being propelled by a fixed device with huge energy resources, while an information package was practically without any mass at all. To most people in the Polity, runcible transportation and U-com might seem instantaneous, but in fact they weren’t. But Cormac did not want to travel through U-space right then, he just wondered how far he could see through it with his U-sense; wondered if from here he could spot the war runcible that Orlandine Taser 5 had stolen.

Cormac lay back on his bed and relaxed, releasing his hold upon his U-sense and letting it expand out from where the King of Hearts now sat in orbit about Ramone. Soon the sheer scale of the mess here became more evident. Ramone sparkled like a piece of iron just taken from the furnace, for it was the centre of a perpetual meteor storm as chunks of wormship, other Jain constructs and, unfortunately, the remnants of many Polity ships fell into its atmosphere and burned up. Around the planet the debris cloud lay eight thousand miles deep, and certainly over the ensuing years would settle itself into a ring. Also, one astronomical unit out, there was another even larger cloud of debris extending nearly two million miles across. Within this a few remaining Polity ships were still busy hunting, firing missiles into any larger chunks of worm-ship that appeared to have enough life left in them to regenerate, incinerating stray rod-forms and generally sterilizing the entire area. The rest of the Polity ships, along with the leviathan Cable Hogue, had already jumped outsystem to join other battles.