Frowning, Cormac returned his attention to the others seated around the table. He would have expected them to choose a game like poker, or maybe one of those derivatives of chess in which the pieces actually fought each other on the table top and died messily. That they chose to play contract whist seemed odd to him. He shifted his attention to the next player and found he still felt slightly unnerved by its presence.

He guessed it wasn’t unexpected that an attack ship AI that had named itself King of Hearts might be interested in such a game. What unnerved him was how the AI chose to manifest itself. Hunched over his cards, the ship’s avatar had adopted the external appearance of one of those sleer-human hybrids from the planet Cull, though its internal construction was doubtless based around a Golem chassis. In form it was a male human with silvery faceted eyes and pincers curving from the jawline in front of its beaked mouth.

‘Three,’ it lisped.

Now it was Cormac’s turn to declare how many tricks he intended to win. In the light of the previous bids, he again studied his hand, though not the actual cards but the images in his gridlink. He felt himself becoming the focus of much attention and wondered what the others might be trying to read from him. He deliberately raised his heart rate and made random small movements. Unfortunately he could not alter his pheromonal output, but hoped that would give nothing away. About to go for a safe zero, he suddenly had a sharp perception of himself seated at this table, with the others nearby, and the whole of U-space bearing down claustrophobically.

Something…

King’s avatar dropped its cards, then slowly bowed over until its pincers clinked against the glass table. Cormac received the impression of something like a hemispherical shock wave hurtling towards the ship. It passed through and he felt the vessel ejected up into the real. His chair slid back and he oophed as if someone had just gut-punched him, then the ship bucked and rang with a sound like a blow delivered against some massive porcelain bowl.

‘Oh bollocks,’ said Arach, tossing down his cards.

In a moment they were all on their different kinds of feet and heading for the bridge.

‘That felt like a USER,’ said Smith.

Cormac could not comment on that since he very much doubted his own feelings bore any relation to anyone else’s.

‘Could be Erebus,’ suggested Arach hopefully. ‘Or this Orlandine?’ The two hatches on his abdomen opened tentatively.

‘Could be,’ Cormac conceded. He didn’t know why the drone seemed so happy since, if they had just inadvertently encountered one of those two before safely joining the Polity fleet out of Salvaston, Arach’s only involvement with any fight would be his addition to an expanding vapour cloud that had once been the King of Hearts.

Soon they were clattering into the bridge — where Cormac quickly noted that King had added a couple more sculptures to his collection. One was of Scar, a monument or an exercise in tasteless insensitivity? Hard to tell. The other one was a Prador second-child brandishing a multi-barrelled rail-gun much like the weapons Arach currently sprouted from his back.

‘King, what’s happening?’ Cormac asked.

U-space was distant from him now, but still there. It seemed to be heaving underneath the real, like a sea in motion underneath a mat of sargassum, but what this meant Cormac had no clear idea.

‘There has been a major disruption throughout U-space,’ King replied.

‘No shit?’ said Arach dryly.

Cormac glared at the drone. It wouldn’t do to irritate King now, since the attack ship AI did have an inclination to sulkiness. ‘A USER?’ he suggested.

King continued as if the drone hadn’t even spoken. ‘The effect has been similar but is much more chaotic. I am still analysing the data.’

‘Does this mean we are trapped out here?’ wondered Smith.

That thought had not even occurred to Cormac. He gazed out through the ersatz dome at the stars winking in the blackness. Certainly the King of Hearts had been knocked up into the real of interstellar space, so if travelling through U-space had ceased to be an option, he would probably soon have to be making use of a cold-coffin. This idea did not appeal, since who knew what his frigid dreaming mind might do with his body the moment travelling in U-space once again became possible.

‘We were knocked out of underspace by what appears to be some kind of shock wave and, unless there are further waves, we should be able to return to it within the next few minutes.’

‘A shock wave from what and where?’ Cormac asked.

‘Still analysing.’ King paused for a moment, whereupon gridded spheres expanded from numerous surrounding stars to crowd up against each other. Next, grid lines appeared across the starscape, sinking away directly ahead to sketch out a funnel shape running through the intersecting spheres till its neck closed down to almost nothing. This image then became clearer when the whole scene went photo-negative. Cormac blinked at the brightness, since the starscape was now represented as black dots in a white firmament.

‘What am I seeing here?’ he asked.

‘We were merely knocked out of U-space by a side effect of the main event. U-space disruption has expanded from between twenty and thirty different locations, in each case encompassing a volume of twenty light years,’ said King. ‘It seems evident that Erebus has instigated a runcible-based multiple attack against the Polity.’

‘Why so evident?’

‘Fifteen of the planetary systems concerned were the temporary or permanent bases of ECS fleets. Many of the other planetary systems disrupted are those, where Jerusalem’s forces have been engaging. Jerusalem’s own base was also a target.’

‘What kind of runcible-based attack are we talking about here?’ Cormac felt the skin crawling on the back of his neck as he recollected a threat the original Dragon had once made — namely turning runcibles into black holes. Were ‘between twenty and thirty’ Polity worlds therefore now rubble? Were billions of citizens now dead or dying?

‘Once an enemy has obtained access to the runcible network, the most likely scenario is the transmission of imploders to detonate within the target runcible gate, and what I am seeing seems to confirm that. The effect is similar to that generated by a USER: the disruption of a large volume of surrounding U-space, though the disruption will be of limited duration and unstable.’

‘What about the effect upon the worlds involved?’

‘Minimal,’ said King. ‘The gates would emit only gamma radiation, whose destructive potential should not extend beyond any medium-sized runcible complex.’

So, no worlds trashed and no billions killed. Merely thousands, though it seemed wrong to feel so relieved to hear that. Now he speculated on what precisely was going on. Presumably this Orlandine must have used the stolen war runcible to key into the Polity network and thus send the imploders.

‘Can you give me a tactical analysis?’

‘ECS fleets brought in to cover the possibility of further attacks in this same quadrant by Erebus are now incapable of U-space travel,’ announced King.

‘Which includes the fleet out of Salvaston?’ said Cormac.

‘Precisely.’ King continued, ‘Those fleets fighting Erebus’s forces at the line itself are either confined or wholly engaged with the enemy, so unable to break away, and Jerusalem is out of contact with all of them.’

‘This will mean that Erebus’s forces there are also confined,’ observed Smith.

‘True,’ said King, ‘but those forces were only a small portion of the total. And there is the war runcible still to consider.’

‘So where are the rest of the enemy forces, and where is Orlandine?’ asked Cormac, already guessing the most likely answer.