‘There,’ said King. ‘Another one.’

A square red frame appeared in the viewing dome to select out part of the blackness beyond and magnify it — the frame expanding to blot out the asteroid entirely and bring something else into view. At first this could have been mistaken for mere asteroid debris, but after a moment Cormac recognized two identical squat cylindrical segments loosely linked by a fibrous tangle. This tangle resembled optics or maybe tree roots but was actually Jain-tech.

‘What the hell happened here?’

‘Maybe Orlandine had a falling-out with Erebus?’ suggested King. ‘Maybe Erebus wanted to meld with her and she objected to the idea.’

‘Well, you would know about that, wouldn’t you?’

King emitted an angry snort, then went on, ‘It could be that the wormships destroyed here were rebel ones. That human captain you saw certainly wanted to break away from Erebus.’

Cormac nodded. ‘Yeah, could be.’

But Cormac really wasn’t sure, which seemed a permanent state of mind with him lately. Yes there might be elements of Erebus which, like Henrietta Ipatus Chang, wanted to break away, but he did not think there would be many of them, and few of those would even be capable of doing so. Allowing his U-sense to slide beyond the ship, he detected more of those same Jain-tech fragments spread widely through space and could feel a buzzing echo in the U-continuum of the dramatic event that had occurred here. Orlandine had used the war runcible to destroy one or more wormships, that seemed certain, and he would have to keep this in mind when they eventually reached her.

The image of the asteroid slid to one side as King of Hearts turned and accelerated past it. Cormac braced himself for the moment the AI would engage its U-drive, yet, when it did so, he felt perfectly stable and in no danger of drifting away. He gazed up at the greyed-out dome and beyond it, and felt the pull of U-space with the enjoyment of revelling in a breeze rather than trying to stay upright in a hurricane.

‘Can you give me a hologram of the war runcible?’ he asked.

‘Certainly,’ King replied.

The war runcible instantly materialized, hanging just above the glass floor of the bridge and slowly turning. Though Cormac had known about this artefact, he had never really speculated on its shape, which now came as something of a surprise to him.

‘Why a pentagon?’ he asked.

‘Just two runcible horns are sufficient to sustain a Skaidon warp large enough to open the way for objects of your size,’ said King. ‘Further horns are required as the size of that warp increases. Four horns are optimum for a runcible of this size, with a fifth one for stability as the warp is extended further.’

‘Why not make bigger horns?’

‘In the first instance, these horns are bigger than those of either a passenger runcible or a normal planetary cargo runcible. In the second instance, do you really want me to explain runcible theory to you?’

‘Maybe not,’ Cormac admitted.

‘Oh good,’ said King, in a tone heavy on the sarcasm.

‘So, where would be the best place to put the CTD?’

A piece of the runcible separated out, carrying away with it some of the hull, a disc-shaped control blister and many internal components. Exposed inside were parallel corridors running through the gaps between three long cylinders that terminated at each end in spheres. Just before the latter, each of the corridors ended against a vertical shaft containing old-style spiral stairs. Even with the section of hologram removed, what remained was still tightly packed with a complicated tangle of ducts, transformers, interconnecting passageways, catwalks and cubic stacks that Cormac recognized as laminar batteries.

‘Why spiral stairs?’ he enquired. ‘I know this runcible is old, but it’s not ancient.’

‘The three cylinders you are seeing are the buffers for this particular segment of the runcible. Detonating the CTD here, or in the equivalent place in any other segment, will take the device completely out of commission.’ King paused contemplatively. ‘Spiral stairs, since you ask, because inductance from the runcible buffers would interfere with the irised gravity field in any conventional drop-shaft. Just consider, when was the last time you saw a drop-shaft located anywhere near a runcible?’

This was true: he never had.

‘What about gravplates — since they’re the same sort of tech?’ he asked.

‘Similar, but they produce a static gravity field, while drop-shafts produce a moving one.’

‘I see.’ Cormac gazed at the hologram before him and tried to imprint it on his mind. For back-up he applied to King’s server and downloaded the entire schematic to his gridlink. He turned to go, then paused to ask, ‘How long until we reach the corridor through to Earth?’

‘Less than an hour now.’

Cormac headed for his cabin.

The true size of those blooms of Jain coral only became evident as Dragon drew close enough to them for Mika to see something caught in the fork of two branches amid the many. Gazing at it she wondered if it might be some sort of biomech crouching there ready to leap on passers-by, then she saw writing on its side and abruptly recognized an old-style attack ship, whereupon everything jumped up a magnitude in scale. Only then did she pay full attention to the data provided by her sensors now scrolling up on her screen.

From behind, where the other Dragon sphere faced off the massive Jain biomech, came perpetual surges of EMR — in consonance with the waxing and waning of the light out there. The two were still battling, but it was not this that riveted her attention. The incoming data now gave her the true scale of the partially conjoined spherical blooms. Each of the seven possessed a diameter of no less than five thousand miles. Mika cursed silently.

‘Note the density,’ said the Dragon inside her head.

Yes, these structures certainly occupied a substantial volume of space, yet their density was akin to that of bushes, or maybe a better analogy would be tumbleweeds.

‘Density noted,’ said Mika. ‘What’s that supposed to tell me?’

‘I’m guessing that Trafalgar landed on a moonlet or an asteroid, which it then processed during the first phases of acquiring and controlling Jain-tech,’ Dragon replied. ‘The rest of the AI exodus was gathered in close orbit about that same landing place.’

The Dragon sphere was now getting incredibly close to the nearest bloom of coral. Looking up from the conferencing unit was a disquieting experience, because this bloom stretched from horizon to horizon. It was as if an endless ceiling from which depended a forest of bone trees descended towards her, or maybe a mass of the kind of branching stalactites found in the caves of low-gravity worlds. Deeper in, amid the tangle, she saw the boxy shape of a scout ship melded into a limb of coral, where numerous thin branches had sprung from it as if it were the core of an epiphyte.

‘So now that we are at the centre of things,’ ventured Mika, ‘are you going to be more precise about why we’ve come here?’ She asked this almost because she felt that she should, not because she hoped for any clear answer from Dragon and not, oddly, because she needed an answer.

‘You must go to Trafalgar for me,’ said Dragon. ‘I am fairly certain that it lies at the centre of this particular bloom of Jain technology.’

Mika felt a rumbling vibration through the floor and, when movement at the horizon attracted her attention, she looked over to see a pseudopod tree spearing towards the bone forest. She watched as it reached the Jain coral and penetrated, fraying and spreading out as it did so. The vibration steadied at a low note and, checking scan returns, Mika saw that, in relation to the mass before them, Dragon was now stationary. The sphere had clearly moored itself to their destination.