‘You’re probably telling me because you’ve spent too much time in the company of habitually taciturn war drones,’ Orlandine quipped.

‘Just because they don’t talk that much to you doesn’t make them taciturn,’ Cutter replied. ‘It makes them sensible.’

Orlandine grimaced, then observed the horns of the cargo runcible now turning in order to wrap the Skaidon warp over themselves. Standing in the world of information at Bludgeon’s shoulder, she noted the drone monitoring the build-up in the spoon, balancing buffer energies and slowly increasing fusion-reactor output to the warp. The little ship now lay only a few miles from the fountain’s edge — and one nudge from the main drive would place it inside that appalling fire. She also noted that Heliotrope’s temperature was still rising, but kept her counsel to herself for a little while. Bludgeon then showed her he knew precisely what to do, for the three horns detached from their seatings and, driven by hard-field projectors, began to expand the triangular warp. Heliotrope’s, umbrella needed to be bigger.

‘I’ll want you to go to maximum expansion of the cargo gate,’ she explained, then wondered why, since the two drones did not need her input. ‘I will give you plenty of warning,’ she added, then focused her attention at her end, on the barrel of this massive weapon.

There was no need to run any more tests. Orlandine retuned the chameleonware for a major change in what it was hiding, then started up the war runcible’s Skaidon warp. Though the device was hidden from outside view, her view of it was perfect and she felt a thrill on seeing the meniscus ripple into being across the area enclosed by the five horns: the five runcible sections. It stabilized quickly and she then initiated the separation of these five sections. The feeling for her was almost painful, like pulling off some tightly rooted mental scab. It was almost as if the Jain-tech did not want to break off where she had prepared it to do so, which was odd since it was an insentient technology with no will of its own. Perhaps, if she survived this, she would investigate the phenomenon, which she suspected, lay somewhere at its very base.

‘I am moving to Section Three,’ Knobbler informed her.

This decision did not surprise her, since that segment of the runcible was the only one not occupied by a war drone. The drones could remotely control the weapons mounted on and in each section, but it would be best to have them nearby should anything go wrong, which it inevitably would when things started to get hot. She watched Knobbler exit rapidly through an airlock and hurtle away from one section in a trajectory that would intersect with the next section round as it moved out. She watched him spread his tentacles ready for landing then returned her attention to embrace the entire runcible. Seeing the huge device coming apart like this, even though she herself had initiated it, gave her a moment of considerable disquiet. Would the Jain mycelium properly counter the inertial effects of weapons fire from each section? Might she even have achieved her aims without expanding the gate like this?

Damn, this seemed a stupid time to have such doubts.

Then something else attracted her attention, and curiosity momentarily dispelled her disquiet. The agent, Ian Cormac, seemed to be experiencing a bit of a problem. He was bent over, leaning down against the back of the spider war drone, and, no matter how Orlandine focused her conventional sensors on him, he seemed strangely thin, insubstantial. However, when she focused those sensors that derived from runcible technology — ones intended for gravity and density mapping, and for measuring Skaidon warp phenomena — she saw clearly the disturbance around him. Fascinating: he seemed to be on the point of falling into a warp all his own, yet maintaining himself at the interface through some effort of will. And this phenomenon certainly seemed related to that mycelium threaded in his bones.

Even so, when Orlandine ran an analysis of the field generating around him, she still could not figure out how he was doing it. Certainly, it seemed as if he didn’t want to be doing it, so she assumed the proximity of the massive Skaidon gate must be affecting him somehow. That would be no problem to her unless he was actually trying to get himself somewhere else aboard this runcible.

Orlandine quickly scanned over to his point of arrival aboard the runcible, and to check that the CTD was now gone. She reviewed recorded data and ascertained that, as instructed, one of the drones had taken the device away after she broke the agent’s link with it. That same device had now been stripped down and added to the munitions of the drone concerned, which was the big iron spitting cockroach. Like it needed more munitions. She returned her full attention briefly to Cormac, who now seemed to be getting his problem under control, then to Mr Crane, who had seated himself on the floor and was placidly sorting through his odd collection of keepsakes. What a crew. She focused fully now on the task in hand.

Knobbler had by now landed on Section Three and was scrabbling inside the airlock. Orlandine was reassured to note the micrometric adjustments being made — with steering jets — to the current position of that runcible section, for this demonstrated that her mycelial sensors were sensitive enough to pick up on the relatively infinitesimal impact of Knobbler’s arrival there — though it was an impact that would have made no significant difference to the integrity of the Skaidon warp.

Shortly, the war runcible would be opened up to its maximum expansion. And shortly Erebus would arrive, and the bizarre crew gathered here would become the least of her worries.

Mika propelled herself through the dead corridors finding no more human remains but plenty of open cabins that looked to have been formerly occupied. Dragon’s remote drifted along at her shoulder, peering into these places with its clear blue eyes radiating a strange kind of innocence. Eventually she reached the airlock that connected into Trafalgar’s docking mechanisms. It seemed evident that the Jain-tech had penetrated the attack ship through here. It was all around the open airlock, and in the docking tunnel beyond it had grown utterly straight and even. She thought it looked like some odd by-blow of vines and antique plumbing. Worryingly, it also appeared to be more alive here, because unlike much of what she had already seen, which was bone-white or grey, this was bluey-green and possessed an odd iridescence. Or perhaps that was because everything around her now seemed more alive — or rather gravid with the potential to spring into life. She forced herself to continue through, even with the stuff all around her, then kicked off against it and accelerated when she saw points of growth slowly easing like onion sprouts out from the general mass towards her.

‘It does not possess the energy to harm you here,’ Dragon informed her, adding, ‘unless you stay in contact with it for long enough.’

Mika stopped by catching the edge of the airlock at the far end and propelled herself down towards the floor of the Trafalgar, gasping and on the point of panic. She tried to calm down, tried some breathing exercises, tried to study her surroundings analytically. She mocked herself for her fear: she was a scientist, not some panicky little girl. It didn’t really help.

The docking tunnel was connected to one of a series of five airlocks widely spaced along the wall of a large equipment bay. Mika thought these must have been used for getting workers or troops outside, perhaps into maintenance pods, for there was not enough room for five large-sized vessels on that section of the docking ring. Within the bay itself a row of maintenance pods was secured along the facing wall. Doubtless, when repairs to the battleship were required, they were shifted outside through the larger bay doors at the end, then kept outside until the work was completed while their operators used these airlocks. Other equipment was scattered here and there: a tank with caterpillar treads was down on the floor, while another lay at forty-five degrees against the wall to her right. Why these two items were aboard a ship like this baffled her. A mass of spacesuits rested in a pile, and racks of ordnance lay where they had fallen. All were bound by Jain tendrils and other thicker structures, and all were missing material as if they had been sprinkled with acid. However, the growth here seemed to be offshoots of the main structure, which had obviously originated from her left — from the entrances to a row of drop-shafts.