‘I am to follow this stuff to its source?’ she suggested.

‘That would seem to be a good plan,’ said Dragon.

Right, good plan.

Mika propelled herself towards the shafts, glad of zero gravity, for she felt that walking on the floor below her would be like stepping amid sleeping snakes. She misjudged her course slightly and landed against the wall above the level of the shaft mouths, but there were numerous power ducts here she could use to push herself down. Very little Jain growth visible here above the shafts, but then perhaps it was concentrated inside the ducts.

Entering one of the shafts she did not know where to go next, for the growth seemed equally prolific in both directions. The blue-eyed remote slid past her and landed against the far wall, then with a puff of vapour sent itself up into the dark throat of the shaft above her.

‘I take it you know where I’m meant to be going now,’ she said.

‘Yes, I know where you are going.’

As Mika followed her strange flapping guide, she abruptly felt that she did too, for this was exactly the direction some instinct was telling her she should avoid. As she moved she began to hear odd sounds. They could not have been coming from her surroundings, since she was surrounded by vacuum, so were they coming instead from her suit radio? No, it was switched off. They were in her head, obviously: a low drone like a mournful wind, the occasional chittering and a distant sound as of someone sobbing.

‘Are you hearing this too?’ she asked.

‘Hearing what?’ Dragon enquired.

‘Weird sounds.’

‘Resonance,’ said Dragon.

‘Uh?’

‘The Jain AIs are affecting you. You’re vibrating like a tuning fork in an opera house.’ Mika wondered where Dragon had dredged up that analogy. The entity continued, ‘My remote resonates in different ways, for it has no ears and not much of a brain.’

‘Why here, Dragon?’ Mika asked. ‘Why here and not somewhere else, like that massive Jain growth in the Coloron arcology?’

‘Everywhere Jain-tech grows, the Jain AIs gather on the underside of U-space. It both creates them and calls them, for such is the nature of U-space that both cases are probable. Nobody looked for them at Coloron, and why should they?’

‘Why would these AIs help us against a technology that… sustains them, that they are a part of?’

‘I don’t know.’

Just that, then: I don’t know. Were they here just on the off-chance that alien artificial intelligences, the product of a hostile individualistic race, might be prepared to help? Two Dragon spheres had weaponized themselves to come here, and one of them was perhaps still fighting a massive biomech outside just to give her this opportunity. And Dragon didn’t know? She then entertained a horrible suspicion. Had Dragon come here simply out of curiosity or did the entity have some other purpose in mind? Was this mission just Dragon’s excuse for coming here?

The remote exited the drop-shaft ahead of her and, as she followed it into the corridor beyond, she recognized the kind of place she was in. Resting against one wall was a wheeled gurney of the kind they had used in ships of this type, rather than gurneys buoyed by antigravity, because of the possibility of power failure. She had just entered Trafalgar’s medical area. Ahead she saw that the vinelike growths become narrower, and all seemed to have issued from just one particular door. With a puff of vapour and a flap of its wings, the remote shot in ahead of her, and reluctantly she followed. Here reality seemed to be a light skin over something else, and things kept squirming at the edges of her vision.

Mika halted herself against a ragged door jamb, peering into the room at the long-dead occupants of three surgical chairs. The dried-up corpse in the first chair looked as if it had been fashioned out of plastic then placed in an oven for a while. Bones, exposed through large areas of missing flesh, had sagged and run, and thorns of alien material were sticking up from them. The head rested back in some sort of clamp, from which skeins of optics trailed away to plug into a pillar of computer hardware jutting from the floor behind. She shoved against the door jamb to propel herself over and study the cadaver more closely.

This was a woman. There was a name tag on her ECS Medical uniform that identified Misha Urlennon. Mika shivered at the similarity of their names. Misha’s head had been shaved and it was apparent that numerous probes from the clamp had entered her skull. Mika groped at her own belt for a moment, located a small cache, popped it open and extracted a laser pointer which she used as a probe. The corpse’s dried skin was papery, its ropes of muscle shrunken solid. Missing skin and flesh on its right side gave access to the chest cavity in which the organs lay freeze-dried and also shrunken. Mika turned on the laser and shone it inside, noting scattered components like chrome-covered stones, all linked together by a network of silver wires.

‘What happened to her?’ she wondered.

‘She was a failure, I suspect,’ Dragon replied.

Mika glanced across to the next chair, whose occupant was tangled in threads of Jain-tech which had rooted to the floor and then spread out. These threads grew fatter the further they dispersed from the chair, and it was evident from the state of the floor that they had extracted much of their physical material from it. The success? Mika decided to leave off studying this one until last, for here reality lay at its thinnest. This chair and its occupant seemed almost to occupy a different area of space from the rest of the room; it was as if they lay partially removed from the universe. Perhaps they were. Mika pushed herself past them towards the last chair and studied its occupant too — anything to delay what she feared to be an inevitable encounter.

The man in this chair was devoid of head, left arm and the left-hand side of his torso and the top half of his left leg. That side of the chair was gone too, and whatever weapon had been employed here had melted a hole right through the floor. No name tag was visible. Working out that the blast had come from above Mika looked up and gasped. The entire ceiling was concealed by masses of monitoring equipment and weapons. Four cube-shaped ceiling drones hung suspended in frameworks, each deploying the glassy hardware of old-style particle cannons. Obviously the Trafalgar’s AI had taken very seriously whatever had been occurring here.

Returning her attention to the half-corpse, Mika again noted those thorny growths sprouting from the bones and the remains of internal hardware. However, there was also Jain-tech growth in the chest cavity, and the right foot was rooted to the floor by tendrils of the same.

‘A near-success?’ she suggested.

‘But not the kind required,’ Dragon added.

Mika turned back to the middle chair but did not want to go near it. Now her attention was fully focused on it and its occupant, they seemed to retreat to a distant point deep in some well. After a moment she pushed herself over and halted beside the chair by grabbing its tendril-coated back.

This one’s head was also clamped. As doubtless the previous one had been, before both head and clamp had been destroyed by a blast from one of the particle cannons above.

‘The success,’ she said. ‘What was happening here?’

‘I think you know.’

‘Spell it out for me.’

‘It is the nature of Jain technology that it cannot react to artificial intelligences. Perhaps this was a safety measure put in place by the Jain AIs to protect later alien versions of their own kind from the technology’s destructive potential, but I think it more likely it was put in place to stop the technology being initiated by intelligences capable of disarming it and plumbing down to its depths, thus uncovering the Jain AIs themselves and maybe doing something about them.’