‘We took the pressure off,’ piped up Bludgeon abruptly.

If Cutter had possessed lungs, he would have breathed a sigh of relief.

‘For Orlandine?’

‘No.’ Bludgeon shifted round and raised his blind head towards Cutter. ‘By placing the cargo runcible within the flow of the fountain, we relieved pressure all the way down to Anulus. This in turn caused a pressure wave to come back up at us. It was an odd phenomenon, and worthy of study.’

‘Yeah, sure,’ said Cutter, ‘but what happened back there with Orlandine?’

‘Oh, her plan worked,’ said Bludgeon. ‘Within limits.’

‘Limits?’

‘Erebus will not now be attacking Earth,’ the drone explained. ‘However, it is doubtful whether either Orlandine and the war runcible or Knobbler and the rest will survive.’

Cutter absorbed that. They’d all known in advance the risks they were taking, indeed it was risk like this they had been built to take. ‘Then we need to get back and find out.’

‘Certainly — though we have many repairs to make’ — Bludgeon shook himself, so maybe he was having problems with his joint motors too — ‘when things have cooled sufficiently.’

Cutter merely nodded and clinked one of his limbs against a door frame. He wondered if his first repair task should be to find a way to restore his edges. Then he reconsidered. Maybe, with those sharp edges gone and the war runcible likely destroyed, it was time for him to become a little bit more sociable.

Nah, probably not. Cutter went to find a sharpener.

Even as Erebus sent its forces against its attacker, the error messages, the returns from automatically initiated diagnostic programs, the screaming of wormship captains still dying and the sheer tide of information swamped it, and the overload was like pain. Over eighteen thousand wormships gone in one single strike. All because of a war runcible, a damned ancient artefact from the Prador-human war. How had it ended up here anyway, and how had it managed to conceal itself? The Polity, though possessing sophisticated chameleonware, did not possess the right kind to conceal an object like that.

How how how?

The answer then surfaced through the confusion with a horrible inevitability: Randal.

‘Does it hurt, Erebus?’ Randal enquired.

They were both in the virtuality now, though Erebus could not quite remember choosing to be there. It was easier, though, for the borders of the virtuality filtered and dulled the massive input. Randal stood close by, the same as ever, his expression impudent and yet somehow sad. Erebus’s perception of itself was much more worrying: the infinite tangle spreading back from its black human form, binding all those other melded entities, was breaking apart and fires burned within it.

‘Distraction and misdirection,’ Erebus managed. ‘You wanted to focus my attention beyond the corridor, whether at real or phantom Polity fleets. But you did not want me to look too closely at the corridor itself.’

‘It’s certainly a tangled old web of deception.’

From within the virtuality Erebus felt itself to be peering through grey fog infecting the sensors of the remaining wormships and other biomechs hammering down upon the war runcible. This was because all the sensory input available was necessarily being winnowed out of chaos. Even though the runcible’s main weapon was now out, the other ordnance still being deployed from its five sections was taking a heavy toll. There had been a few crucial hits on its structure, enough to have knocked out the Skaidon warp and, despite the defensive fire, something major was sure to eventually get through. Erebus now closed down that option. It did not want this troublesome object destroyed. It wanted whoever was aboard it captured alive.

‘How?’ Erebus spat.

‘You had your trial run with Skellor, and it was a success,’ Randal said. ‘Orlandine was a failure because your assessment of her was at fault — because I influenced it. Then again was it really at fault or was she precisely serving her purpose? She then further caused you problems by destroying your USER and allowing both herself and the Polity fleet to escape. Perhaps you should have realized then what a dangerous creature she is. Or could it be that you already did know?’

Rod-forms and other biomechs were unable to withstand the appalling firepower spewing from the war runcible. Erebus recognized the energy signatures of weapons used during the Prador-human war, remembered being Trafalgar, remembered when things weren’t so complicated…

‘She got what she wanted,’ said Erebus, a feeling difficult to identify rising within — could it be panic? ‘Why did she attack me?’

‘Revenge.’

Erebus realized. ‘Klurhammon.’

The firing from the runcible could not last indefinitely for its power supplies were limited, but the wormships were now still within its scope and many of them were coming apart, their captains screaming… those portions of Erebus’s mind screaming…

‘I knew she would return to the Polity eventually, for all the power she possesses is meaningless elsewhere. I was forever on the lookout for her, therefore, and made careful preparations for her return. I sent one of your wormships to Klurhammon, where its legate captain, apparently working at your behest, tortured and killed her two brothers. Then I sent recordings of that atrocity to her Polity net address.’

‘For all your detestation of what I do, you are no better,’ said Erebus.

Some rod-forms were reaching the runcible’s skin now, but they were not surviving long. Extremely tough war drones were dealing with them very quickly, scouring them from the runcible’s surface with weapons fire and even attacking them physically. Erebus felt a deep disquiet about attacking such drones… its own kind, after all.

‘So you don’t understand yet?’

‘What do you mean?’ The panic still grew, and with it a deep fear.

‘You will understand eventually.’ Randal shrugged. ‘I placed an agent aboard Jerusalem to lock down any information about Orlandine. It was a necessary precaution, for had Earth Central discovered what she was up to, it might have thus found out about your attack here and prevented it, though of course you would have been allowed to continue attacking elsewhere. I distributed copies of myself throughout you, awaiting the opportunity to pass on your plan of attack to her, once she reappeared.’

‘This does not seem plausible.’

Finally, a wormship, although severely smashed up and depleted of the units of its modular structure, managed to get past the fusillade and right down to the runcible’s skin. War drones closed on it, but already it was spewing out biomechs designed specifically for capturing stations. Erebus became aware of one drone, its ordnance obviously depleted, attacking and tearing with ceramal mandibles and slashing with limbs edged with chainglass. It would surely not survive for long.

‘Plausible? On the face of it no, but you have not yet accepted the truth.’ Randal seemed unconcerned. ‘I took complete control of one wormship and its legate captain and sent them to Klurhammon without you noticing. I reprogrammed the Jain-tech employed there to self-destruct, hence your missing wormship. I interfered with your attack on Cull so that only a type of gas would be used, rather than an antimatter bomb, and therefore ensured the formidable Mr Crane would survive to seek vengeance.’

The drone was still putting up a valiant fight, but surely it had to succumb soon. Erebus felt almost sickened, though whether about the drone’s fate or Randal’s words it did not know.

‘I readied myself to transmit to Crane when he first attacked you,’ Randal continued, ‘giving him the necessary codes for an even more damaging attack — one exploiting the inevitable fault in your plans. He taunted you after that, and you gave chase as per my plan, your two pursuing wormships carrying your newest recognition codes and chameleonware formats straight to a rendezvous with Orlandine.’ Randal paused. ‘It’s all almost too much deviousness for a simple human mind to encompass, you’d think.’ He pressed one finger to his cheek and looked thoughtful. ‘Or maybe there weren’t any human minds involved at all?’