‘Should one of those ships come after us, I’ll shift us again,’ said Cormac. ‘So don’t be in too much of a hurry to use your get-out clause.’

‘Sure thing,’ Arach replied. ‘I won’t use it anyway until I can’t shoot any more.’

That figured.

Seven war drones left. Cormac tried to see more clearly using his U-sense but found himself still gazing into chaos. He ran a program from his gridlink, tightening certain muscles around his eyes to increase their magnification, and then ran a secondary program to clean up the distorted image received by his optic nerves. Now the runcible and its enclosing attackers seemed to loom right over him. He saw the twinned spider now on the surface, boiling metal in a circle all about it, and around that again Jain-tech mounding up into a wave. The drone suddenly seemed out of munitions or energy, for it did nothing as the tangled Jain growth fell upon it and swamped it. Bearing in mind Arach’s recent comments, Cormac flinched in expectation of another large explosion as a bright light flashed through the writhing mass, but this time it was some beam weapon boring a tunnel. The twin spider hurtled out through this cleanly, then simply disappeared.

Another explosion on the surface, this time excavating a glowing crater. Shooting out from this he saw what he first took to be a biomech but then recognized as the drone Knobbler. A shoal of silvery objects streaked out after the escaping drone but then milled in confusion as it too disappeared.

The wormship which Cormac had earlier seen heading for the runcible now arrived. More drones were busy escaping, but it intercepted one of them, part of its mass opening to swallow the silvery scorpion whole. For a moment it was as if massive flash bulbs were going off inside the wormship. Cormac managed to turn his head just in time as the bright explosion expanded, ripping the entire ship apart. He then saw three drones slam together, some distance from the runcible, and also disappear like Knobbler. As he puzzled over this, he noticed his perspective was changing. Adjusting his focus back to normal, he peered at Arach and noticed that the drone was releasing a perpetual stream of gas, accelerating all three of them.

Now the entire war runcible bucked, and light glared from five distinct areas within it, precisely where the buffers and the reactors were located within each segment. In pure silence five explosions, the intense blue-white of burning magnesium, joined to become one. The runcible, the surrounding wormships and other Jain-tech, all fragmented in this massive blast, then were swamped in an expanding sphere of fire. Observing this, Cormac realized that, unless he shifted again through U-space, his lifespan would be shortened even further. Crane and Arach might both survive that blast front when it reached them, but he was still mere mortal flesh.

He focused out on where next to shift himself as well as the other two. Then vacuum seemed to ripple right before him, and a big armoured claw stabbed out and closed on Mr Crane’s ankle. The next thing Cormac knew was that he crashed, alone, into a small airlock. Obviously it was too small to encompass the three — or now rather four — of them.

‘Welcome aboard the Harpy,’ said a sardonic voice.

It was like a basic and incomplete virtuality format with one surface texture chosen from some strange palette, dimensions put in place but given no orientation, and then the whole project consigned to a store and forgotten. Mika had no real awareness of her own body here. She was just a point of existence floating somewhere in colourless space, at once above a weirdly textured and endless plain, or beside a wall without limits or perhaps a ceiling of the same infinite dimensions, for there was no up or down in this place.

From the Atheter AI stored in an artefact retrieved from the lava planet called Shayden’s Find — named after the woman who discovered that body but who was murdered while trying to recover it — researchers had learned that Jain technology made an imprint on reality that was visible from within U-space, but only if you knew what to look for and possessed the right equipment. This fact had enabled Cormac and his mentor Horace Blegg to track Jain nodes. It had not been clearly understood why Jain-tech left such an imprint. Huge mass, like that of planets and stars, was detectable from within U-space, just as heavy weights are detectable from the underside of a sheet they rest on, but small complex objects should theoretically make no real impression at all.

As Mika understood it, though it wasn’t really her subject, other researchers had found that the macro-, micro- and nano-structures Jain-tech created in turn caused specific pico-structures to spring into being. They were a kind of sub-creation, a side effect almost like the shape left on a flat surface after some object has been spray-painted on top if it then removed: almost a shadow of the technology. However, those pico-structures were too regular, too constant to be anything but deliberate. Looking more closely, the researchers found a kind of pattern that slid under the real, somehow insinuated its way into the interface between U-space and realspace without the usual huge energy requirement. And where this pattern lay, on the edge of the ineffable, the researchers detected very busy movement that almost defied analysis.

Mika now knew what that activity was: the Jain AIs.

And here they were.

The surface Mika found herself by appeared to consist of metallic fossil worms, an expanse of them that extended to the infinite. They were triangular in section and somehow hot and burning. At first glance the worms seemed to be utterly still but then, as she watched, she detected movement that defied definition: a slow massive change, something like the leisurely transitions seen in a kaleidoscope. Sound here too: a howling that wrenched at the core of her being and an insane muttering from tight-crammed madness. And smells: decay, sweet perfume, a savoury smell and the stench of excrement, all crammed into one sensory overload.

But though her mind was interpreting all this as input through her five main senses, there was also some part of her that recognized it as a shifting of dimensions her brain was just not formatted to accept, and that it was also something falling halfway between physical change and thought. There was a multitude here and a single presence. Being naturally analytical, she interpreted this as something like a hive mind, but being analytical was not easy, for there was a multiple entity here slowly becoming aware of her presence — and it terrified her.

Then, in time she could not measure, the plain — for now she firmly held to that perspective — began to alter in respect to her own position. A pattern formed about and below her, with herself at its centre point. The attendant howling grew in intensity, and the muttering rose to a gibbering. A sluggish perception seemed to briefly focus on her then drift away. Perhaps the idea came from Dragon’s comment about waking up these entities, but it was almost as if she was in the presence of someone dozing who on some unconscious level had just acknowledged her presence.

‘Dragon, what do I do?’ she asked, though here she possessed no mouth.

She felt something — some connection with Dragon — but heard no words. However, now those memories stored in her head but not her own began to surface. All at once she saw a race raising itself from the swamps of its homeworld and weaving for itself towering homes out of flute grass. The gabbleducks, the Atheter, built tall, their focus upon structures rather than individual machines, and so it was that they first reached space by using a form of space elevator rather than rocket propulsion. They expanded their civilization across star systems and were faced with their own version of the Fermi paradox: why are we alone? They found life on many worlds but little intelligence, then abruptly they weren’t alone — for they came across one primitive race with the potential of raising itself to something greater. These were hard-shelled arthropods, vicious and competitive, and even in their primitive state beginning to learn to work metals. With some misgivings they left these early Prador to their own devices, but still there remained a question: this galaxy being so old, why were there no other spacefaring races? Were they the first?