"I cannot even begin to fathom how you decided to commit such a crime against the Sudorian people," Harald hissed.

"What crime, precisely?" Gneiss enquired.

"The Worm was one of our greatest assets and now you have flung it away."

"I have done no such thing," Gneiss replied. "For reasons that presently escape me, the Polity Consul Assessor managed to gain entry to one of the cylinders and there caused a breach. Subsequent events remain a puzzle to me."

Harald jerked back as if the man had slapped him. The screen view now expanded to include a figure standing at the Director's side.

"But not a puzzle to me," confessed Yishna. "A breach should have resulted in the ejection of only one cylinder, but it was my own alteration of the breach protocols, some time ago, that resulted in the ejection of all four cylinders. And it was Rhodane, aboard that Brumallian ship, who fired those missiles in an attempt to destroy the Worm." She paused, and Harald was sure he read both fear and puzzlement in her expression. "We made an earlier attempt to cause a breach, but station security forestalled us. Orduval was killed."

"Are you all insane?" Harald demanded. He just could not see the purpose of his sibling's actions.

Rhodane? Orduval dead?

"Not any more," Yishna replied. "Despite the failure of our plan, I think everything's going to be all right now. Can't you feel it going away?"

Harald's gaze strayed to another screen where he observed how the Worm ring had broken at one point and one end of it was spearing away into infinity. Returning his gaze to his sister, he noted the dressing on her shoulder, the intensity of her gaze. Her words still made absolutely no sense to him.

"I asked you if you're insane," he stated. "You have yet to provide me with an answer."

"We've both been working for the same master, Harald," Yishna told him, "but now it's leaving us. This is now over. There's no need for any further loss of life. Surely you know this? You must be able to feel it too."

All Harald could feel was his headache growing in direct proportion to the ball of rage inside his guts. He studied his sister and noted her speculative observation of him. "You still make no sense, sister. I am here to reinstate Fleet power and remove the threat that Orbital Combine poses to us all. I had hoped that by seizing Corisanthe Main and taking control of the source of Combine's power I could bring this present conflict swiftly and neatly to an end."

"Brother, there are no swift and neat endings to civil war."

Harald allowed her his false smile. "In that you are incorrect. Because of a certain reluctance I've observed on the part of their Captains, I have now assumed control of the gravity weapons on board both Wildfire and Harvester" He held up his hand, enclosed in the control glove. "I can now end this conflict merely by inputting some simple commands."

Her expression became at first puzzled then changed to one of growing horror.

"Your head injury," she said. "We know about that."

"My head is perfectly fine, thank you."

The horror in her expression turned rapidly to calculation.

"I begin to understand." She studied him closely. "With its prime instrument still operating, it does not need to endanger itself by being here."

"Ah, so apparently you are insane," said Harald.

Abruptly Yishna leant forwards. "Let me come to you. Let me explain it all."

Harald nodded. It seemed somehow appropriate to him to have his sister at his side here, aboard Ironfist, as he proceeded to destroy the three Corisanthe stations.

McCrooger

The salvo fired by Desert Wind had come dangerously close to erasing our Brumallian ship from existence, and if the Worm had not acted when it did, we would have been dead. Even though I wasn't dead, I wondered if the state I was in could really be described as life.

"It acted simply to defend itself," Tigger informed me. "Be thankful Desert Wind distracted it from us."

"I figured that," I replied, while gazing through the ship's sensors at the departing alien entity. After a moment I returned my gaze to my physical self, floating in some womb-like bladder, my body dead, spinal blocks in place, while some oxygenated fluid was being routed from an independent supply to circulate in my brain. Organic cables and tubes had been connected directly into my optic nerves, and elsewhere into my brain through holes carved in my skull.

I'd looked better.

The chameleonware was in operation now so we enjoyed a grandstand view without the danger of being attacked directly. Tigger had keyed into all and any uncoded communications, and we were listening intently as the drama continued to unfold.

"What's happening down on the planet?" I asked.

Tigger summoned up for me pictures of riot-damaged cities, burning buildings, pockets of civil disorder scattered here and there. GDS wardens were now back in control of three of the eight cities they had earlier been forced to abandon. Chairman Duras and what survived of Parliament had now returned to the capital in the mobile incident station, but no one was concerned with debating anything until the present emergency was over. Everyone kept looking to the skies.

"They're showing less inclination to kill each other down there," Tigger observed, "but that might be as much due to physical exhaustion as to the removal of the Worm's influence. These are humans, and as such are prone to after-the-fact justification of their actions, so that justification might include insisting that they were right, and that those actions should therefore continue."

"Quit the moralising, why don't you?"

"Sorry—moving up from drone to ship AI has given me preachy tendencies."

"I preferred the old Tigger."

"All right, the Worm has been driving these people bat shit for decades. Its departure doesn't necessarily mean they'll suddenly become less crazy. In some cases the exact opposite might occur."

"Are you thinking of Harald?"

"Not really," Tigger replied. "He, like his siblings, is a different matter entirely. Its influence on them has been extreme, and he has perhaps found himself a convincing justification for what he's doing."

This was pretty much what I had figured. The Worm had set him in motion, and kept prodding him in the direction it wanted him to go. He thought all along he was fighting for Fleet when in reality the Worm had been using him to exact its own vengeance, or simply to cause misery and destruction, for whatever motive. I knew this for certain now. I'd witnessed one Worm segment tear out through the wall of Ozark One, and I'd later seen Tigger's analysis of the energy levels involved in the damage it had done to Desert Wind. The Worm had not really been a prisoner for some time—maybe even twenty or so years. Now it was gone and Harald was still running on autopilot—a tool set in motion and no longer requiring its close influence.

"Can you do anything about him now?" I asked.

"We could try a direct attack on the Ironfist, but I don't see that ending well for us."

"No, I mean can you somehow break his control over those other ships?"

"I would first need to get in close to Ironfist and then it would take me an hour or more to actually break into his systems. There's a good chance he would detect my interference and, as we know, his finger is on the firing button. Also, as shown during my attempt to stop the bombing of Vertical Vienna, he clearly has some means of detecting me."

"So you're not even going to try?"

"Of course I am, but I rather suspect this will be all over before then, one way or another."

Tigger then showed me a conversation recorded on camera aboard Corisanthe Main. I felt a tightness in a throat that was probably no longer connected to my brain. Perhaps I would have cried without those things plugged into my eye-sockets.