"This is preposterous."

Orduval and Yishna were now each watching me with the intensity of a cat observing a caged hamster. Rhodane's gaze was less unnerving, just.

"Really?" I said. "All four of them, as you know, have been functioning well beyond human norms to push themselves into positions of power. Rhodane came near to raising the Brumallians against Sudoria, but for the Consensus interfering with the signal or with her programming." Duras stood straighter on hearing that, his gaze sliding to Rhodane then to the two quofarl. "Yishna is now second only to Director Gneiss on Corisanthe Main. Orduval…" I paused, having no idea what he had been up to, though he had obviously been in communication with Tigger and he was here.

"I tried," he himself supplied, "but I could not do very much."

Duras gave him an irritated look. "The writer Uskaron did enough," he said, then turned to me. "Yes, perhaps you have something, though I've yet to see it clearly."

Orduval was Uskaron—I wasn't sure how that fit the theory that was even then developing in my mind. For I did not see the Worm's intentions as peaceful, and only by following a twisted logic could his books be contrived as anything like as destructive as what Rhodane had intended to do and what Harald was already doing.

"So Orduval wrote books that changed the whole attitude of a planet," I said.

Orduval held his hands out to either side. "Perhaps."

Yishna and Rhodane stood gazing at their brother with new-found respect.

"There was always something familiar—" began Yishna.

"And then there's Harald," I interrupted.

"It seems a very convoluted way for the Worm to gain its freedom," challenged Duras.

I paused before replying, as I wasn't entirely sure that freedom was the motive here. With whatever it had already done to Elsever Strone and her unborn children, I felt it had ably demonstrated how it could break out of containment at will.

I continued, "You must understand how its influence on all of you is huge, especially on the four children of Elsever Strone. They alone don't dream of the Shadowman—the Worm's attempt to create a human face for itself—and they don't need to, since its control over them is so much more direct."

"This is all conjecture," argued Duras, but I could see the fear in his expression.

I turned back to Orduval, looking for more information, some way to convince them. "What did Tigger tell you originally, about your fits?"

He looked somewhat bitter as he replied. "He decided that I am sensitive to U-space, and that it was disruptions in the U-space continuum that caused my fits."

"Yet Tigger changed that argument just now, told you that you caused your own fits to escape."

"Yes, he did."

It occurred to me then that his books might also have been a way to escape that pervasive influence—they might have been the antithesis to the Worm's manipulation of him.

"To escape what, though? To escape the influence of the Worm, the control it held over you through U-space, control that it is reasserting now, as is evident from your current reaction to Rhodane who is mostly free of it. It's a similar reaction I observed in Yishna once she boarded this ship. You see, it made you, and it made you all more able to receive its signal."

At this point Yishna muttered some curse, and we all turned towards her. Her eyes were closed tight and her hands trembling.

"He's right," she said, then paused with her mouth still moving but nothing coming out. Then she shook herself, perhaps trying to break the words free. "The…Ozark Protocols."

"Tell me, Yishna," I said.

"I altered them. In some cases they originally called for the destruction of the Worm, so I changed that to…survival. It wants to survive." She gasped, and now subsided to her knees. Rhodane immediately squatted down beside her and placed a comforting hand on her shoulder. Orduval moved over too and stood staring down at them, his hands clenching and unclenching spasmodically.

"You have all, for a long time, carried that worm in your heads," I told them. "You need to be rid of it." I focused now on Duras. "It is not the Worm that needs its freedom, but all of you need to be liberated from it."

"You may well be correct there," said Duras, "but you may have noticed that we are in the middle of a war."

"Let me put it another way," I said. "If you can remove the Worm from Harald's head, there will be no more war."

Harald

Carnasus had ordered his old Admiral's chair moved up into his Haven just after the end of the War—an action then filled with significance. Harald's guards were even now bringing the chair back down to place it in its former central position on the Bridge. He wondered how many around him understood the significance of that move, since most of them, like himself, had been children when the chair was originally moved. Around the spot where the chair would be relocated, technicians were connecting up the new screens Harald had ordered. Waiting until the chair was finally in position and the legs bolted down, he walked over, placed his hand on the old cracked hide of the seat back, then opened his com helmet to general address.

"If I could have your attention please, this is Admiral Harald," he began.

Everyone on the Bridge turned towards him. On the single image showing in his eye-screen he observed the crew down in Engineering also pausing in their tasks to glance up at the public address screen. Testing a link to one of the larger screens arrayed before him, he called up an image from one of the ship's refectories, and saw the crew gazing up from their hurried meals. He felt a moment's trepidation, but before his head injury he had worked out the wording of the short speech, so it had to be right, didn't it?

"Those of you who know any history will perhaps understand that fifty years ago Corisanthe was merely the name of a small desert town, until one of the residents built the core station that eventually developed into the ones we know today."

Probably everyone did know that fact, as it had been regularly covered in the main history curriculum in most schools since the War.

"Back then," he continued, "just about everything in orbit around Sudoria came under Fleet jurisdiction—a security requirement necessary during our war against Brumal. Then thirty years ago Fleet encountered the Worm and, believing it to be some new weapon controlled by the Brumallians, they attacked it and managed to break it into four segments which in turn contracted down to those items currently held aboard the station we are now approaching. Fleet used a converted troop transport to get these four pieces to the original Corisanthe Station, where they were secured in four containment canisters, then the outer enclosing cylinders were swiftly constructed around them."

He gazed about him, checking that he still had everyone's attention.

"While this process was ongoing, over two thousand civilian" — he placed a sneering emphasis on the word—"scientists were brought up to study the Worm, and significant technological advances resulted from their research. These advances enabled us to win the war against the Frazerworldlers, so we can never begrudge them that. However, in the later stages of the war, this scientific population of the Corisanthe Station frequently came into conflict with Fleet, raising petty objections to our security protocols, when not squabbling amongst themselves. So immersed were they in the importance of their research, they seemed to forget about those fighting and dying at the front."

Harald slowly paced in a circle round the chair, called up some more screen views, and continued.

"As the scientific community grew, the demand for extra space resulted in the division of the original station into three. Shortly after the War, many of the discoveries they had made were allowed into the public domain, and this resulted in a sudden growth in high-tech industries, whose management in turn began to finance that ongoing research. Fleet authority was thus gradually being displaced until Parliament, in its wisdom, decided to take away what remained of such authority and hand it over to a consortium of industrial companies who in themselves had by then become a political force and whose representatives made up a substantial portion of Parliament. These companies went on to build ever more satellites and stations, then in time amalgamated to become the entity we now know as Orbital Combine."