5

Which they ate with a runcible spoon—

He managed to ignore it at first, the people patting him on the back or grasping his hand and saying, "It's great to meet you," or "Thank you for what you're doing," or simply staring. But now as he sat sipping a glass of the local brew—something called greenwine—at one of the bars in the arcade leading to the main runcible complex, he began to become a little irritated. "Christ! You think they'd be used to seeing soldiers by now."

Urbanus, who sipped a glass of cranberry vodka just to be sociable and because a fuel cell in his body could utilize it to power him, emulated an amused smile and gazed up at the glass ceiling of the arcade. "Are you going to tell him, Lindy, or shall I?"

"I think we should let him find out for himself, don't you?" Lindy replied. She glanced back into the bar itself where numerous customers had gathered since their arrival, and kept peering out at them. Then she bit her lip and nodded to a screen display affixed amidst ivy on the outer wall of the bar.

"What are you two—" Jebel turned towards the screen. "That's Grant's World… fucking Prador."

The scene depicted a camouflaged second-child fleeing through jungle. Something familiar about that, but then Jebel had seen many fleeing Prador. He let his gaze stray away and saw that a group of people now gathered on the main concourse were looking towards the bar. When they saw he had spotted them, some of them grinned, nodded and moved off. Others stayed to point out the bar to others. Jebel was beginning to get the creepy feeling it was him they were pointing to, and it made him feel nervy.

"Excuse me, sir."

Jebel spun round spilling some greenwine down his shirt front. His hand dropped to the thin-gun holstered on his belt. Then he lowered his gaze to a small boy standing before him—a kid in ersatz fatigues, a toy pistol on his belt and a pet lizard clinging to his shoulder.

"Hey," said Jebel, "I'm no recruiting officer."

The boy did not seem to know how to reply to this, so instead looked towards a woman standing a few paces back, clutching a holocamera. She held the device up questioningly. Jebel supposed the kid, who was obviously into militaria, wanted a recording of himself with some soldiers. He shrugged and waved a hand obligingly. Boy moved up beside him as the woman, probably his mother, raised the recorder.

"Can you stand by me?" the boy asked.

Feeling rather foolish, Jebel stood with his hand on the boy's shoulder.

"What's your name?" he asked.

"Alan," the boy replied.

"So you want to be a soldier?"

"I want to be like you," the boy replied, staring up at him wide-eyed.

Like adults throughout history Jebel then just stood there unable to think of anything else to say. Certainly the boy would not want to be like Jebel, but how to explain that to him? Finally the woman came over.

"Thank you for that." She held up her holocamera exposing a fingerprint and gene reader plate. "Could you verify it, please? I know it's an imposition, but there are sure to be fakes."

"Well… yeah, sure." Jebel pressed his thumb against the plate until the device beeped.

"We'll leave you in peace now—I expect you get a lot of this." Hand on her boy's shoulder, she moved away. The boy kept looking back at Jebel, still wide-eyed.

Jebel sat, not quite sure what to think.

"Of course," said Urbanus, "the lizard on his shoulder is a gecko—they've become quite a fashionable pet."

Gecko.

"Worryingly dense, our great leader," Lindy added.

With interminable slowness, realisation surfaced in Jebel's consciousness. He understood then that, on some level, he already knew. He turned and looked at the bar's screen and observed airborne shots of a glowing crater surrounded by burning jungle.

"Recorded by the AIs, war drones," said Jebel, then turning to Urbanus, "and you?"

The Golem nodded. "Those were my instructions. The Polity needs good news of victories right now, and there's damned few of them. It also needs heroes."

"I'm not sure I—" Shadows abruptly fell across their table. Jebel looked up to see four floating holocams jockeying for position above him.

"Looks like the Trajeen newsnets just found out," said Lindy.

"I won't stay here for this," said Jebel.

"No need," Urbanus replied, "I've just been informed that our services are required elsewhere, if you are willing."

"Where?" Jebel asked.

Urbanus pointed up through the roof of the arcade, at an object only just visible in the sky.

Standing upon the bridge of one of the utility ships available to the runcible project, Moria gazed through a chainglass screen at the nearby Boh runcible hanging in silhouette before the gas giant: a small thorny object skating above banded colour and omnipotent indifference. She rubbed at the back of her neck. The tension, just bearable during the transit here, seemed to have stretched all her muscles and turned her spine into a rod. Her stomach also felt full of swirling oil and she'd not eaten for ten hours. But the excitement was gone. Moria acknowledged to herself that the war removed the gloss of discovery and adventure from it all. Everyone was distracted by the constant bad news, and only recently were people becoming frightened. Staff were also being seconded away by ECS to work in the big shipyards, and many of those remaining worried about kin either involved in the conflict or living on worlds closer to the front line. How could anyone feel excited about the runcible project now that the Prador were killing millions, taking world after world, and smashing Polity dreadnoughts like a steamroller tracking over walnuts. Moria shook her head and tried to return to the moment.

When they first approached, she was able to discern the smaller objects spreading away from the runcible itself, some of them towed by grabships, some moving under their own power, and some being shifted by stripped-down drive motors bolted into place. To evacuate the runcible about half of the infrastructure—all the scaffolds and extraneous rubbish and all the occupied accommodation units—was moved to a lower orbit, and since then boosted around the other side of Boh, that being probably the safest place to move them, in the permitted time, should there be any mishaps.

U-space com established between Trajeen and Boh, Moria could call up a real-time view of events back at the other runcible. There a different procedure was used. Rather than detach paraphernalia from around the runcible, the staff were evacuated to Trajeen. The runcible itself, driven far out from the planet by five big fusion motors, represented less of a danger than the Boh one since at that end any mishaps would not be so cataclysmic. Now in deep dark, with Trajeen a distant blue marble, that runcible waited. And a hundred kilometres away from it, the big cargo carrier stood ready: one kilometre long and half a kilometre wide, that final distance extended by old-style balanced U-space engine nacelles and a third very old U-navigation nacelle—they did not want to use a new vessel for this. The ship's holds were filled with asteroidal rock to bring its mass up for the test. Neither humans nor AIs occupied it—George, or rather the larger part of him back at the Trajeen runcible, would guide it remotely through the gate.

"As well as data gathering and collation at this end," said George, standing beside her, "I want you to model the entire test."

"Well, thanks for that," Moria checked the time to the test in her aug, "but a little more notice would have been nice."

"As we have thus far discovered: it is only when you are under pressure that the more esoteric programs and functions of your aug are revealed."

"How much more processing space do you think it has, and how fast do you think it can operate?" she asked.