‘Yes, what is it, Seven?’

The submind had been trying to attract the Warden’s attention for some microseconds.

‘Captain Sprage, boss. He’s opened a channel up here again through that conferencing link of his.’

‘Then you can again inform the Captain that whilst Erlin Taser Three Indomial is a valued Polity citizen, her stepping outside the Line and putting herself in danger is none of my concern. And, Seven, I am not your “boss”. I am the Polity Warden of Spatterjay.’ As the Warden finished speaking, it felt something akin to a flush of embarrassment. Would I have said something like that before?

‘He’s not calling about that. He’s calling about a missing ship.’

‘That happens. Again, it is not my concern.’

‘But… Warden, he’s got some coordinates from the point where the conferencing link to the Vignette went offline. He’s very concerned about it, but only wants to know if you might have seen anything with any of your eyes.’

The Warden did a fast scan through its Polity remit and found that this situation fell in one of those grey areas. Though this might concern only the loss of a few individuals, it had been communicated to the AI via one of the sort-of rulers of the human population here, and so might pertain to something important.

‘Very well.’

Seven transmitted the coordinates and the precise time when the link went off. The Warden scanned the memory of the satellite eye concerned—it was memory they held for a few days before deleting. The coordinates centred on a cloud mass, which immediately aroused the AI’s suspicions—if anyone wanted to hide their actions from it, they would perform them underneath such a mass. Searching through the range of the eye’s scan, the AI found very little until moving into infrared. There—the vague blob of the ship, an explosion then a fire, then the heat flickering out, along with that blob itself, as the ship no doubt sank. An accident? Hoopers were not particularly prone to them, though they did carry gunpowder, explosives and sometimes Polity weapons aboard. Moreover, the Vignette’s record was not a good one. The Warden ruminated over the response it would give, before reluctantly packaging the relevant information and transmitting it.

‘Sniper, check this out will you,’ the AI also sent—then fretted that it might be sending napalm to put out a fire.

The industry of the Golem and other Cybercorp machines was fast and frightening. Ron had earlier expressed an interest in being involved in the construction, but Bloc had told him no humans were allowed on site—it was just too dangerous for them. As he saw a skeletal Golem rush past with a ten-metre beam on its shoulder, halt abruptly, spin the beam round then throw it up through a gap in the hull planking, Janer now understood why. A moment’s inattention might result in a human ending up smeared into the woodwork.

‘You note, they are not only using wood,’ said Wade, pointing through the perimeter fence.

Janer scanned the site, noting composite beams resting on a row of trestles nearby. A spiderlike robot was hauling a sheet of some sort of metal up the side of the ship. The huge rudder, which even now was being swung into place and hung from a crane located on the deck above, bore the logo of a company Janer knew specialized in the production of bubble-metals—alloys foamed with inert gas and cast in zero-G so the bubbles remained evenly dispersed. The air around him was also redolent with the smell of fast-bonding epoxies.

‘Not a nail in sight,’ he commented.

‘Even Hoopers don’t use nails in the construction of their ships,’ said Wade, turning to walk along the perimeter. ‘They use pegs and dovetails and mortise joints, and that has not changed even since abundant metals have become available to them.’

‘You know about shipbuilding?’ Janer asked.

‘That’s just plain woodworking I’m talking about. However,’ Wade tapped his own forehead, ‘I have recently loaded much about the craft.’

Janer paused to consider that. Humans could load information directly into their minds, but to do it they required some kind of hardware in their heads. The process was very much easier for Golem. Just in this short walk down from the compound, Janer had almost forgotten what Wade actually was.

‘Why are you here?’ he asked.

‘Why are you?’ Wade countered, studying him. He then went on, ‘I’m a free Golem, I go where the interest takes me… Now, that looks like a weak point.’ Wade pointed, and it took Janer a second to realize the Golem was indicating at a join in the fence beside one of the pearwood posts.

‘Yes…?’ said Janer cautiously.

Wade gave him an unreadable look, reached out and shoved his fingers through the fence mesh. Janer smelt hot ozone, then Wade pulled, and, sparking and crackling, the fence parted.

‘See, shoddy workmanship,’ said Wade. ‘Shall we?’ He gestured through.

It was certainly dangerous in there, but Janer had always found that avoiding danger usually resulted in danger blindsiding him. Anyway, he was already bored with the prospect of sitting around with the rest of the Hoopers, seeing if it was possible to drink the rum as fast as Forlam could distil it, for they seemed intent on doing little else. That was, he realized, a sign of them having accepted immortality: they were able to be still for long periods. He was not.

‘Okay,’ he said, ducking in ahead of Wade.

The Golem soon overtook him and led the way into the site. Janer hung back for a moment.

‘You still gone?’

No response from the hivelink. He quickly caught up with Wade.

Now, drawing closer to the big ship, Janer began to get a better impression of its sheer scale. The side of it was like a cliff ahead of him; its bows rested on the beach and its stern abutted the first slopes ascending to the peak at the centre of Mortuary Island.

‘How are they going to launch it?’ he asked.

Wade pointed to the bottom of the hull, which was largely concealed by construction materials and machinery. ‘There’s a ramp under there, and a few hundred motorized pallets on which they laid the keel.’

As they passed a stack of timber, Janer peered through a gap to see the gleam of a metal caterpillar track in the undershadows. They moved on past an open container half-filled with pipe fittings and prosaically domestic plumbing items. Another container just behind it contained electrical equipment and next to this rested a half-used reel of insulated and combined five-core S-con and fibre-optic cable. Seeing such standard items here was a bit of a disappointment to Janer—until Wade gestured to something on the hull itself.

‘I knew it would be here,’ said the Golem.

In the side of the ship was a large open portal containing the kind of iris door more commonly found on space stations. It would be submerged, Janer realized, below the waterline. As they drew closer he saw that inside, resting on a ramp leading to this door, was the flattened-torpedo shape of a large submersible. Around the door itself were the familiar arc-shaped sections of black metal that were the business end of a shimmer-shield generator. Of course a shimmer-shield was perfect for this, since it could let the craft out without letting the water in.

‘Not quite what I would have expected,’ he said.

‘To the letter of Windcheater’s laws, though not exactly in the spirit of them,’ explained Wade. ‘That sail wants only sailing ships on the surface of the ocean, and no AG vehicles at all in the sky, but no other technologies have been proscribed.’

‘Why do they need this, anyway?’ Janer wondered.

‘That’ll be Lineworld Developments. No doubt they originally had some profitable enterprise in mind.’ Wade shrugged. ‘Of course they’ll not be pursuing it now.’

Just then a paint-bespattered skeletal Golem stepped in front of them.