‘Proceed,’ Nigel said.

Demitri shuffled round so he was side-on to the egg, next to a curving sensor band.

‘Good angle,’ Fergus assured him.

‘Deleting now,’ Demitri said.

‘Deleting?’ Kysandra asked.

‘The egg absorbs memories as well as the physical body,’ Nigel said. ‘The institute was quite clear on that. It’s like the memory read the Commonwealth Justice Department has. I don’t want the Faller to know everything I do. And it certainly can’t realize that we’re going to download a copy of its memories.’

‘It’s clear,’ Fergus said. ‘We’re down to basic autonomics.’

When she looked back at Demitri she saw him staring emptily into the distance, as if he was asleep with his eyes open. ANAdroids didn’t sleep.

Nigel took a sideways step. Demitri copied the movement exactly, his right arm and leg touched the egg, and stuck.

Kysandra drew in a gasp. ‘Uracus!’ But she clenched her jaw and stared ahead resolutely. Use your logic, not emotion, she told herself sternly. Observe this as a Commonwealth scientist would. It’s an experiment, that’s all. No humans will be hurt during this research.

Just yesterday she’d laughed and joked with Demitri, sharing the excitement of the egg capture mission. She liked him. Machine body or not, he was still a person.

Was a person, she corrected. Demitri’s shell was non-existent now, allowing her to perceive his thoughts. The patterns in his head were little more than an animal’s: basic routines that animated the body, but nothing else, no awareness or memories. That had all gone, downloaded into Skylady. Death of sorts.

Demitri’s shoulder was sinking slowly into the egg, as was his hip. Sensors observed closely as the molecular structure of the eggshell changed to become permeable where Demitri’s skin touched it.

‘That has to have a specific trigger,’ Nigel muttered. ‘The internal intelligence must have direct control over the shell structure.’

‘Or it’s touch sensitive,’ Fergus said.

‘There’s a discrimination effect involved,’ Nigel countered. ‘There has to be. You’d get stones and raindrops being absorbed otherwise.’

Kysandra concentrated on the datastream coming from Demitri. His medical routines were showing her how the skin that had been drawn into the egg was already starting to break down at a cellular level. It was being penetrated by micro-organisms which were methodically dissolving the dermal cell membrane walls.

Demitri’s head reached the egg, and started to sink into it.

‘Here we go,’ Nigel muttered as he stared raptly at Demitri’s eggsumption.

Exovision showed Kysandra the egg organisms devouring Demitri’s ear then exposing the skull bone. He sank deeper and deeper into the egg. After another twenty minutes half of his head was inside, at which point the egg finally eroded a small patch of his skull just above the jaw. With the breakthrough complete, the rest of the bone began to vanish like window frost before a warm breath. The organisms began to infiltrate the brain, forming long, superfine threads whose tips pierced individual neurones.

‘That is one sophisticated weapon,’ Nigel said in a troubled voice. ‘Commonwealth biononics are a long way behind this kind of nanobyte ability.’

‘Why would we want to build it?’ Fergus replied, his nose wrinkled up in dismay.

Nearly half of Demitri’s body had been absorbed into the egg now. A status review of his medical routines showed Kysandra that the egg had stripped his arm, leg and torso of skin. It was beginning to consume the exposed musculature. Her ex-sense could perceive the yolk substance thickening around the section where he was being drawn in, with denser folds beginning to accrete, like swirls within a black nebula. Strands began to slither into the missing slivers of muscle. Blood began to pulse out of frayed veins and arteries, to be sucked deeper into the egg. The egg’s serene thoughts were also starting to quicken. She glimpsed strange fractured images seeping free, and the sensation of profound cold . . .

‘What’s happening?’ Nigel asked. ‘Is that normal?’

The sharpness of his voice made Kysandra start. When she looked at him, he was frowning down at the flaccid ANAdroid protruding from the egg. The edge of Demitri’s body where it was being absorbed into the egg was oozing blood.

‘He’s coming out!’ Fergus barked.

Kysandra’s mouth dropped open in shock. The whole process was reversing. The egg was expelling Demitri’s body. She could perceive the egg’s thoughts fluttering, radiating out a sensation close to human panic.

‘Dammit,’ Nigel grunted.

Blood was flowing freely now as more of the semi-devoured body was expelled from the egg, splattering across the metal basin floor. Egg yolk began to spray out through the exposed muscles and slippery blood vessels.

Kysandra winced. ‘Uracus! That’s horrible.’

‘It’s rejecting him,’ Nigel said. ‘Hell, there must be something in his biochemistry that’s incompatible with the egg.’

‘What?’

Exasperated, Nigel gave her an almost pitying look.

‘Sorry.’

The flow of yolk liquid abruptly increased, forcing Demitri’s body out of the gap which the eggshell had created to ingest it. With a sickening fluid crunch, it collapsed onto the floor, heart still pumping strongly to squirt long streams of blood from the unravelled arteries in the leg and arm. Muscles fell off, slithering across the slick basin like gory fish.

Kysandra cried out and shut her eyes, feeling the bile rising in her throat. For a long moment she thought she was going to be sick. She made sure she turned round before opening her eyes again. The brick wall of Barn Seven was directly in front of her, reassuring in its bland normality. While behind her the last of the gurgling sounds faded away. ‘Now what?’ she asked miserably.

‘I’m storing the data in my lacuna,’ Nigel said. ‘Not that there is much.’

It was as if he hadn’t heard her, or didn’t care. She frowned at him.

‘Give me your hand,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘I’m going to undo this, obviously. I can tolerate losing Demitri if it achieved something. But it hasn’t. So . . .’ He held out his hand.

Kysandra grasped it, surprised by how warm and sweaty it was. Just like hers. As before, her ex-sense perceived the weird echoes of herself pervading the hidden fabric of this universe as Nigel pushed his thoughts deeper into the memory layer. She glided back through them, through herself, watching events rewind.

‘Stop,’ Nigel commanded.

Kysandra was standing on the rim of the pit, looking down as a naked Demitri reached out to put a brass key into the cage’s Ysdom lock. He paused, and looked up at Nigel.

‘It doesn’t work,’ Nigel said.

There was a long moment while Nigel downloaded the data he’d saved from the non-existent future to Demitri’s u-shadow.

‘Damn,’ Demitri grunted. He grinned. ‘Something I ate?’

‘I don’t think you’re organic enough,’ Nigel said. ‘Once it started to break down your cells into specific compounds it realized something was wrong. There’s got to be a whole load of protective protocols built in.’

Demitri gave the dark egg a suspicious glance. ‘Clever. So: plan B, then?’

‘Looks like it.’

‘What’s plan B?’ Kysandra blurted. Nobody had mentioned this before.

‘We use a body that won’t be rejected,’ Nigel said.

‘A body? You mean a human?’ Her voice rose in alarm. ‘You’re going to let a human be eggsumed? To Fall? That’s . . . That’s . . .’

‘Pretty bad.’

‘You can’t. I won’t let you.’

‘Sometimes to do what’s right, you have to do what’s wrong.’

‘Still no.’

‘Not even Ma?’

Kysandra blanched. Hesitated for a moment. ‘No,’ she said, then more firmly. ‘No, not even her.’

‘Interesting moral dilemma,’ Nigel said. ‘Given a soul in the Void is effectively immortal, and we desperately need the information. Just who is unworthy enough to qualify?’