Seconds passed — or perhaps minutes, or hours. Sastol gazed around at his men, and those men of the neighbouring squad. Most of them were now on the ground, groaning, writhing… though some were ominously still. Others, who like Donch and himself had torn away their augs, were still standing and mobile.

"What the hell was that?" Sastol shuddered, unable to accept that he had seen one of the cylinder worlds gutted by fire, and then felt some monster trying to take control of his mind.

"Fucking Satan," Donch replied.

Sastol nodded; perhaps that was the only answer he would be getting down here. He stepped out into the open and looked around. Some of the prostrate members of the other squads were now standing again. The rattle of gunfire had him down in squat as he observed the captain of the next squad stumbling out into the open as well, with one of his men following. The second man suddenly raised his weapon and blew the captain to the ground in a bloody mess of pieces of flesh loosely connected by skin and ligament.

"What?" Sastol turned to his own men, saw Donch's horrified expression turn to one of pleading, then saw him spin away in a wheel of blood. Sodar. It was Sodar who had fired — the man standing upright with mechanical efficiency, but his face twisted as if he had suffered a stroke and the aug on the side of his head now seemingly fused to it, looking ashen grey as if burnt. Sastol observed that same ashen tint on many heads turning with the same dead eyes and wasted expressions. Without hesitation he stepped back into the clearing his squad had made earlier, snatched up his weapon and pack — and ran.

Polas read through and understood every piece of information with which his instruments presented him. Through the probe he watched Faith die, and the source of that death coming insystem, before the probe whited out. Then his instrumentation went insane in a way he immediately recognized as viral takeover.

"Lellan, I'm getting a viral takeover of com. Shut it down immediately!"

Whether that got through or not he had no idea, for all the equipment shut off together for a couple of seconds, before clicking back on. Then, over to his right, he saw that the holojector tank had dumped its usual program, and no longer displayed the complicated dance of the Braemar moons and other worlds and worldlets that made up the Masadan system. Instead a wasted face appeared, seemingly wearing a helmet of grey wood and blood-infused crystal.

"I will not hamper your communications," spoke a decidedly creepy voice from Dale's console. "Just as I will not hamper your inclination to kill each other. I have only one wish, and that is for you to give me Ian Cormac. Do that and I go away."

"What is this, Polas?" said Lellan from her hide in the foothills.

Polas quickly replied, "The Occam Razor just arrived. Are you getting the picture I'm seeing over your helmet screen?"

"I am."

"Skellor, I think."

A slow handclap issued from Dale's console — she had now pushed her chair well back from the machine, as if it might bite her — and the image of Skellor, in the tank of the holojector, grinned nastily.

"Ah, I see I have been expected — which means you know where Cormac is. Let me have him and I will let you all live."

Whilst watching Skellor speak, it took a moment for Polas to realize that an old stripfilm printer across the other side of the room was operating. Moving out from behind his console, he walked across to it and observed the printout.

"I would hand this Cormac over to you," Lellan told Skellor, "but even though we have been in communication, I have no idea where he is."

The message coming through the printer read:

"Sophisticated viral subversion programs all over — attempted trace of U-space transmission — closing down all links and now maintaining a watching brief — Jarv."

Knowing that the printer possessed its own small memory, Polas reached down and pulled its optic cable, before reversing the stripfilm and wiping it. Returning to his console he was uncomfortably aware of the wall-mounted security camera following his progress.

"That is a real shame," said Skellor with the sincerity of a crocodile. "That means I'll just have to kill some of your people, and keep killing them until you find Cormac for me."

"Lellan, you have to get to the caves," advised Polas. "That ship is more powerful than the arrays ever were."

"I don't think that's our main problem," Lellan replied. "We've got Theocracy soldiers attacking right now, but there's something very wrong with them." She went on to say something more, but her voice became heavily distorted, and all comlinkage then blinked out.

… viral subversion programs…

Polas turned to look at the head in the holojector as it stared out with seemingly blind eyes. There were no Theocracy soldiers here for Skellor to subvert — but there were people to kill.

"All of you, get out," he said to the personnel in the operations room.

Dale looked up at him, her expression puzzled. Perhaps it was better that way, for when white fire blasted in through the panoramic window, no one but Polas realized what was happening. And he knew it only for the half-second it took for the fire to reach him, and vaporize him along with the rest of the mountain peak.

Jarvellis lifted her hands away from the instrumentation of Lyric II as if it had suddenly become infectious — which, in limited electro-optical ways, it could well have been.

"Lyric… are you all right?" she asked, frightened that she might not believe the answer.

"No worms got through," replied Lyric II's AI. "The Skellor based its attack program on information gleaned from the cylinder world it burnt out. In my terms it was pretty crude, but only crude in the way that dropping an atomic bomb on your enemy is cruder than creeping up behind him with a knife."

"Your metaphors leave something to be desired," Jarvellis replied, glancing over her own shoulder. "Remember your language."

At least the ship's AI was still hers, but things were far from all right. For the first time in a very long time Jarvellis felt frightened and indecisive. She knew that this was not wholly because of what the AI had referred to as 'the Skellor' — it was because for the very first time in ages she had so much to lose.

John was out there somewhere, but to try and communicate with him would be madness — locating both him and herself for this Skellor. And then there was this ship of theirs and all it contained…

"Lyric, what must we do to stay safe?" she asked, more for confirmation than because she did not already know.

"Move," replied the AI. "The Skellor will have realized that was only a secondary emitter in the mountain peak, and we do not know how much information he obtained from there."

AIs were just so cold: never unable to answer any question posed. Jarvellis thought of Polas in the nursery in Pillartown One, laughing as he pushed around toy tanks for a blond-haired child. She tried to scrub the image and to concentrate on the instrumentation before her.

"We have to assume that Skellor now has full use of all the scanning instrumentation possessed by that dreadnought. In Polity terms it is an old ship, but it's still way beyond anything the Theocracy owns… or rather owned," she said.

"The Skellor may have more than even that," commented the AI.

"Why do you keep calling him 'the Skellor'?"

"Because it is not human, it is not AI — and because I want to," it replied.

John had deliberately programmed Lyric II's AI for a certain cussedness, but sometimes Jarvellis wondered why they couldn't just have one as nice, polite and helpful as those she encountered on other ships.