"He may not be prepared to take any more risks with us." Stanton at last voiced what they were all thinking. "If he fires on us as soon as he surfaces, that's it — all over."

"But he won't," said Cormac with a confidence he did not feel. "He'll want to gloat, if only for a few minutes, and while he does that we'll be sending our message on ahead. I would even bet he'll open communications with us in the hope of getting some response out of me."

"And our response to that?" said Jarvellis.

"I will talk to him," said Cormac. "Every second we gain…"

"In that respect," said the captain of Lyric II, "it's time to start counting."

The Occam Razor slid out of underspace a thousand kilometres behind them, so that it seemed a tangled, dead thing, wrapped around something glorious and precious, was folding out of blackness there. Observing the great ship, Cormac was struck this once by how strangely beautiful it was. Perhaps this was because it would be the last time he ever saw it.

Through the myriad senses at his disposal, Skellor observed Lyric II like a fleck of matter against the sprawling backdrop. He studied the cylinder worlds like displaced towers, and the fragile chains of habitats, the huge manufactories and refineries, and the swarms of ships. Here was another place open to subversion, to takeover — throughout it he could feel the presence of Dracocorp augs, in loosely aligned communities each held together by the creeping dominion of one of their members. His arrival at Masada, and what he had found there developing under the Hierarch, had made him understand the subtle route Dragon had used to dominate humans — a route Skellor had very unsubtly ripped wide apart. But that was all something he must return to later, for here he was much too close to the Polity, and already could feel the U-space probing of a runcible AI. No, the one ship ahead of him he would take, and that would be all and enough. He opened the bay from which he had earlier ejected the raptor-piloted lander, and accelerated down onto Lyric II. As he descended, he spread himself out through Jain structure, substructure, architecture in a kind of rapturous stretching as of some creature extending great wings and claws.

This is it, Agent. I have you now.

Horrible laughter then echoed within him — and it wasn't his own.

You are dead, he told the source of that laughter.

You made me, replied the ephemeral voice of Aphran. He tried to find it, encompass it, smear it out of existence, but he was chasing mere shadows through the vastness of himself.

You haven't seen it yet, have you?

I haven't seen what? he asked, hoping this time that when she spoke again he would be able to nail down exactly where she lurked.

The light, Skellor. The light.

Standing in the sharp blue shadows of his favourite cyanid, Dreyden drew hard on his cigarette, its glowing tip reflecting off his chromed aug, then blew out a cloud of smoke over the exposed yellow convolutions inside one of the plant's opened pods. The convolutions all immediately zipped themselves up like a swarm of worms passing over the surface of this alien flower, then after a time unclenched again.

It was only here that Dreyden truly felt he could relax. Or perhaps he was kidding himself that relaxation was even possible for him: he had been described as being 'taut as monofilament' from his childhood — full of crazy hopes and numbing fears which he felt were the driving forces of his success. He knew that sometimes his fears strayed into the irrational, and it was good that he did know this, for Lons and Alvor would never tell him: Lons because Dreyden's sanity or otherwise was not a matter of interest to him; and Alvor because he was always looking for an angle, for a way to manipulate his boss, to scrabble another couple of rungs up the ladder.

Across the ground before him a flattened worm of jelly oozed with slow ripplings that caught the lights from his apartment. To his right he saw that a plasoderm's grey seedcase had hinged itself completely open, and that the object crawling before him was the last of its slime-mould spore carriers to be released. He threw his cigarette butt into the empty seedcase where it hissed out in the damp interior. The accuracy of his shot gave him a second's satisfaction before his whole world collapsed on him.

There was no alarm mode in his aug, as he considered that for anything that urgent he wanted no delay. His connection, which had been a low buzz of activity in a place impossible to point to, suddenly slammed back with such force that he staggered against the lethal edges of the cyanid leaves.

"Battle stats and alarm to all areas lock down and seal gate connection break…"

Alvor was rattling off instructions so closely auged in that he became part machine himself for that brief moment. Lons had already moved beyond the verbal and was dealing in logic blocks and prestored sub-programs. Below Dreyden's hands, virtual consoles flicked into existence, and all around him flat and holojected displays folded out of the air. There he observed huge transfers of information as the bulwarks of his empire were automatically dropped into safe storage. However, his attention was immediately riveted on one small screen. A touch at the non-existent console expanded the screen to reveal the huge Polity dreadnought bearing down upon Elysium.

"Lyric II pursued. Message coming in from John Stanton."

Dreyden had not needed Alvor to tell him this. He was on top of things now.

"Dreyden, you've got to cover me. He is seriously pissed about those drones," said the holojected image of John Stanton.

Dreyden felt his insides clenching in a brass fist as he studied the man — Stanton seemed scared, and that was a first.

"What about the drones?" he asked.

"Signal code broken. Signal code broken."

Dreyden pressed his hands together to stop them shaking, as Stanton flickered out of existence and was instantly replaced.

"Donnegal Dreyden," spoke a hated image. "This is Ian Cormac of Earth Central Security. You have thirty seconds to transmit all your control codes to this Polity dreadnought. If you fail to comply I will be forced to fire upon you."

Something was wrong with all this, but Dreyden could see no way to discover what, nor had he been allowed time.

"You know what my reply has to be," he said, not believing he was speaking these words, nor knowing what else to say. "I did warn you last time you were here."

"Do you really think your pathetic mirrors will manage to cut through the armour on this Polity dreadnought before it destroys them?" And now Cormac's expression turned furious. "Do you really think that ECS can countenance you supplying terrorists with high-tech Polity war drones?"

"But I—"

The link cut off and Dreyden was left staring at darkness.

"He can't be that stupid."

Dreyden was in complete agreement with Alvor's assessment: Agent Cormac of ECS had to know the mirrors were capable of raising in seconds the temperature of anything to that of a sun's surface. The agent must want to die aboard that great ship, and Dreyden did not have the option to persuade him otherwise. Already he was sending the signals that would give him total command of each mirror. Before him a depiction of Elysium sprang into existence, and each mirror gained a shimmering halo as it came under his control. His hands moving across and through the consoles, he spidered the air with bright lines as he plotted trajectories and sent further commands. In that moment he moved into the language of machine code, and felt himself connecting more deeply into his own realm. He knew that, like those images of consoles and screens around him, the feeling itself was illusion, but he felt the glide of massive hydraulics, the acid fire of thruster motors, and the huge shifting of mirrors at his command. Subliminally he noted a grabship caught in momentary focus, turning mercury-bright then transforming into a ball of light expanding and dispersing. Then plotted trajectories intersected on what was even now becoming visible through the glass dome above.