"Your face looks like it's exploded," said Stanton. "It always fascinates me how they open you up to make even minor internal repairs."

Thorn reckoned Stanton should have been a surgeon — he seemed to enjoy describing to the patient the processes involved.

Now, as well as that of the cell-welder, came the higher-pitched droning of a bone-welder as the doc fixed into place the teeth it had rapidly manufactured inside itself. There came further tuggings as it checked the security of its welds. With the work of the cell-welder still continuing, Thorn was beginning to wonder just how much damage had been done to his face, when suddenly feeling returned to it and the doc withdrew. He sat up and immediately brought his hand up to his face: he now possessed a new set of front teeth and his nose was back to its customary shape, and all he felt was an ache deep in his gums and his sinuses. He took the mirror Stanton proffered him and inspected the repairs — same old face, but with absolutely no sign that it had been broken.

"You say that you now have the greatest respect for Ian Cormac, and that after Viridian your perspective changed completely. But I still don't see why you saved my life. You risked a hell of a lot there," said Thorn, handing back the mirror.

"Haven't you realized?" asked the mercenary as he returned the mirror to its rack. "I'm one of the good guys now."

Thorn, who was an expert when it came to 'evil grins', felt that Stanton's took some beating.

It was a huge ship, which was convenient as this meant that there were many places to hide — and right then Skellor wanted to hide. This hold-space was old and obviously had been long unused. The ceramal walls were dull, and on the floor were scattered the wing cases of blade beetles that some time in the past must have briefly infested this area. Many of the wing cases, he noticed, had tiny neat holes punched right through them — a sure sign that small ship drones had used their lasers to clear the infestation.

Skellor dropped down with his back to the cold wall and closed his eyes, connecting himself deep into the Jain substructure and assessing the information presented by the devices it was creating within him. Unconsciously he touched a hand to the woody material that had grown from his collarbone and up the side of his neck to cup his chin and cheek, on the opposite side of his head from his aug. This part of the substructure had grown before he had managed to take control of it, and he had yet to find a way to reverse the process. No matter — he'd find a way.

The detector, which was integral to the entire structure inside him, no longer registered Hawking radiation, and from it he no longer experienced the terrible feeling of threat. As far as he was aware, the Polity had no interstellar ships capable of carrying working runcibles, since the devices conflicted with the function of the underspace engines, yet Hawking radiation was a byproduct of a black hole — and it was damned unlikely one of those was aboard — or of runcible function, so what had occurred?

Almost on an instinctive level Skellor knew that something had recently paid the Occam Razor a visit, and that same something had rung alarm bells in the Jain structure and in himself. That something, he understood, had represented a great danger to him. But fortunately, it had departed the ship shortly after the ship itself had entered underspace, and now it was time for him to make his plans.

He knew that if the AIs that ran the Polity found out about him and what he had achieved, they would not rest until they had tracked him down. How much more severe would their strictures be upon his work now that he had become his work? They would throw him into the deepest hole they could find, and fill it in after him. Now, rather than being a researcher who had found the Separatists convenient allies and generous paymasters, he was essentially a Separatist himself. The Polity was now his enemy — it could be no other way.

So first he needed to know where this ship was heading, how many people there were aboard and who they were — and everything else that he was up against. As yet, he did not have the confidence to attempt gleaning that information directly from the ship AI. Yes, in a very short time he had acquired huge capabilities, but he did not yet think himself ready to go up against an AI of that level. However, there were other ways of getting the information he needed that would not require him venturing too deeply into the ship's systems: human beings were easily accessible packets of information in themselves. Of course, it would be convenient if, whilst finding out those things he needed to know, he also acquired some allies.

Skellor attempted a smile, but his face felt stiff. Going deeper into his Jain structure he began to build further useful… tools.

The corpse was laid out on a table inside the isolation booth while forensic robots, which were complex near-kin of autodocs, swarmed over it like chrome dung beetles as they investigated and catalogued its structure. Cormac observed this process with a feeling of chill that he had brought up with him from the platform on which he had met Blegg. What he had seen down there… what had he seen?

"They were rather touchy, down there," said Mika, as she studied screens and, through the touch-consoles below, tapped in further instructions to the robots.

Down there?

After a moment he realized she was referring to Elysium and the difficulties the three Golem had experienced extracting her from that place. He smiled then, remembering her inability to ask direct questions. "They thought they were about to suffer a Polity takeover."

"An understandable reaction," Mika replied, as he turned. She made a pushing gesture with her hand, exposing the tattoo on her palm that signified her graduation from the Life-Coven on the planet Circe — a secretive place that produced some of the best analytical minds for biosciences in the entire sector. Cormac studied her. She had changed only a little since the last time he had seen her: her orange hair was now shoulder-length rather than the crop it had been, her eyes were still demonic red and her skin pale, but she had acquired some bulk on her diminutive frame that had not been there before.

"Have you had a chance to look at the artefacts?" he asked her.

"Briefly," she nodded to the nearby case in which they were contained, "but such items require deep and intensive study."

"Then they are Jain?"

"Oh yes, but in all honesty this thing is much more interesting." She indicated the creature Shuriken had killed in the Separatist base on Callorum, as some of the forensic robots now burrowed inside it. "You realize that this was once a human being?"

"I saw the similarities, but I assumed it was just some bio-construct of Skellor's and left it at that. He's had a tendency to come up with some nasty devices: poisonous snakes directed by microminds, birds with planar explosive packed into their bones, and more recently an organic gun that fires darts which are apparently just grossly enlarged bee stings but can inject the poison or drug of your choice."

"It's surprising he was allowed to remain free," Mika opined.

"We never had anything definite on him until he started taking Separatist pay cheques, so we left him alone in the hope he'd lead us to others, which he did." Cormac grimaced. "Though now I suspect that maybe we left him to get on with his work for a little too long." He gestured to the corpse in the isolation booth. "You said this was once a man."

"Or woman," Mika replied. "I'll have it sexed in a little while, though I can't see what there is to be gained from that. Essentially what Skellor created here is a melding of calloraptor and human being, but that's not the most interesting part: this creature has a nanotech structure inside it that worked very quickly to repair its body."