Gant smelt burning and just knew there was something wrong. He wondered if this knowledge could be put down to instinct, then he wondered if such an abstraction could have survived the copying process that had resulted in his present self.

"Aiden? Cento?" he said into his wristcom, while drawing his pulse-gun. Then he damned his own stupidity — he was in a security area so radio signals could not penetrate the shielding incorporated in the walls. All communications from here had to be via direct line wires or optic cables. Moving to one of the coms set in the wall itself, he spoke the same words. His voice should have activated the device and his words caused it to relay them to the required recipient, but there was no response. He tried the touch-pads and found them dead.

Of course, his next action should have been to get the hell out of there, then return with a shitload of backup. But Gant was Sparkind and a Golem android now, and utterly confident that there was little he could not squash on his own. He ran to the door and flung himself through it, rolled, and came up into a crouch to spot potential targets. No movement. The guy sitting at the console looked wasted, and the other…

Gant suddenly had one of those moments of revelation that in others often necessitate a change of underwear. Golem, He tried to communicate with it on the same level as Cento and Aiden did with himself — direct radio transmission, mind to mind — but got nil response. Someone had killed this Golem. The head was a blackened ruin, which did not necessarily mean much as the mind was contained in an armoured case in the chest. But the lack of movement or communication did signify. Swinging round, Gant quickly moved back to the door and headed for SA1. He was only a few paces down the corridor when the blast from a riot gun lifted him into the air and deposited him on his back.

"The ship you were on, the General Patten, was completely destroyed by Dragon," explained Cormac.

Apis stood in a gravity of one gee. The exoskeletal suit that the Golem, Aiden, had earlier found in the Occam's stores, bulked him out so he now looked to have the musculature to withstand this gravity. The thick grey material covered him from his feet to under his chin, where it flared to cup his head. There was also a coms helmet that went with the suit, but they told him he would have no need of it, just as he would be unlikely to need the hood that folded up from the back, or the visor that could rise to meet it from the chin rest, or the weapon-system connection ports. For this was a suit specifically manufactured for military use.

"Yes, I knew that," he said, staring straight back at Cormac.

"Did you know many of those aboard?" Cormac asked, sitting. Apis moved carefully to another chair and sat down. He would be all politeness, but he wondered what this grim man wanted from him. The Cormac of The Dragon in the Flower — the book detailing the events preceding Dragon's supposed suicide on the planet Aster Colora — did not strike him as the kind to waste time on socializing, especially with a teenage Outlinker. They were now heading into a potential war zone, with a titanic dying alien clinging to the outside of the ship. Surely there were more important things that required his visitor's attention?

"My probable father, Peerswarf, also others I'd known in the tech section for a few months, my teachers…"

"Friends?"

"They were all in the communal areas. I was in the tech section," said Apis bluntly.

Cormac looked around the room. "Why one gee?" he asked.

That isn't it, thought Apis.

"I want to get used to using this suit. I don't want to be helpless again. If soldiers…"

Apis suddenly lost track of what he was saying. It was fear, he realized. With this exoskeleton on, he could fight back.

"You weren't exactly helpless. A brain beats physical strength every time."

You're watching me, thought Apis, gauging my reactions.

Cormac said, "Now, I don't want to aggravate your grief, but there are details I need from you. I want you to tell me the entire story."

Ah…

"From when?" Apis asked.

"From a relevant point."

Apis stared at him for a long moment. "I discovered the mycelium," he said, and was gratified to see a flash of reaction in Cormac's face.

"Then start from there."

Apis did so, frequently being stopped for questions about various points, some of which struck him as utterly irrelevant. Why did Cormac want to know precisely where the mycelium was found, and at exactly what time? Why did he need to know all the technical parameters of its growth through Miranda? Why did he push so hard to learn the wording of Masadan prayer?

When Cormac finally left, Apis felt tired and frustrated, but as he headed for his zero-gee hammock, replaying the conversation in his head, he realized that the agent had missed very little, that it had been a very thorough interrogation.

Stanton sipped his drink very carefully, as he did not have Dreyden's tolerance of scotch with lumps of hallucinogenic cips ice in it. Already the man's collection of tropical plants had taken on a slight halo of glowing blue, and there seemed suspect movement just at the edges of his vision.

"The more I look at those things, the more I sympathize with the Separatist cause," said Dreyden as he lit up yet another cigarette. Stanton studied the man: with his feet up on the balcony rail of his apartment in the geodesic dome, which also housed his plant collection, the man was trying to impress with his relaxed urbanity. But Stanton was not impressed. Dreyden was actually gaunt with worry, and eaten away by drugs and the constant medical treatments that kept them from killing him. Though he had reached the top here in Elysium, it seemed he was having trouble maintaining his foothold there. Stanton turned from him and looked up at what elicited the man's sympathies.

Outside the dome, the two war drones hovered where they had finished their brief demonstration — all their targets now so much metallic vapour. Dreyden pressed the two yellowed fingers clamping his cigarette against the expensive aug he wore, as if he really needed to concentrate to operate it. One of the segments of the dome slid aside onto vacuum, but trailing the nacreous meniscus of a shimmer-shield behind it to fill the gap. With small jets of thruster flame, the drones manoeuvred towards this gap and one after the other oozed into the dome to then drop down and hover over the cyanids and plasoderms.

"Separatism will eventually lose unless it is prepared to accept and use AI," said Jarvellis. "There's always been a bit of an arms race, but now the Polity is winning."

"Yes," said Dreyden, "the Polity is winning."

Stanton glanced at him and recognized a look in his face that he had only seen previously in Arian Pelter's, from the moment just after agent Ian Cormac had nearly killed him, right up to the point when Cormac actually did kill him. He glanced at Jarvellis sitting in a lounger on the other side of Dreyden and knew her expression: she had opined that this man was, as she put it, 'out with the fairies' for some time before Stanton himself had seen it. He had been as slow seeing the same in Pelter as well.

"It depends what you mean by 'winning'," he replied. "It's suppressing any rebellion against it, and expanding, but there's an awful lot of space out there that isn't Polity-controlled."

"All very well if you want to keep on moving," said Dreyden, drawing heavily on his cigarette before flicking the glowing butt over the balcony. "Now, on to money."

Smiling easily, as if unaware of the man's sudden abruptness, Stanton placed his briefcase on the table between them. Opening the case, he removed a card holding ten cut blue gems, each the size of someone's eye, and each containing square flaws which on close inspection would reveal intricate patterns as of an old integrated circuit. Closing the case, he dropped the strip of gems on the lid for Dreyden's inspection.