Dreyden spun the card with his finger. "Etched sapphires… interesting." He looked up at Stanton. "Are they scan-enabled?"

Stanton nodded. "Each is a unit representing a hundred thousand New Carth shillings — the price we agreed, yes?"

Dreyden sat back, pulling yet another cigarette from the dispenser and lighting it with his fancy ring. He drew deep and waved one hand airily through the smoke. "Oh, it's agreed."

Opposite them the two war drones, obviously instructed through Dreyden's aug, began to rise back towards the shimmer-shield door in the roof of the biodome — since through there lay no doubt the most direct route to the bay containing Lyric II.

"I'll take it on trust that they are genuine," Dreyden added.

Stanton kept a smile on his face, knowing that also through his aug, Dreyden could control the orientation of every mirror out there. He was aware that any who had crossed this man and thought to then escape by ship were now so much drifting ash. Apparently a ship the size of Lyric II would last for slightly less time than a fly in a blast furnace if even a single one of the mirrors was directed at it.

There was something horrible about the way Skellor moved, as if something chitinous was heaving along under his skin, but with movements not quite in consonance with his own. Studying him, Aphran wondered at the strange outgrowth that extended up the side of his neck and cupped his chin, at the grey veins that ran across his face and the backs of his hands. What the hell was all that about? And why was there blood flowing in his crystal matrix AI? She could only assume that he had now put it fully online, and that somehow he must have used that weird shit he had been playing with on his off-time from doing work for the group, to prevent it from killing him. Had she been able to, Aphran would have opened up on him with the pulse-rifle she had picked up in the Security Area but, judging by the burnt-out Golem she had seen in there, such action would not have availed her much. Anyway, she was unable to act against him: her aug felt like the body of some vicious insect with its sharp legs clawed inside her brain, and she knew that all his orders must be obeyed — the consequences of disobedience would be agony and death.

Glancing aside, she studied Danny, and to a certain extent considered herself lucky. Her own aug, though somehow subverted and now being used to control her, was at least the same Dracocorp item that had been provided by the Masadans. The boy's aug, where Skellor had touched it, now sprouted the same greyish material that inhabited Skellor's body, and roots of it were spreading across the boy's neck and his head. Now, whenever she looked into Danny's face, all she got in return was the expression of an imbecile, but one who obeyed Skellor without hesitation.

Finally finding the courage to speak, Aphran asked, "What about the others?"

"They'll cause sufficient disruption. My 'ware field wouldn't extend to cover you all," Skellor replied.

Aphran glanced about herself — she had not even been aware that they were covered. She glanced to Skellor's belt and saw that he was now not wearing the generator he had spent so much time on. What was he talking about?

"Ah, here," he said, halting and turning to face a door. He reached out and pressed his hand against the touch-panel, and for a moment Aphran expected klaxons to start blaring. Then she chided herself for being obtuse — if he could break into a Polity Security Area, then closed doors were obviously no problem to him.

The door slid aside and as Skellor pulled his hand away from the panel, Aphran saw that it was as if he had just pressed it down in some tar — long strands stretched and attenuated, then snapped back into his palm. Useful ability maybe, but she was not sure it was one she wanted to own.

"Cold store," she said, stepping into the room beyond and surveying the rows of cold-coffins either side of a single aisle.

"There are only fifty people here," said Skellor, "but the system that watches this room is the same system that watches all the other sleep rooms on this ship, so I can access it here." So saying he headed down the aisle to a space in one row of coffins, finding an instrument wall. Here he slapped his hand against a touch-console. This time the task for him appeared much more difficult as, after a few seconds, he closed his eyes and bowed his head. Aphran watched the blood pulsing faster in his aug, and noted how the greyish veins on his face seemed to be moving: sliding under his skin like lizard tails.

A series of sucking thumps sent her into a crouch with her pulse-rifle held at the ready, then she realized that the noise came from cold-coffins hinging open — all of them. Inside each was exposed the naked body of a man or a woman, their concave impressions mirrored in the lids.

Opening his eyes and glancing round, Skellor said flatly, "Damn."

"What happened?" Aphran asked, standing again. She noted that Danny had moved not at all.

"Vascular control," Skellor explained. "I was trying to get the system to pump them dry, then return their blood before they'd reached thaw-up, which would have killed them all rather neatly. Unfortunately, I overlooked a subroutine that isolates the coffins, which in turn then revive their occupants. But don't worry, this was only a test run, so it's only happening in here."

"They're waking up?" Aphran asked.

Skellor surveyed the room as if that had not occurred to him. "Oh, yes," he said. "You've got about six minutes yet, so you'd best hurry and kill them all."

Aphran stared at him in horror, and immediately felt the claw inside her head closing when she made no move to obey. Suddenly she found herself walking towards the head of a row. It was not as if she was being forced, for it was her doing the walking; it was rather as if at the wholly animal level she had made the choice to stay alive, for by obeying was the only way she could.

"You take that other row," she instructed Danny, the words tasting foul to her.

Upon reaching the cold-coffin at the end of her own row, she placed the snout of the pulse-rifle against the temple of its occupant, and pulled the trigger. The man's head lifted to the side, blooming open like a flower on the blue flash of energy. However, as he settled back, what ran out of the ugly wound was not blood but the complex antifreeze that had been pumped into his body whilst his blood had been pumped out. The next coffin occupant was a woman, and seeing a tattoo on her arm that branded her as Earth Central Security, gave Aphran no comfort. This was bloody work. She was a soldier in the Separatist cause, not a murderer. Her tenth victim leaked blood, and her fifteenth sprayed it across the metal floor. Her last one of twenty-five opened his eyes and sat upright before she shot him twice in the chest, knocking him out of his coffin. Perhaps she should not have been so tardy; Danny had killed all his lot long before.

Carrying her laptop, Mika entered the cold-sleep area and glanced around. Everything looked as it should be; anything wrong in any of the ten or more of these areas, and the Occam's AI would have registered it immediately. This particular area, though it had room for many more of them, had only eight occupied coffins. Seven contained some of the Occam's technicians — overspill from another area a quarter of a kilometre to port of the ship — and the eighth one held Apis Coolant's mother.

It had been Mika's intention to leave her in cold-sleep until she could be returned to an Outlinker medical facility, as the injuries she had sustained though easy enough to deal with in a normal human, in an Outlinker were not so amenable to the medical technologies at Mika's disposal. Even the boy's broken ankle had caused her some problems — normal bone welding not being sufficient to the task of repairing fragile Outlinker bone — and she'd needed to fabricate an autodoc boot to monitor the slow process of repair.