"Skellor?" Cormac asked.

"Oh yes, I control every one of these prisoners and I'll soon control this ship. It'll be interesting to see what the Polity can do about a subverted AI dreadnought nicely filled with a technology that's about a million years ahead of its own… I'll be seeing you, Ian Cormac."

With that, the woman convulsed in the same way as the man, and died.

Skellor smiled a triumphant smile to himself as he stood before this newest door. It was with some relish that he contemplated getting his hands on that ECS bastard and doing something really drastic: maybe rewiring his nervous system so that everything he felt caused him pain, and rewiring his head so he could never faint or die of shock. But that was for the future, when he had complete control of this ship. Right now, he must get complete control. He turned to the door and placed his hand against the palm lock.

He now found that he did not require a sample of the specific DNA for those doors that were DNA-locked, as he had discovered that the locking codes only keyed to a thousand or so specific and short base sequences. Having discovered the positioning of these sequences in the polynucleotide chains enabled him to create a skeleton key in his right hand — actually altering the genetic structure in the skin of that hand to suit. Of course, this did not work without him sending filaments into the locking system to subvert security routines and listen, like a safebreaker, while he changed over to specific sequences to suit the lock. The door he now stood before opened after a few seconds, and he strode through, quickly followed by Aphran and Danny.

"My God," said Aphran, her dull tone belying the words.

This entire room was a storehouse of Golem. Skellor surveyed the racks of skinless androids for a moment before moving on — these were not for him, not yet.

With Cento and Gant at his back, Cormac stepped into Medical and studied the scene. Mika now stood over Apis, who was slumped in a chair. Scar stood to one side, watching the boy intently — perhaps now learning more about human grief than he had ever known before. When the boy looked up, Cormac met his gaze for a moment then turned away. He could offer him no comfort: the boy's mother was dead — murdered by Skellor almost by default, while the man had been killing five hundred other people aboard this ship.

Cormac switched his gaze to the ceiling. "Tomalon, are you listening in?" he asked.

"I hear you," replied the familiar grating voice that was an amalgam of both Tomalon and Occam.

"Okay, I want you to use all the subminds and stored personalities at your disposal to initiate those of the ship's Golem you consider safe. How quickly can you do that, and how many can you provide us with?"

"I can have all the Golem with you in one hour — they have not been subverted. From the subminds and personalities I have, I can run as many copies as required."

Cormac glanced at the two Sparkind Golem. "Do you still have copies of Aiden and Cento?"

"I do."

"Run copies from them: they're Sparkind so they'll probably be more useful in this situation than technicians or researchers."

"Understood."

"What about Skellor: any sign of him?"

"None."

"The escaped prisoners?"

"I have located fifteen of them, and have that matter under control."

Cormac now turned his attention to those gathered in the room with him.

It was like a raw bloody wound in his side, where part of his flesh had been excised, but neither that, not the damage to Occam, nor the excision and destruction of a whole internal system, caused him the greatest pain. That was caused by guilt. They had been his responsibility. Five hundred human beings had given themselves over to his care and his infallibility, and now they were all dead. Tomalon had screamed and raged earlier, but the cold machinery of the bridge pod sucked away his cries, and they were as ineffectual as the dead themselves. Grief was not the answer: vengeance was. While, with one facet of himself and Occam combined, he watched Cormac's briefing, he hunted with the rest of himself.

The four he'd located hiding in hold LS-45 had not moved, and shortly the high-speed surveillance drones would reach them. Tomalon considered also sending the hull-repair robot from LS-33, but a diagnostic probe revealed that it had discharged its laminar batteries. Looking through the same robot's two normal and two tracking eyes, he saw through the clearing smoke that the two Separatists were most definitely dead: teeth broken and internal organs shattered, skin blistered where it was not charred. He'd known that, during the long game of hide-and-seek, the two would at some point make the mistake of trying to get past the slow-moving robot, not realizing that though the robot was slow, the wire-feed to its seam-welder was not. It had electrocuted them both when they made that mistake.

The drones were nearly there now. Another thirty seconds would see the four Separatists in LS-45 dealt with. Though shaped like arrowheads, the drones had no sharp edges, but that was of no consequence when they could accelerate to Mach II within only a few tens of metres.

With tears running from his whitened eyes Tomalon now turned his attention to the nine escaped prisoners he had located in LS-26. Four of them were in an outer hold space that possessed an external hatch. They'd panicked when he'd shut them in, but they carried nothing with them they could use to cut through the ceramal door. Their five fellows were coming to their aid with all speed — obviously summoned via the Dracocorp augs they all wore — but it seemed unlikely they would get there before the second hull-repair robot, which was trundling round the hull, reached the hatch. With a kind of horrible glee, Tomalon felt the Occam part of himself calculating vectors from the four — trying to work out which of them would first be sucked out of the fifteen-centimetre-square hatch.

Ah, LS-45, now.

One of the Separatists there had stepped outside, perhaps hearing something. He turned, horror writ clear in his features. Through six red eyes Tomalon saw this, then transferred his attention to the pinhead camera set high in the corridor. He watched as one of the drones hurtled forwards and slammed straight through the man, exploding away most of his torso and spinning the remainder against the wall where it smeared blood and intestines before collapsing. The two other drones turned into the hold to be greeted by screams and yells. Then the stuttering of a pulse-rifle hitting one of the drones before it slammed into the possessor of the weapon in white-hot fragments. The woman next to that man staggering away, groping at where a stray fragment of metal had torn away half her face. The other one, pushed back against the wall by the second drone — it not penetrating because it had not room to build up sufficient speed — screaming as it crushed his chest, blood spraying from his lips. The drone backing off to let him drop, turning to the woman who is now down and crawling, coming down on her head like a stamping iron boot…

LS-26 again. The robot connects its key-plug, turns it, inserts it further, turns it three more revolutions, retracts it and trundles back on its hull-grip treads. Initiated now, the hatch motor draws power and begins to lift from its seals. The five other Separatists have now reached the inner door to the hold and one of them fires at the lock with a pulse-gun. This does no more than fuse the mechanism and reduce the possibility of them getting the door open. Tomalon observes this, just as he observes the white mist of vapour-laden air blasting from the opening outer hatch and ice crystals condensing on the hull-repair robot. Inside the hold, he observes the four scrabbling at the inner door as the outer hatch reaches its slide point and slams aside. Suddenly a miniature hurricane drains the hold. The woman who slams against the hatch-hole does not have time to scream before the huge pressure differential snaps her spine and folds her in half — ejecting her into space. The man who hits directly behind her is jammed in place — the differential no longer enough to break him up sufficiently to push him through. Air continues to escape past him. Through the robot, Tomalon watches him — his arm and head through the hatch, eyes bulging and vapour jetting from his mouth, veins breaking and reddening his face like a drunkard's. Soon all the air is gone and he falls back inside to join his fellows, who are on the floor gasping at nothing, and dying.