The surveillance drones have nearly reached the other five who have now stepped back from the inner door — no doubt having received some last communication from their fellows inside. Tomalon turns the drones and sends them in search of the other escaped prisoners. He considers that the evacuation of further air will be no great loss, for the Occam Razor is now less five hundred souls who would need to breathe. All around these five Separatists, he closes doors and seals and hatches, then he opens the inner door to hold LS-26. This is a show he wants to see again. He watches the five try to run, fighting the hurricane that wants to snatch them away. He sees one hurtling down the corridor and slamming into the doorjamb of LS-26 before being dragged through, yet knows in his heart that this is not enough vengeance; there will never be enough.

"Hello, Captain."

The voice is close and he feels breath on his face. He slides aside the two nictitating screens that cover his eyes and behind his eyes he stands down the extra optic-nerve linkages. All views external to the bridge pod fade and he gazes at the face before him.

"Hello, Skellor."

The hand that touches his face is hot and feverish, then suddenly scalding. He feels linkages blinking out, subprograms collapsing or being isolated. He feels the invasion. Pain in his right arm. He looks down and sees Skellor's other hand on the engine-control vambrace, then that being levered up and tearing from Tomalon's flesh, trailing strands like tar. Engine control gone. Dropping out of U-space. In horror he watches Skellor finally pull it away from him, skeining optic cable behind, then pressing the vambrace into place on his own arm. Security protocols come online, grope for the invasive presence — become that presence.

Tomalon. Tomalon. Tomalon. Like a child mimicking the galloping of a horse, but, behind this, Occam is screaming.

Access codes!

He tries to dump them, but the system-backup protocols will not allow them to go unless he orders it again. Too late. System backup slides into black isolation. Tearing. The second vambrace has gone, and now Skellor has his fingers under the Captain's heart plate, his grasp coming near to life-support; and on Tomalon's head the primary connections to Occam are loosening.

Someone is screaming, Tomalon realizes it is himself.

Perhaps this is enough?

Tomalon accesses a system long unused in the Polity, and Occam gladly consents.

It was fun, Occam says.

Goodbye, Tomalon replies.

The unused system comes online like a guillotine slamming down: hard-wired and not easily amenable to subversion; it was built in when humans ran the Polity and AIs were not to be completely trusted. Occam dies, its mind fragmenting under a huge power surge, crystal layers ablating away, perfect logic and stacked memory becoming a searing explosion of static. Throughout the ship, surveillance drones drop from the air, their minds bleeding away and single power-surges scrambling the silicon matrices in which those minds were contained. The hull-repair robot outside LS-26 closes the hatch, shearing in half a corpse still caught in it, before locking down against the hull itself and dying. Other drones either freeze or lock into a repetition of their most recent task. One of these, which is welding a hull member, continues the task long after it has run out of welding wire; and another, deep in the ship, continues polishing an area of floor it will wear its way through some time hence. Control panels shut down for a moment, then come back on in isolated function. And finally, twenty-eight skinless Golem bow their heads as one, dots of white heat appearing on polished ceramal skulls as internal components fuse and burn away. A further twenty-two stand up as one, and step out of their bracing frames.

"Fuck you!" Skellor rages, his hand closing on Tomalon's throat.

The image of the room and all its contents, excepting the creatures, faded away, to then be replaced with an image of a bedroom with three beds, and Brother Malcolm, hugely asleep. The woman glanced at her son, perhaps considering showing him this, herself certainly understanding where the story was now going. The boy was busy playing with his macabre toys and probably wouldn't notice if she stopped reading. However, she wanted to carry on because she was enjoying the story herself.

" 'Who's been sleeping in my bed? asked Daddy Duck, upon finding the sheets of his bed rumpled and crumpled," she said — over-egging the self-parody.

Her son glanced up at her and frowned. She continued in a more normal tone, " 'Who's been sleeping in my bed? asked Mummy Duck, finding her sheets all rumpled and crumpled too. 'Mffuful coffle foofle, said Baby Duck."

The woman stared at the picture of the smallest of the three gabbleducks — that is to say one that was only about three metres tall — as it ground its jaws from side to side, two feet clad in filthy red and white striped bedsocks sticking out the side of its bill, and blood running in rivulets down its breast. The boy would like this picture, but was too intent on his toy, which had now pulled its victim out from underneath the carpet and was using it in the same way as Brother Malcolm had been used. As, on the final gulp, the two feet disappeared, she finished the text of the story:

" 'Don't speak with your mouth full, said Mummy and Daddy Duck together."

In the morning, they pushed through the flute grass for only an hour before coming to a crushed-down clearing in which something had obviously pounced on and devoured a grazer. Old grass and new, the latter being now even in these wetter areas up to waist-high, was spattered with a treacly substance that Fethan told her was grazer blood. Also scattered all around were regurgitated piles of white bone flakes and chewed skin, and stinking worms of excrement — whether this last was from the grazer or the thing that had eaten it was debatable. The most eye-catching item left was the grazer's skull, which sat at the precise centre of the clearing as if carefully placed there. This object was as large as a man's torso, and possessed a jaw set with three rows of flat grinding teeth that worked against a flat bony plate. There were four eye-sockets on either side of the long skull — one still holding an eye that was the colour of iron and contained a double black pupil.

Eldene noticed movement amid the treacly blood and dark flesh still clinging to white bone, and on closer inspection saw this was due to small black crustaceans similar in shape to sprawns — but without the wings — that had come to feed. Stepping back, she realized that the entire clearing was swarming with these creatures. Wordlessly she hurried after Fethan, who now took the track that led from the clearing towards the mountains.

By mid-morning they were on high ground yet again, and the going became much easier. As they drew closer to the mountains, the landscape and vegetation began to change drastically. Lizard tails grew in big clumps encircling some kind of huge flower or fruit with the appearance of a mound of raw liver; stubby flute grasses grew in hollows, but the rest of the ground was covered by blister mosses ranging from blue to green, with the occasional red pod-spike rearing up to a metre in the air; plants like giant thistles encroached., as neatly ranked as marching armies, clad in finger-length thorns and bearing furred heads of deepest purple over bodies of pale green; rocky outcroppings became commonplace and a wider variety of molluscs clung to them. And the ground sloped ever upwards.

"I've never seen this, any of this before, not even in a book," Eldene commented, after she had stopped to inspect some of the rock-clinging molluscs gathered on a large flat stone. Their shells were seemingly enamelled in Euclidian patterns of black and yellow, as if someone had spilt a jewellery box there.