Loman snorted. "Have you been away so long that you have come to believe Polity propaganda?"

"No, Hierarch."

Loman stood and took yet another pull on his inhaler before marching up again to the black viewing screen. This was the sort of thing he should instantly quell: the inflation of rumour and myth about the omnipotent Polity. Now to hear such idiocy from the mouth of his own brother. He slapped his hand against the screen and turned.

"Perhaps I do not do you justice. The Polity does have wonderful technologies, but you must never forget that it does not have our heart. Remember that no matter how large or powerful it is, we have already manipulated it to our own ends. Behemoth has fled and, like our hunting dog unleashed, the Polity will hunt him down."

Aberil nodded, his face expressionless. "Yes, Hierarch."

As if to punctuate this conversation, the ship now dropped out of underspace and the atmosphere of the cabin returned to some form of normality. Loman pocketed his inhaler then turned and rested his hands against the bottom rim of the screen, which now showed only starlit space. After a moment, he reached out and adjusted the view on the screen to show a massive structure out in vacuum. For a long time he had been puzzled as to why the appearance of Ragnorak bothered him so. It was only after searching databanks that he discovered a similar shape in the image files used to teach ancient history. There he found what he had been reminded of: the lethal device they were constructing was the Eiffel Tower displaced into orbit above Calypse.

"I didn't understand what you said about Polity field technology," he said, turning back to observe his brother, completely unaware that what he was asking made his previous haughty pronouncements laughable.

Aberil picked up an incendiary bullet he had earlier been using as a model. He held it up before his face. "Each kinetic missile weighs one tonne. If we fired them at Masada, at the velocities Ragnorak is capable of generating, they would explode in upper atmosphere. What we're using is a Polity shimmer-shield over the nose cone of each. It reduces friction sufficiently for the missiles to reach the surface. During penetration they'll turn to plasma, which will burn downwards up to a kilometre. Each of their caves will be filled with this — it will be as if a fusion bomb had been detonated down there."

"Losses on the surface?" asked Loman.

"About thirty per cent," Aberil replied.

"A price we have to pay," Loman said, wondering how long, after these kinetic missile strikes, it would take before the trade in luxury proteins could recommence.

The boy had finished his supper and was now listening goggle-eyed to the story in the hope of the usual denouement. The woman pursed her lips as she scanned the next bit of text before reading it out.

"Upon the morning of the second day Brother Serendipity came upon the siluroyne coiled on its bed of grasses. 'Please feed me, begged the creature, 'for I am old and cannot hunt so well, and I am hungry. 'Why should I feed you when, given strength by my food, you might rise up and strike me down? he asked it. 'I give you my word, said the siluroyne. 'Swear your word in the name of God and in the name of his prophet Zelda Smythe, the good Brother demanded. The siluroyne so swore, and he gave it the second third of the meat cake given to him by the old woman by the boundary stone."

The boy started playing with the bits left on his plate, his attention wandering.

"Into the night the creature followed him, companion to the heroyne, and so, doubly warded, did he survive to come closer to the compounds."

"Mum's boring," the boy interrupted.

"You must stay with stories like this, my dear, for through them you will receive great instruction, and great understanding of God," said the woman.

The boy gave her a look — young he might be but he had the innate intelligence of both his parents, and the extra intelligence of the genetic tweaks he had received before being born, and he knew when his mother was taking the piss.

With no little trepidation, Thorn watched while Jarvellis flew Lyric II in towards a large lump of rumbling asteroidal rock. Once she was close enough, the ship's AI took over and, with exact bursts of manoeuvring thrusters, apparently brought the rock to stillness. It wasn't until he looked beyond this piece of asteroidal debris that Thorn felt a touch of nausea to see Calypse and the stars beyond mirroring the tumble he had earlier seen — Lyric II now perfectly matching the rock's motion.

Jarvellis now thrust her right hand into a telefactor glove, closed a viewing visor across her eyes, and began to work the loading grab from the centre of the trispherical ship. On various screens Thorn and Stanton watched the multi-jointed arm rise up towards the rock, with its five-fingered grab opening like a hand, then fingers telescoping out so this hand became large enough to get a sufficient grip.

"You say you've done this before?" Thorn asked.

"Four times," replied Jarvellis. She glanced at him. "Don't worry. I've dealt with heavier loads than this."

"That wasn't so much my worry," said Thorn. "I was just wondering if the Theocracy would be getting suspicious about all the meteor activity."

"They don't care unless it's near their cylinder worlds, and it never is," said Stanton. "And any large enough to reach the surface and cause deaths, they'd view as the hand of God — just so long as it went nowhere near themselves."

The grab closed on the rock and began to draw it down to the deck area extending between the three spheres that made up the ship. As it touched down, Thorn felt a faint vibration through the structure of Lyric II. With the rock now in position, metal arms folded in from the edges of the deck area and Thorn wondered what their purpose could be; they were not long enough to hold the rock down against the metal. The question he had been about to pose was answered for him when jets of vapour issued from cylindrical objects mounted on the ends of these arms as soon as they touched the surface of the rock.

"Explosive bolts," Thorn said.

"Uhuh," agreed Jarvellis, as she now detached the grab and folded it away.

"Not standard fittings on such a ship," he said.

"As Jarv said, we've done this before," said Stanton.

The ship's thrusters were again firing, this time to correct its tumble. The views on the screens began to settle down, and soon Calypse itself was centred on the main screen.

"We take a sling around Calypse, and from here on in it'll take us five solstan days to reach Masada," said Jarvellis.

Stanton said, "Lyric, start the chameleonware generator."

Thorn kept his attention focused on the screens showing various outside views of the ship. He watched as cowlings split and slid aside from three devices positioned just in from each of the connecting tunnels between spheres. These things had the appearance of huge metallic ammonites, intersecting with something like an ancient combustion engine. For a second every image shimmered, then stabilized.

"How far out is the interface?" Thorn asked.

"About twenty metres, but beyond that the field is ten metres deep," Stanton replied.

That meant that outside that distance there would be no sign at all of Lyric II. They were invisible.

The five days ground past like cripples at a funeral, and Thorn came to agree with Stanton that staying in cold-sleep was the best thing to do whilst travelling on a ship this size. On the second day he decided to take the plunge and have the autodoc assess the damage to the nerves in his fingertips, then later had the pleasure of sitting watching it opening the ends of his fingers — folding up the nails like little hatches — as it repaired the damage it found. Thereafter some hours passed before not everything he touched felt scalding hot or searingly cold. The bed set up for him in the hold was comfortable enough, and in an insulation sheet he had no trouble sleeping despite the constant cold. It was the periods between sleep that almost had him screaming. It was nice for the other two that they were always so wrapped up in each other, but their intimacy made Thorn uncomfortable, so he had to keep avoiding them. He spent most of his time viewing lectures about Masada, put together by the ship's AI. In this electronic intelligence he found company more to his liking, with its abrasive personality and constant sarcasm. It probably knew how he felt and was doing the best it could to keep him from going mad with boredom.