"In the predawn light Brother Serendipity stood at the bounds of Agatha Compound and turned to address his three companions. 'You have served me well these three days, and should know that in that service you have served God and his Prophet: For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand? "

The woman made a slight whimpering sound as she suppressed a laugh. The Brother stood to one side of the tall boundary stone, with his arms spread wide and a beatific expression on his face. The three creatures looked at each other with expressions that were completely unreadable. The gabbleduck then lifted what could loosely be described as a hand up to the side of its head and, with what could equally loosely be described as a finger, scribed circles in the air.

"As the sun rose over the compound. Brother Serendipity said unto his companions, 'You shall come with me to share in this glorious day! "

Now the three creatures moved in around the Brother, almost concealing him with walls of flesh, bone, claws and teeth.

" 'Here, from my trial in the wilderness, I come to claim my birthright. I shall smite the morlocks in their dank caverns and I shall rise up over my brothers and rule from the sky! said the Brother. 'That would be a good place to rule from. said the heroyne, sharpening his beak on the side of the boundary stone, 'This boy could go far' added the siluroyne, sharpening his claws on the other side of the stone. 'Shame' concluded the gabbleduck, whose teeth and claws were always sharp."

The boy didn't get it for a moment, until he saw the picture of the creatures pulling apart the Brother like a piece of naan bread. He then grinned with delight and pointed at the picture.

"Gabbleducked," he asserted, not without a degree of craftiness in his expression.

The woman looked at him warningly, then finished the story.

"And thus our story ends with the moral: You can have your cake and give it away, but never turn your back on a gabbleduck."

The night sky was bright with shooting stars that burned long courses through the oxygen-bereft air. Occasionally, distantly, some larger piece of wreckage would make it to the ground, and there then would be a flash and a boom as of gunfire on a distant battleground.

"Dragon is nothing if not thorough when it decides to destroy something," commented Mika.

"It always works on a huge scale," said Cormac, taking a sip from the tea Gant had made out of a packet he'd found amongst their supplies. Cormac and Mika were sitting on their packs whilst watching this display; Apis stood a little apart from them, his head tilted to the sky; and Gant and the dracoman were out 'taking a little recce', as Gant put it.

Cormac nodded to the Outlinker boy. "You notice how all his hatreds are directed towards the Theocracy here and against Skellor on the Occam, He hasn't had a bad word to say about Dragon, yet the creature destroyed the General Patten and killed many of his kin."

"I had not noticed that," agreed Mika, studying the boy.

"It's an attitude prevalent throughout the Polity — since Samarkand, and probably before, Dragon has been viewed as more a force of nature than a being in its own right. It's too huge and unfathomable for most people to see it otherwise. You might just as well hate a hurricane or a volcano."

"I think I understand that: even with scientific objectivity, one cannot help but feel awe. It is godlike in its power and size, and its rather Delphic communications only make it seem more so. There is also its immortality: you once destroyed one Dragon sphere, yet Dragon still lives," Mika replied.

Apis turned towards them now, and walked back over. As he seated himself on his own pack, Cormac thought that behind his visor the boy looked rather unwell.

"How are you doing?" he asked.

"Gravity," confessed Apis. "This exo damps out most of the effects, but I can still feel it pulling on me. I'm tired, even though I'm not working."

That was not actually what Cormac had been asking about, but he let it ride. "We are all tired," he said. "I'd like to stop for sleep, but…" He gestured at his oxygen bottle.

"Oh," said Mika, glancing at Cormac. "I thought, being an agent, you would have been… adjusted."

Cormac considered that: many people, especially in Earth Central Security, had the function of their bodies adjusted so sleep was, at worst, necessary only for a few hours, and then not every night. When he had been gridlinked, he himself had been such a person. After losing his link, he had then deliberately sacrificed the rest of his augmentations. Blegg, his boss in ECS, had been right about the dehumanizing effects of gridlinking, but had not gone far enough: for in Cormac's opinion all augmentations dehumanized. And, furthermore, Cormac found that with human weaknesses he operated more efficiently. This was actually psychological, and he knew that it too could be adjusted, but he felt that in the end people had to draw the line and decide for themselves just how much they wanted to remain themselves. Because of his previous experience of gridlinking, Cormac did not want to fool with his own mind, so he drew his line long before many others drew theirs.

"No," he said. "I'm not adjusted — and I'm tired."

Mika reached into one of the pockets of the pack she was sitting on and pulled out a reel of drug patches, each one on the same paper backing strip no more than a centimetre wide. Catching the reel Cormac tore off one section, removed the patch, discarded its backing strip, and reached inside his shirt to press it against his torso. Then, holding up the reel, he nodded his head to indicate Apis.

"No," said Mika.

"Why not?" Apis asked.

"Your system is not used to the constant drag of gravity, especially your heart, so using stimulants might be suicidal. Anyway, you probably will not need any sleep. The nanites building up your musculature and adding density to your bones will also be clearing out toxins."

"But I feel tired," Apis protested.

"Psychological," replied Mika, tapping her head with her forefinger.

As the stimulant scoured away the fuzzy coating that seemed to have been thickening over everything for the last few hours, Cormac was glad to have it confirmed that it had, after all, been a good idea to lug along Mika's equipment. He himself had refused to use a nanite booster treatment so that he could handle the higher gravity on Callorum, a treatment that would have required him spending forty hours in a tank. Luckily for Apis, Mika had an interesting device with which she could manufacture nano-machines to her own specifications — a device Cormac was not sure was entirely legal within the Polity — and those specifications, he had since learnt, owed much to her study of the hybrid Skellor had created. The Outlinker himself now had a few varieties of those machines beavering away inside him, building muscle, bone, and all those other structures required for a body to handle gravity. Of course, Mika had to make only one mistake and they might end up having to pour Apis out of his exo-skeleton. However, the alternative was that the point eight gee on this planet would kill him over time. Thus far the only detrimental result of this treatment was that the boy was forever hungry. Cormac watched him as he fingered the touch-pad on his neck ring, to draw his visor down into his chin rest so he could begin stuffing another meal bar into his mouth.

"If I'd known there'd be such a celebration of our arrival, I'd have put on my dress uniform," said Gant, striding out of the darkness with Scar at his side.

"I don't think the Theocracy have anything to celebrate at present, and I think they'll find this particular firework display rather costly," said Cormac.