Carl engaged the drive of the tank and took it around a blackened APC, out of which he had earlier seen two soldiers stagger, their clothing on fire until the lack of oxygen outside their vehicle extinguished the flames. The two had by then suffocated.

"What about the initial attack there… on the city?" Beckle asked, not taking his face away from his targeting visor.

Carl glanced over at Uris. "Anything on that?"

Uris merely shook his head, so Carl opened his direct channel to Lellan's control room and asked the same question. It was Lellan herself who replied with, "Heavy resistance, Carl. Apparently Deacon Clotus pulled in all the roving forces as soon as Dragon trashed the arrays, and those forces are now screwed in to the old fortifications."

"They care so much about their people in the city?" Carl inquired sarcastically.

"They care about the spaceport, I think," Lellan replied.

"What losses there?"

"We lost five tanks to some big launchers Clotus had set up."

"Now?" asked Carl, as he drove the tank up beside a stand of new flute grass and noted, on the radar traces transferred from Uris's console, that other tanks from other attack points were now converging on his own.

"Most of the launchers are down, apparently, but there are still snipers with rail-guns stuck in the old bastions — like scole leaves, as Polas puts it," Lellan replied.

Carl succinctly relayed this information to his crew.

"Still seems too easy," remarked Beckle, pushing his targeting visor away from his face and glancing tiredly towards Carl.

"It is," said Carl, his face without expression. "All bets changed once the arrays went down." He now stared down at the screen to which Uris was relaying all command signals. "If it makes you feel any better, Polas is keeping me updated on the situation up above: the fleet is now on its way, with forces embarked from Charily, so it seems likely we'll have a whole rush of Theocracy troops up our arses any day now."

Into the short silence that followed this announcement Uris interjected, "Then we need to take the spaceport as soon as possible."

"Yes," agreed Carl. "If they can bring down their mu-class ships, then they'll be able to offload heavy armour. Without the port they'll have to use the landers and infantry, and they'll have to come down on the plains, as there aren't enough clear areas around here to land on."

"It'll get bloody," said Paul.

Thinking of the carnage they had so recently wrought, Carl said, "What do you mean, get?"

The sun sank close beside Calypse, bouncing light off the gas giant in a brief flood that turned the landscape golden. Within half an hour this odd light was fading, and now the clouds along the horizon, behind which both planet and sun were sinking, had the appearance of stretched marshmallows in pastel shades of green, blue, and red against a rusty orange sky.

"It's because of the dust and smoke," said Cormac. "Pollution makes for the best sunsets."

Apis only half heard what the agent was saying, as pain and anger sat inside him hand in glove, clenched in a fist around his insides — or perhaps the physical pain he felt was due to the constant drag of gravity, of being confined here in this dark well. After all, the words 'My mother is dead' seemed to have no real meaning at all, along with phrases like Miranda has been destroyed… I am the only survivor from the supposed rescue ship, which was in turn destroyed by Dragon… I killed twenty-three of my fellow survivors because they would have killed me… the AI dreadnought that then rescued me has been hijacked by a Separatist madman wielding the technology of a five-million-year-dead race — the same technology that is now keeping me alive in gravity that would otherwise kill me.

"How are you doing?" Mika suddenly asked him.

Apis glanced at her. By what he had learnt from Cormac and Gant, the ability to ask questions was something she had only recently acquired, and he could see that just asking a question was an end in itself for her. It was not as if she required any specific answer — the nanomycelium growing in the tissues of his body, which it was currently rebuilding, monitored him at a level far beyond that even of an autodoc; and, as far as he understood, transmitted reports to this suit's CPU which in turn conveyed the information to Mika's laptop.

"I'm alive," replied Apis.

Mika's expression showed some confusion for a moment, then she turned away to observe the other members of their party as they trudged through flute grass that had been grazed down to ankle height. It occurred to him that though Mika was learning to ask questions, she had yet to discover what to do with the answers — it seemed that whole new landscapes of conversation were opening up for her, and that she was still agoraphobic in that respect.

He decided to ask a question himself, more to ease her discomfort than because he wanted answers. At an intellectual level he knew that he should have answers and knowledge of all that was occurring, but on an emotional level he just did not care.

"What makes this Jain nanotechnology you are using better than the Polity version?" he asked her.

Mika turned back to him with her expression relaxing into the comfortable superiority of the didact. "Besides their basic nanomachine units being as far in advance of our own as the AGC is to a horse and cart, it is the structural nanotechnology that is so… useful. The technology employs nanomycelia, which enables a powerful support structure for the machines at the business end, and almost instant communication between machines. Essentially it is the linking together of disparate machines: it is the organization. A useful analogy would be in the building of a city. With our technology, it would be as if you had sent in a thousand stonemasons each with blueprints and the tools to do the job. The masons would do the job, but get in each other's way, repeat tasks, and make outright mistakes because of the ensuing chaos. Jain nanotechnology is more hierarchical: every unit knows its place, its job, and all inefficiencies are therefore wiped out."

"Jain technology is social, then," he said.

Mika appraised him wonderingly. "Yes, you're right. You're absolutely right."

Apis went on, "Perhaps a better view of your masons, in Jain terms, would be them standing on each other's shoulders, passing up tools and stone to build the castle."

"Yes, that is indeed a simplification of the mycelial structures now being built inside you." She glanced at her laptop. "Within two solstan days you will no longer require that suit. Using Polity tech, a similar result could only be obtained in about a month — and you would have spent most of that same month in a tank, along with the nanites, monitored by AI."

"Jain tech is self-monitoring then?"

"Yes, it is," Mika replied, slightly puzzled.

"Does it have inbuilt AI then?"

Mika had no further reply, and Apis noted her expression of worried fascination. That she had not foreseen the possibilities was perhaps some facet of her inability to ask questions. That none of them had understood what Dragon had meant when saying of the Jain, 'It is not they any more… it is not a race', he put down to the fact that they had all been under quite a lot of pressure recently, and that they did not have the Jain growing inside them, like he did.

Skellor gazed down upon the sulphurous moonlet with a vastness of comprehension that was almost godlike, but still with the pettiness of human drives — anger, hate, power-lust — and felt a hint of disappointment when the first missile punched down through its surface. There seemed to be no satisfaction in destroying the inanimate, no satisfaction in destroying something that could not appreciate its own doom, nor feel pain or terror. The second, third and fourth missiles then punched into the moonlet, evenly spaced around its equator, timed to impact to its spin, so they struck all four quarters. The explosions that followed collapsed thousands of square kilometres of surface and raised vast clouds of dust in shades of yellow and chocolate brown that were dragged round in orbital streamers to obscure from the normal human eye much of what followed. Skellor's breadth of vision encompassed nearly every emitted radiation, though, and he enjoyed a grandstand view of the destruction he had wrought.