Each collapsed area was flooded through rapidly opening fumaroles and soon became a lake of molten rock. From these lakes, huge crevasses opened in the surface and spread, separating mountain ranges and swallowing them, turning frozen plains of sulphur into boiling seas, and finally joining in a network that spread across the entire surface. At this point the fifth missile struck and tore the moonlet apart: here an asteroid fifty kilometres long trailing streamers of molten rock, its cold face what had once been a range of mountains; there a vast sheet of sulphurous fire separating out into smaller spheres cooling into something like black glass; an incandescent cloud of gas spreading, turning, already moving — dragging back into the shape of an accretion disc.

Skellor observed all this with the eye of a physicist, before sending out the Occam's grabships in search of suitable chunks of debris. Like wolves cutting through herds of great brown buffalo they sped, selecting the calf-sized chunks to clamp onto and drag back. Whilst this was happening Skellor inwardly focused his attention.

He was all-encompassing, but all his systems did not yet operate to perfection — there was much he still needed to do, and soon he would have the material for the job of extending and expanding the Jain architecture of the ship. Through this architecture he would gain absolute control of all the ship's distant systems, and perhaps enough control to be able to still the intimate mutterings of what remained of the minds of his command crew, or rather have sufficient control that such things were no bother to him. Suddenly overcome with curiosity about the functioning of minds from which he was quickly becoming alienated, he studied their… output.

Danny's mind revealed only a low instinctual mutter related to sex and the urge to procreate — something that always functioned most strongly when extinction was close. The man controlling the U-space engines — Skellor did not know his name as that had been something erased as irrelevant — was listening to music as if on a looped tape. Linking through to a library on the Occam, which he had only recently subsumed, he identified the tune as a Mozart clarinet concerto — not the usual easy listening indulged in by a Separatist fighter out of Cheyne III. The mutter from Aphran's mind was something of a duologue — a parody of the madwoman speaking to herself.

"There's a limit, there's always a limit. Go beyond this point and the technology you acquire from the enemy shafts you, and you become the enemy."

"But it wasn't acquired from the enemy, it was acquired from wonderful Skellor whom I love who acquired it from the artefacts of a dead race."

"Don't matter, there's still a limit: rail-guns are okay, but anything that starts to think for itself is dodgy. AI is the limit. Jain stuff is AI — almost alive. No, no further."

"What about Mr Crane? He thought for himself, and he nearly creamed that bastard Cormac."

"Unstable and dangerous. How many of our own did he kill?"

Skellor's curiosity was further piqued, and he immediately raided Aphran's mind for all information concerning this Mr Crane. In half a second he had all she knew. Encased in Jain architecture, he snorted derisively. "A brass metalskin Golem — a simple machine like that," he said aloud.

"Yeah, and how much closer did you get with Jain tech and a fucking delta-class dreadnought?" said one of the two Aphrans.

The other one tried to drown this with, "I love you I love you I love you Skellor!"

This didn't stop him finding the best way of hurting… both of her, and this was more satisfying to him than destroying a moonlet.

"And thus it was in the fiftieth year of colonization that the siluroyne came to dwell underneath the Bridge of Psalms and sorely troubled the low people of the compounds, and in the fiftieth day of the fiftieth year there came to that bridge the two pond workers, Sober and his wife Judge."

The picture the book displayed was of a mountainously fat couple made even more grotesque by the huge green and red scoles that seemed almost moulded into their bare chests. They wore only breeches and open shirts and were both so bristly and ugly that it was difficult to distinguish male from female.

"Greedy peasants," commented the woman.

The boy looked up at her and waited.

"You'll never see a fat pond worker," she explained to him.

The boy continued staring at her until she continued with the story.

"As the two workers crossed the bridge, the siluroyne climbed out before them and said, 'Give me my toll of flesh blood and bone. Terrified, the two could not say a word as the monster bore down upon them. Then Judge, more quickwitted than her husband, said, 'Let us live, and we shall bring you more flesh blood and bone than you can shake a stick at! Craftily the monster said, 'One of you will bring it to me whilst I hold the other here. Judge went and brought first the Brother whose sin was gluttony…"

In the picture the siluroyne held Sober in one of its multiple hands, whilst with the other it ate, one after the other, the sinning Brothers that Judge led to the bridge. Glancing at her son, the woman was glad he did not seem to notice when she missed reading out some of the sins committed by the Brothers — he was so busy watching those Brothers being crunched down and the gut of the siluroyne expanding.

Dawn crept in unnoticed, covered by the flashing of pulse-cannons and detonation after incandescent detonation. Slowly, the ancient walls and bastions surrounding the city became distinct from a purplish sky — gradually revealed in all their repro-medieval glory. In the past these huge limestone and plascrete defences had served the purpose of keeping the somewhat hostile wildlife out of the small inhabited area within. The growth in the population and the spread of crop fields into the wilderness had driven said wildlife back, and for a hundred years the walls had served only to prevent the city itself from spilling out across the land like some kind of poisonous technological froth. Now they once again served a truly medieval purpose, as this morning the enemy was at the gates.

Carl noted the position of the rail-gun in the north tower, as it opened up on one of the remaining tanks, which sped down the causeway between two squerm ponds. The racket of iron slugs impacting armour was horrendous and pieces fell away from the tank as it turned and motored down into one of the ponds, taking itself to cover. Carl hoped, for the sake of the occupants of that tank, that no slugs had penetrated. If the tank had been holed, and those holes were big enough, the occupants wouldn't even have time to either drown or suffocate before the squerms got them.

The transformer hum, followed by a strobe light, signified that the pulse-cannon had cooled down enough for Beckle to fire it once again.

"Got the bastard," he said.

"Are you sure about that this time?" Carl asked, observing the water slopping against the lower edge of their own tank's display screen, and the squerms in that same water scraping their way across the vehicle's surface, perhaps sensing that there was something soft to chew on inside the big tin can in their pond.

"Sure enough," Beckle replied. "It was the same one as before, I reckon they just wheeled it across from the other side."

Carl looked up at this latest burning cavity cut into the limestone, and opined that they would be wheeling nothing nowhere now.

"Let's get out of this hole then," he said, and thrust the steering column forwards and up. The tank's motor droned in response, while squerms and water slewed away from the screen. Immediately there came the rattling clanging of small-arms fire impacting on their armour, and Beckle replied by cutting chunks out of the city wall with his pulse-cannon. On the displays, and by glancing to either side, Carl saw that all the tanks were now advancing.