For some time he had sensed the stunted, imperfect growth inside him. That the mycelium was killing him he was certain, and now perhaps he would know how and why. As she returned from her analysis of the data gathered by the probes piercing him like needles stabbed into a grub, Mika looked grim.

‘What’s it doing, then?’ he asked, his gaze wandering from her How am I going to tell him this expression to the robot poised over him, like a chrome cobra head but with an underside of complex insectile manipulators and surgical tools. Not for the first time he felt a shudder at the resemblance this device bore to the hooder he and Eldene had seen devour the First Commander of the Theocracy—only a hooder’s cutlery served instead the purpose of dissecting its food to be sure the predator did not ingest any poison. That there had been none existing in Dorth had not dissuaded it from this meticulous and lengthy task.

Studying her laptop, Mika replied, ‘It’s forming nodes inside you, but I don’t know why—possibly because what it’s making is as incomplete as it is itself. In doing this it uses more of the available resources, and so has shut down some of its other functions.’

Apis shook his head. ‘Like enabling me to survive outside.’

‘Yes, like that… It’s moved from mutualism to parasitism.’

‘Like something alive, then,’ said Apis, knowing such comments unnerved Mika.

She gave him an unreadable look but did not reply.

‘What about the pain?’ Apis asked.

‘That comes from where the growing nodes are trapping your nerves.’

Now Eldene, who throughout the investigative procedure had remained silent, spoke up. ‘What are you going to do about it?’

The expression on the Life-coven woman’s face was now readable: embarrassment and pity. She returned her attention to the screen of her laptop.

‘You now possess sufficient physical growth to sustain you in this gravity, and that will not go away. I can attempt to save you by surgery.’

‘What do you mean, “attempt”?’ Eldene asked, her voice rising.

Before Mika could reply to that, Apis said, ‘It’s a mycelium—that would be like trying to remove cobwebs from jelly.’

‘Not quite, since its filaments are tough and not so easy to snap, which should make them easier to remove. Previously I would have considered such an operation impossible, as the mycelium grew evenly throughout your body. But now it’s drawn its main mass into your torso, with trunks extending into your limbs and head. I estimate that I could remove over ninety per cent of it.’

‘You still haven’t explained what you mean by “‘attempt”,’ Eldene insisted.

Mika turned to her. ‘The mycelium will work to close any cuts I make. It will actually fight the surgery. It will also fight against having itself removed—attempting all the time to return to its… home. And even should I manage to remove the main mass, remaining filaments—those reaching into his extremities—might die and cause massive blood poisoning as they break down. Or they might stay alive and grow into a new, complete mycelium. They might even stay alive and become something else.’

‘What alternatives are there?’ Eldene asked.

Mika did not reply, and Eldene bowed her head, knowing the unspoken answer. Apis felt a sudden surge of self-pity, and the need to get out of there, to live whatever time he might have left as fully as possible, but he stamped down on it hard. At least, should he die under the knife, he might provide Mika with enough information to save those others who faced the same prospect: Mika herself and Thorn—but foremost to him, Eldene.

‘Can you start now?’ he asked.

Mika nodded.

Apis turned to Eldene. ‘I’d rather you left now.’

She looked hurt, but he doubted she would relish the prospect of seeing him open like a gutted fish on this table any more than he relished the prospect of being that way. Mika then tapped out something on her console, and Apis felt a cold spreading through him from where the probes penetrated his flesh. As his consciousness faded, he saw Eldene turning to go. The surgical robot bowed like a geisha, and opened out its glittering tableware.

The man halted and studied their surroundings, and Marlen found himself slavishly tracking the man’s gaze.

The chequer trees had shed their square leaves, which now lay like badly applied gilding over the mossy ground, or else caught in layered clumps on spiky sedges. Fallen from the adapted oaks, the blue acoms that punctuated these surfaces like discarded half-sucked sweets were being nibbled at by creatures like birth-defect rabbits, hopping and bouncing as if ever on the point of coming apart. Marlen noted the old damage to the trees, and the occasional lumps of metal protruding from the ground. There had been a battle here between agents of ECS, accompanied by Viridian soldiers, and the Separatist Arian Pelter—this had been one of the first bits of information the man had ripped from Marlen’s mind. Glancing at his accomplice in their recent disastrous robbery attempt, Marlen saw that Inther was drooling. What the man had done to them both through their biotech augs must have damaged Inther’s brain. Marlen returned his attention to their captor.

He appeared perfectly ordinary: stocky, brown-haired and dressed in a cheap environment suit—not noticeable. But closer inspection revealed that he sank deeper into the soft ground than he should, and that his gaze held a silvery shimmer as if lizard-scales were moving in the sclera of his eyes. What was he, then? Both Marlen and Inther were big men, and boosted too, yet he had tossed them about as if they massed no more than origami sculptures before… doing what he did.

The man turned on a scanner. Marlen glimpsed on its screen a translucent image of the ground, in which were buried stones, wood, jags of metal and more macabre objects.

The man pointed to a sunken area. ‘Dig there,’ he ordered. Marlen and Inther could only obey—the biotech augs behind their ears were grey, as if seared, and something was poised inside their skulls like a reel of fishhooks.

The two men took up their spades and picks, and immediately set to work. Marlen concentrated on the task in hand—was unable to concentrate on much else. He didn’t slack; didn’t stop to rest until his muscles were burning from lactic overload, and then he didn’t rest for long. He and Inther were a metre down into the soft ground when Marlen’s spade sheared up a layer of decaying fabric, exposing rib bones and ah intricate line of vertebrae. Marlen noted that long-tailed slugs, the undertakers of Viridian, had eaten away all the flesh and skin, and that a nest of them was balled up in the skeleton’s ribcage. They were skinned over with hardened slime while they made the slow transformation to the next stage of their life cycle: a hard-shelled chrysalis that burrowed to the surface to protrude like a tubeworm, its end opening to release the flying adult form of the creature. He poked at this ball with the edge of his spade, fracturing the coating to reveal slithing movement.

‘I want the skull,’ said their captor.

Inther dug at one end of the spine, and Marlen at the other. Marlen hit the pelvis, then turned as Inther unearthed the skull, took hold of it in his big hand and twisted it away from some remaining tendon, before passing it up out of the hole.

‘Okay, now dig over there, where I’ve marked out.’ As he scrambled from the hole and over to another sunken area—marked out by four twigs shoved into the ground—Marlen glanced at the skull. Its previous owner had obviously been into cerebral augmentation in a big way. Behind where the ear would have been, a grey bean-shaped military aug was still attached by its bone anchors. Extending from this, a square-sectioned pipe lay alongside the temple curving round to enter the left eye socket—some sort of optic link. It was also obvious how this individual had died since, perfectly positioned in the centre of the forehead, was a neat hole ringed by blackened bone—someone had shot this person through the head with a pulse-gun.