The exit tunnel was cylindrical, the bottom half of this cylinder being tough ceramoplastic, with a flat diamond-pattern floor, the top half being polarized chainglass. Gazing out to the tightly curved horizon, Cormac observed a twisted and monolithic metal beam protruding above a thin smear of sulphurous atmosphere, its jagged end silhouetted against the green and orange swirls of the opaline gas giant, Calypse. Other wreckage was strewn across the barren surface of this little moon: the huge cored-olive shapes of thruster motors, seared skeletons of ships and ground bases, glittering craters where molten metal had splashed, human bones. Destroying the shipyards here had been Dragon’s first blow against the Theocracy, before moving on to obliterate the weapons satellites that had held the surface population of Masada in thrall. Dragon’s subsequent fall to its death had produced the strangest and most controversial result of its arrival here: the birth of the race of dracomen from its own substance.

‘Ian Cormac?’

‘Yes,’ Cormac replied, as he ducked into the low structure from which other short tunnels branched to insystem shuttles crouched around the facility. The questioner he instantly recognized as a Golem.

‘I’m to take you to Masada. We have a shuttle with U-space facility available.’

The Golem, in appearance a squat man of endearing ugliness—obviously from a later series made when Cybercorp discovered that Apollonian perfection made potential purchasers nervous, if not jealous—gestured to a nearby tunnel and led the way. ‘This will be our first landing on the planet itself—a partial quarantine still exists, but it has been decided we can’t learn anything more from up here. There are more ships ready to follow us down.’

‘How will you proceed from now on?’

‘Establish a base on the surface, then limit transport thereafter. Our first job will be to secure all Jain artefacts, then ensure that there has been no further… contamination.’

‘That could take some time.’

The Golem shrugged. Cormac guessed ECS would prevent free travel of the Masadan population to and from their own world until telefactors and AI probes had finished deep-scanning the single continent and ocean thereon. Masada could remain partially quarantined for centuries yet. He surmised that these new members of the Polity would not be allowed to object too strongly.

‘Would those artefacts include the mycelia inside Asselis Mika?’

The Golem glanced at him. ‘Your needs have primacy. If you wish to take all of those containing Jain mycelia with you, then you may. There will certainly be enough other stuff down there to keep us occupied for a long time.’

‘And the dracomen?’ Cormac asked, as they entered the airlock into the shuttle and headed for the cockpit.

‘They have been deemed innocent of the crimes committed by their forebear and so have been urged, separately from the human population of Masada, to join the Polity.’

‘They might refuse,’ said Cormac, thinking ‘innocent’ might be stretching the term.

‘They have already accepted.’

Cormac took the co-pilot’s seat, while the Golem took the pilot’s. They both strapped in.

‘Very wise of them,’ he remarked.

‘Yes, quite.’

Gazing ahead as the shuttle launched and rose from the barren moon, Cormac observed the glint of other ships in the darkness of space. Soon after he arrived on Masada, the place would be swarming with ECS troops and monitors, technicians, research scientists and Golem. He had no doubt that the dracomen were more aware of the actual realities than were the planet’s inhabitants. Simply put, Masada must be controlled by ECS because of the potential danger from Jain artefacts on its surface, and the dracomen must join the Polity, for such dangerous creatures could not be allowed to choose a side that might be against it. The alternatives were numerous and lethal. The Jack Ketch AI had earlier enumerated them for Cormac.

Skellor smiled to himself as he pressed together the seventeen fragments of the crystalline Golem mind. Obviously, the Golem—Aiden and Cento—had torn the object from Crane’s body and smashed it irreparably with a blast from a pulse-gun. But what was irreparable to Polity technology was not necessarily beyond Skellor’s ability. What most amused him was that the mind had broken along established virtual fractures, for Mr Crane’s mind had always been in seventeen fragments—this was the nature of the Golem’s madness and, strangely, what had made sanity and autonomy a recoverable objective. His mentality fragmented like this, Mr Crane operated as the killing machine the Separatists required, committing the most horrifying crimes and maintaining them in memory as disjointed unrelated incidents, meanwhile always attempting to reconnect the seventeen fragments and regain self. This he would perhaps have done sometime in the next thousand years. Thus it was that the Golem had obeyed his Separatist masters—in that dangerous and erratic manner entirely his own.

Roughly holding the fragments in the lozenge shape they had once formed, Skellor began to send Jain nanofilaments into it, clouding the crystal as they penetrated between the lattices. Concentrating on a single clean shear, he pulled the two faces together. Pecking along them on an atomic level, he cleared away oxygen atoms from the oxides formed on each surface, also organic dirt and minerals—anything that should not be there. Drawing this detritus away, he found all the major neural pathways, cooling nanotubes and s-con power grid wires, and aligned them. There was some distortion caused by relieved stresses in the crystal, which he recreated. The two faces, drawn together by the Van Der Waals force of atomic attraction, snapped back together as if they had been held apart by elastic, and it was all he could do to pull the filaments out of the way to prevent them from being trapped and crushed. Two of the fragments had become one, and now he detected the nightmarish mutter from this piece of a mind.

For a moment, Skellor refocused his awareness on his surroundings. Not having acquired the same resources he had possessed on the Occam Razor, he was unable to split his awareness during such an operation, which was as intricate as anything he had done before. He briefly noted the man Inther, lying naked on his side nearby, bleeding to death from where Skellor had torn his arm away. Marlen was motionless in his hole, though Skellor’s control of him was not so strong as to prevent the man from showing by his expression the terror he felt. Mr Crane’s body stood perfectly poised, its balance system operating as if he was already alive. The human arm Skellor had grafted on to replace the missing ceramal one only looked out of place at the raw shoulder joint, with its swollen organo-optic interfaces. Inside that body Skellor had built a device acting as a heart, lung and nutrient supply—pumping round the arm an artificial blood supply. The human limb would last perhaps six months like this, but hopefully Skellor would not need it for so long. He returned his attention to Mr Crane’s mind.

Interface after interface bonded, and the mutter of the Golem’s mind grew loud to Skellor’s senses. Delving into this he replayed scenes of murder and atrocity and perpetual imbalance. Quite often, Mr Crane had been as much a danger to the people who tried to control him as he was to those he was sent out to kill. Skellor noted how Crane disobeyed some direct orders when the program, aimed at regaining the Golem autonomy, interfered with the task at hand. Sometimes this program could briefly displace an order to do murder so that, rather than kill, Crane found external iconic representations of each virtual fragment of his mind. Rather than kill a man, Crane had once stolen a pair of antique binoculars. Rather than kill he had once taken a Tenkian dagger. Even with the Separatist orders re-establishing, Crane would not carry out the kill order, for, in the twisted logic of this insane Golem, the theft became the killing.