The dracomen encampment looked like a mass of huge flattened puffballs spread throughout the flute grasses. These dwellings, Mika knew, the dracomen wove from flute grass itself, bonded and stiffened by a resin in their saliva. Upon testing a sample of this substance, she discovered it to be similar to a tough ceramoplastic normally used in the construction of space habitats. When she finally managed to question Scar about this material, he simply pointed out that this was not commonly a product of dracoman saliva; they produced it just for this purpose. The dracomen, generally, did not need factories—they themselves were factories. The most dramatic example of this was the weapon they used for hunting. Their organic rifle used a muscular spasm of its body to spit poisonous darts that actually grew inside it. The rifle also had to be fed, and Mika had seen this weapon hatched from dracomen eggs. They made other complex items similarly: gestated inside themselves, laid as eggs, then hatched out. Dracomen therefore did not need to develop a biotechnology—they were a biotechnology.

Returning to the encampment, Mika saw Thorn and Gant coming out towards her. It was Gant, the uploaded soldier, who mostly communicated with the Polity ships above, via a transceiver built into his tough Golem body.

She had seen neither of these two for a month now—they had been working for Lellan on some project to plant radio beacons in hooders—one of the planet’s lethal native predators—to give advance warning of where the creatures were, so people could quickly get out of their way. Gant she had spoken to by radio only a few days previously, when he had told her about the quarantine ending at Elysium. Thorn, she noted, wore breather gear and wondered why—for, with the mycelium operating inside him, he did not need such cumbersome equipment.

‘We need to talk,’ said Thorn abruptly, as soon as he and Gant got close. ‘That includes you,’ he added to Scar, as the dracoman moved to follow his compatriots.

Scar halted, bared his teeth, then gestured for them to follow him. He led the way between the bulbous walls of dracoman buildings, on pathways of the same woven composite, which rested on top of the rhizome mat. Eventually he brought them to his home: a flattened sphere ten metres across, with a simple circular door set half a metre off the ground. The door opened when he pushed against it—its hinges composed of a dry muscle that was contracted by an electric charge. The door, Mika knew, would not have opened for anyone else, other dracomen included.

Just inside, a small antechamber provided low footbaths and various utensils—fashioned from local materials—for the purpose of preventing mud getting any further inside his residence. With meticulous care, Scar cleaned his clawed feet, then waited until Mika, Thorn and Gant had removed their footwear before he opened the inner door.

Light permeated the structure from outside, complemented by bioluminescent strips inlaid in a grid across the ceiling and down the curving walls. Glass panels inset in the level floor gave glimpses of sealed terrariums and aquariums in which all sorts of curious creatures swam, hopped, slithered or just sat motionless. Mika knew about the creatures—some wild and some manufactured—but had yet to fathom how the dracomen made the fiat sheets of chainglass.

Scar dropped himself onto one of the woven saddlelike arrangements that served dracomen as chairs. Mika and Gant sat on an oval couch that Mika thought might be used for sleeping on, though she had never seen a dracoman sleep. Thorn, meanwhile, paced the transparent floor.

‘What is it?’ Mika finally managed to force a question.

After detaching the compressed-paper mask covering his mouth and nose, Thorn gave her a penetrating look. ‘Apis—his mycelium isn’t working properly any more. You need to come.’

Mika chewed that one over, then groped to phrase another question. ‘How… what is the evidence?’

‘Eldene found him collapsed out by the spaceport. He’d fainted, and the doctor who tended him diagnosed oxygen starvation. He now has to use breather gear.’ He gestured to the pack on his own back. ‘It hasn’t happened to me, but I’m taking no chances.’ He glanced at Gant. ‘I don’t yet have any memplant to save me.’

Mika nodded. Gant had died on Samarkand. What stood before them now was a memcording of the soldier, running in a Golem chassis. A debate was still running about whether such were genuinely alive.

‘Will you come?’ Thorn asked.

‘Yes,’ she said, looking pointedly at Scar. She then winced and ventured a further question: ‘Is there something else?’

‘Oh yeah,’ Gant said, rounding on the dracoman. ‘EC’s decision on Scar and his kind. It seems that no blame for Dragon’s actions will be attached to you and your people. You are free to do what you want, though I suspect that there will be pressure on you to join the Polity.’

Mika felt a brief surge of joy at that—the EC decision had been hanging over them like a guillotine ever since the ships had arrived—but Thorn’s news tempered her happiness. What was happening with the mycelia? She had no idea how she might go about removing the alien technology, and acutely aware that it might change sufficiently to kill them or, perhaps worse, change them.

From where he lay, underneath the wasp-eyed scanning head of the diagnosticer he had cobbled together to try to find out why his gridlink had spontaneously operated, Cormac gazed across the room. Above the counter cluttered with the pieces of dismembered autodoc, a screen flickered on, showing the belt of asteroids lit from one side by the glare of the sun. A small trisection transport appeared in one corner of the screen and, turning slowly, screwed its way across the view on three fusion flames. It was halfway to the belt itself when a black hawkish ship hurtled in behind it. The screen polarized over the glare that followed and, when it returned to full clarity, an asteroid in the belt ahead of the fleeing ship had disappeared.

‘A shot across the bows,’ Cormac guessed, as he watched the ship turn and head rapidly back towards Elysium. ‘Why are you showing me this, Jack?’

‘That was a real-time image,’ the AI replied.

Cormac frowned, not liking what this implied. ‘Why not just grab him?’

‘No contact allowed with the barrier ships.’

Cormac sighed and laid his head back. ‘And the weapon used? I don’t think I saw anything like that before.’

‘Combined CTD and gravity-imploder missile,’ the AI replied.

‘I see—the imploder to prevent the smallest fragment of debris being blasted away, so that the CTD burns everything down to an atomic level, if not below that.’

‘Correct.’

‘Right, so now you’ll tell me why ECS is chasing ships back to Elysium.’

‘Total quarantine of the Elysium system has just been reinstated. The Elysium AI has shut down the runcible. Debris has been detected on an asteroid, previously discounted because out of the range of blast scatter from the Occam Razor, and moving in an elliptical orbit that took it outside of the search area. Polity capital ships are returning to surround the system.’

‘You’ll be rejoining them?’ Cormac asked, sitting up and pushing away the scanning head.

‘EC has reapplied previous restrictions: no one who had any physical contact with Jain technology or any of its products is going anywhere. Because I have you aboard, I myself am now not one of the guards but the guarded.’

‘And this comes direct from Earth Central itself?’

‘It does.’

‘Tell me, has senility long been an AI problem?’

‘Amusing, but missing the point,’ said Jack. ‘EC knows it is impossible to suppress such a technological juggernaut, but this is a case of attempting to slow it down a little so we can move some people out of the way. Your associate Mika is, as you have told us, already obtaining substantial benefits from Jain tech, and no doubt scraps of it will be picked up all around this area. But consider what would happen if someone were to find, for example, one of those creatures Skellor used to attack you on Masada, and handed it over to some well-organized Separatist enclave.’