Vagule inserted himself into the back hollow of a surgical robot while Gnores and the others clamped the humans to the wall. The babble soon ceased when human-specific drugs were injected and feed-lines attached to their veins.

The spider thralls—each leggy device no larger than a human thumb—were installed via splits in the thick muscle on either side of the back of their necks. One of the humans—the child—for no immediately apparent reason died during this procedure.

"How many do we have left?" Immanence asked, his manner slightly bored now as he turned back towards the doors, though through his chouds he spied on the data streams from the thralls.

"Six hundred and twenty," Vagule replied, backing out of the surgical robot.

"I will be expecting some measure of success by the time that figure drops to five hundred and sixty," Immanence told him. "And I will be most displeased by failure."

"As you order," Vagule replied, sagging slightly.

Gnores, however, immediately perked up at this, as did XF-326. They all knew precisely what Immanence meant by it: that some time soon the opportunity for promotion might arise, after one terminal demotion.

While the grabship flew on automatic towards the Trajeen cargo runcible, Conlan scratched between his aug and his ear to lift the edge of his mask, pressed a control no larger than a pinhead and felt the mask sag on his face. After a moment all its edges lifted and he peeled it away and dropped it beside his seat. Then he studied the grabship's controls.

Though a pilot carried out the main task of launching the vessel and much of the final manoeuvring to position its load, certain safety protocols were also functioning, and he was constantly monitored. Should he become ill, or die, the runcible AI could take control to guide the ship out of danger and back to base. Also, if the vessel deviated from its mission plan, the AI would be alerted, and could again take control. For example, if the pilot took it into his head to ram the ship into one of the runcible gateposts, the AI would swiftly put a stop to that.

Subverting such systems was no easy task with the usual hardware, which was why Conlan, though leader of this mission, had chosen himself for this part of it. He clipped open the cover on his aug and plugged into it his multipurpose optic cable, then found the relevant port in the console and plugged the other end into that. Passive scanning of the vessel's systems quickly revealed the various security systems. All communications were being monitored by sophisticated voice language-recognition programs which passed com up through various layers of filtering, then informed the AI should they hear some sequence to cause concern. A blueprint of the mission plan was also stored, so comparisons could be made and any large deviations equally passed on. There were many other security measures. Conlan noted one flashing a warning to his console—apparently he and the copilot needed to link in the monitoring hardware of their spacesuits. Conlan scanned all these then went in search of the truly important level of security: the one that informed the AI if any of the other systems were being interfered with. He found it stretching weblike across all the other systems. But there was nothing he could do about it at the programming level. His aug might be a sophisticated tool, but he did not yet possess sufficient skill to create the destructive viruses he might need. However, it was possible for him to scan and analyse the ship's hardware.

After a quarter of an hour, Conlan unstrapped himself and moved into the rear of the ship, and stepping over the copilot, he made his selection from the racked tools there. He then pulled up a floor plate and cut through certain optic cables, before returning to his seat, opening the control console, plugging his aug back in, then continuing his selective destruction of the ship's safety and security protocols, beginning with that one concerning suit monitoring for himself and the copilot. When finished he gained complete control of the vessel, and would retain it unless the AI managed to take him out. He offlined autopilot, took hold of his grabship's joystick and pushed it forwards to its limit. Now he changed com to a nonstandard frequency, encoding the signal through his aug.

"Conlan here. What's your status, Braben?"

"Our shuttle is about to dock. We encountered a few problems. One of them is now sitting in the toilet with a broken neck, the rest were minor and put down to glitches associated with the runcible test and the subsequent return of about five hundred technicians."

"You are running twenty minutes late. Why is that?" So asking, Conlan eased off on the joystick. Braben and the rest of the Separatists should have penetrated the runcible's infrastructure by now, causing distracting mayhem.

"Two shuttles got priority ahead of us—probably due to the same glitches and confusion that made things easier for us."

"Okay." Conlan felt a sudden sweat break out over his body. Had their plans been uncovered? He could not see how. "Continue to plan. I'll delay my strike by twenty minutes, but no longer. When you have things under control, you'll have to knock out docking security so I can come in. Best of luck. Out."

Now the runcible lay clearly visible ahead of him. He magnified the view in the forward screen, initiated a grid and selected the unit housing the runcible AI. He knew that unit mounted laser meteor defences and was heavily armoured. Those lasers were also powerful enough to knock out most conventional missiles, and could easily cripple a ship like this one. Certainly the AI would fire on the missile he intended to use. It made no difference.

Five of them came through the airlock, heavily armoured and opening up with projectile weapons. Security drones dropped from the ceiling and lasers snap-cracked through the air. Two drones exploded, scattering debris about the embarkation lounge. One of the men went down screaming with smoke pouring from his armour's joints, concentrated laser-fire having penetrated his suit. Cams kept going out, and Jebel's perspective kept on changing. Then the last cam was gone, and the images, transferred by Jebel's aug to his visual cortex, blinked out. However, he could still hear the shooting and occasional explosion.

The AIs made no objection to Jebel and his Avalonians roughly tracking the progress of the Prador dreadnought that had destroyedAvalon Station and was directly responsible for the death of Cirrella. His unit became one of the best at putting up a ferocious defence against Prador first-strike ground forces. Unfortunately, after grinding that initial assault to a standstill it was usually the first unit to be moved on to the next world or next station, which sometimes put them ahead of the ship—as at Grant's World—but more often behind it when its initial bombardment ended and the ground forces moved in. The AIs understood his vendetta against the Prador aboard that ship to be a powerful motivation indeed. And this time they had placed him on the right world at the right time, where some opportunity, no matter how small, might present itself.

He considered the growing military encampment on the planet below. Forces here were small—about a thousand four-man Sparkind units, numerous war drones, and about fifty thousand ground troops—since most of the runcibles were being employed for evacuation, and Trajeen already accepted as a lost cause, especially now that they knew another ship of the same kind had joinedhis ship. However, that did not mean there should be no resistance at all. The forces here were to give the Prador a bloody nose before retreating, to delay things long enough for a big Polity dreadnought to engage, and to give the new ships steadily being turned out by the shipyards time to deploy around the next world.