‘I always feel this activity to be a concession, a weakness,’ she said.

‘While we strive for that synergy between the human and the AI, are we then to deny the relevance of our own humanity?’

‘But in being completely human, we are denying that synergy.’

He halted and turned to look at her. ‘Orlandine, you are in serious need of a drink.’

They finally entered the lounge, where other haimen of the station had gathered, sans carapaces, to celebrate the completion of another small fragment of a construction project with a downtime of a million years. All this was pure unadulturated memory, but soon she felt it slide into the territory of nightmare. They were standing by a drinks dispenser when Shoala said words that were so close to memory, but now drifting away from it.

‘I want you to feel me inside you,’ he said, perfectly on script, but then added, ‘as I felt you inside me.’

And he had. He had felt her tearing apart and deleting his mind. He had felt, at her instigation, the clamp-legs of his carapace displaced from their usual sockets and driven deep elsewhere into his body. She had murdered him to cover her own escape with the Jain node that had been a ‘gift’ to her from Erebus — or rather a Trojan to turn her into something that might destroy the Polity.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, the guilt and deep despair seeming to crush her intestines between them.

He shrugged. ‘ECS kills or erases murderers. There is no mercy, no forgiveness. A murderer has taken something that cannot be given back, and so must himself forfeit that same thing.’

Where were they now? Glancing beyond him she recognized the interior of a Dyson segment: massive pillars rising up in the distance, diagonal tie cables a hundred yards thick and scattered with fusion reactors and gravmotors like giant steel aphids. Ice lay underfoot.

He sipped his drink, his carapace back in place but its clamp-legs now driven deep into his naked body, blood oozing out and freezing as it ran down his trousers, building up around his feet to stick him in place.

‘You feel sorry,’ he said. ‘I would be glad to feel anything at all.’

‘Shoala…’

She saw him now in the interface sphere where she had murdered him, coughing up blood… dying. But I saved most of that Polity fleet from Erebus, she told herself. Doesn’t that count for something? But that was nonsense: her actions might have led to the remaining ships escaping, but she had destroyed Erebus’s USER, the one preventing those same ships travelling through U-space, but only because the device had also prevented her from escaping.

Orlandine woke instantly, fully alert to the sound of docking clamps engaging. Through her hardware she assessed everything that was happening, then stood up and began heading back through Heliotrope towards the airlock. As she walked she again questioned why she repeatedly initiated those dream sequences, because no amount of self-flagellation could return Shoala to life. Yet, somehow, she needed to remind herself of what price others close to her had paid for the near-supernal power she now possessed, so that she would never treat it lightly and would always use this power to serve a higher purpose.

Vengeance?

Yes, she was using her power to exact vengeance for the murder of her two brothers but, just like her destruction of the USER, there would be additional benefit. In this case she would prevent huge loss of life by destroying a powerful inimical being.

Before entering the airlock she initiated closure of her spacesuit — the visor and segmented helmet rising up simultaneously out of the neck ring and sealing together. The war runcible, though it had been constructed to be inhabited by humans, had long been filled with inert gas in order to preserve it. The lock opened directly into a docking tunnel, which in turn connected to one of the many box-section corridors that burrowed through the runcible’s structure. The gravplates in this section were online at half a G, causing her to drop abruptly to the floor. Checking through the runcible’s computer network she found that the drones were located where she wanted them to be, and set out with long bouncing strides. Soon she arrived at an even wider corridor — one used for transporting heavy equipment — and next she stood before open doors that exposed glints of metallic movement inside. She entered.

Knobbler was, unsurprisingly, a brute, typical of the type of drone that usually wanted to manifest as something nasty, and overendowed with limbs. He looked like the bastard offspring of an octopus and a fiddler crab, with a definite admixture of earth-moving equipment in his ancestry. His main body was a couple of yards across and as many deep, with a sharp rim just like that of a crab and, also like a crab, this body possessed his main sensorium, including disconcerting squid eyes. The body was also mackerel-patterned — indicating now-inactive old-style chameleonware. Extending below and behind the body was a tail resembling the abdomen of a hoverfly, which he could fold up conveniently against his underside. From the juncture between these sections sprouted numerous heavy and partially jointed tentacles, some supporting him off the floor, others up and groping through the air, but all terminating in the tools of his one-time lethal trade. She gazed around at the others now gathered in this big and slightly archaic engine room. The war drone’s companions were a collection of phobic nightmares, including large versions of a scorpion, a hissing cockroach, a devil’s coach-horse and other forms less easy to equate with a single species. And she understood that, no matter how fast she might react informationally, they could now easily kill her if they so chose.

They did not so choose. They appeared, in fact, rather enamoured of her plans.

‘It’s good to see you all face-to-face,’ she said.

That elicited a rapid exchange of jokes, story fragments and what could only be described as electronic titters. It was a given that old war drones like these were often more human than some humans these days, and certainly possessed a keener sense of humour. The only problem was that what they might find amusing, most humans would certainly not.

‘I’ll not spend time on waffle, because our time is short.’ While transmitting subtexts and back-up information packages to her narrative, she continued. ‘It will take seventy hours for the nearest ECS attack ship or dreadnought to reach us. Before then we need to get these engines running.’

Spaced evenly about inside the runcible were five U-space engines. She had already assessed them and found that two needed much remedial work, this massive conglomeration of units that was the U-space drive here being one of them.

‘Getting them running isn’t the main problem,’ replied Knobbler, acting as spokesman for the rest, ‘but getting them balanced will be.’ For emphasis he snapped one long razor-edged claw at the air. It looked perfectly designed for peeling open Prador carapaces to tear out what lay inside.

‘They need a controlling intelligence now the runcible AI has gone,’ observed Orlandine, adding, ‘That will, as you know, be only a temporary position, until I myself am ready to assume it.’ She was carefully scanning her audience on many levels. During the war itself none of them would have been of any use in the role she was now suggesting, but throughout the ensuing years they had all grown in experience, knowledge and wisdom, and they had since then all availed themselves of memory and processing capacity bolt-ons. Even so, half of them were still of little use: they were faulty at their core and would waver under the exigencies of processing the higher maths required for both runcible and U-space operation. Running their specs through filtering programs she came up with three best candidates. One was Knobbler itself, another was the one shaped like a huge bedbug, which named itself Bludgeon, and the last was the one that resembled a preying mantis fashioned out of razor blades — who was named, inevitably, Cutter.