‘Captain Hieronymus Janger,’ said a mildly authoritative female voice.

Janger wasn’t fooled by that, since a drone could put on any voice it so chose. However, it was a real woman who stepped through the doorway. She was wiry and tough-looking, her head bald and her skin the purplish black of those possessing a degree of physical resistance to hard ultraviolet. Her eyes were icy blue, and her face attractive in a rather inimical way. She wore a spacesuit, but only as she stepped fully into view and opened the petals of a sensory array behind her head did he see she also wore a carapace and an assister frame. She was haiman.

‘That’s me,’ he replied. ‘And you are a thief.’

She nodded and seemed to look somewhat ashamed. ‘I am sorry to say that I am, but to achieve my aims it has become a necessity. I can assure you, however, that the ultimate good I achieve will negate the crime.’

‘Yeah, right,’ said Janger. ‘The protest of moral criminals all across the Polity.’

‘It’s the truth,’ said the woman, but she looked to one side and added, ‘Though there are crimes for which there is no restitution.’

‘What about me?’ Janger asked. ‘What about my loss?’

She looked up. ‘You will make no loss at all. Your insurance is under AI guarantee and there is a clause in there about piracy — perhaps included because of its utter unlikelihood.’

Clarence turned his Golem head. ‘What about kidnapping?’

She gazed at the Golem. ‘What about it?’

‘The runcible you are stealing includes an as yet somnolent AI.’

‘My drones will leave the AI behind.’

Ah, thought Janger. My drones.

‘So you yourself would be in charge of this act of piracy?’ She just stared at him. ‘Then you made a mistake in coming up here.’ He took a step forward. ‘You are now my prisoner.’

‘You mean because you are pointing that thing at me.’ She nodded to the weapon he held.

‘Yeah, that about covers it.’

‘Not really.’

A flicker of movement caught his eye and he looked down to observe the digital display of the rifle rapidly winding down to zero. Swinging the weapon to one side he pulled the trigger. Nothing. How the hell did she do that?

‘Now,’ she continued, ‘I could have stolen that cargo runcible without even coming here to talk to you.’ She walked forward, using one of her auxiliary assister-frame arms to remove a box from her belt pouch. Janger meanwhile stepped back, still holding the weapon. Perhaps he could overpower her, but, being haiman, she would inevitably have nervous-system augmentations and could probably run fight programs in an instant. She could probably flatten him. Was it worth trying? Well, probably not, if what she had said about the insurance was true.

Using her human hands the woman opened the box after placing it on the table. She took out a translucent red orb and four metallic stones smoothly rounded as if taken from a beach. ‘This here is a natural star ruby, from Venus, and the others are ferroaxinite stones with weak monopole characteristics.’ She glanced across at him. ‘But for one other item that is no longer intact, they were once the most valuable objects in my collection. I believe I don’t have to tell you how much they are worth.’

She didn’t. The ruby alone, if it really was natural, would pay for a refit of his living accommodation — something long overdue — and even the AIs themselves had yet to figure out how to manufacture monopole axinite. Such stones were one of the few natural objects that could not be reproduced and, as such, much sought after by rich collectors who wanted something virtually unique.

‘Still not enough to pay for a cargo runcible,’ Janger insisted.

‘Your insurance will pay for that,’ she replied. ‘This is merely to compensate for the trouble I’ve put you to — for which I also apologize.’

Abruptly she turned away and headed back towards the airlock.

‘Does this salve your conscience?’ was Janger’s parting shot.

She paused for a moment. ‘There is no salve for my conscience,’ she told him, then stepped out of sight.

Vulture longed for a return to the omniscience of being a ship AI, but the best he could attain was a narrow link to the ‘Prador control system’, from which he began incorporating fragments of astrogation and library data. And gazing through the eyes of the Harpy, Vulture watched the fifty wormships orbiting almost nose to tail — if such could be an apt description of objects that looked like balls of iridescent millipedes as they writhed in orbit around a small hot planetoid close to the nearby sun. This was in fact an inhabited system, with the main human population crammed on to two small worlds both orbiting on the inner edge of what might be described as the green belt. Both of them were also fairly hot, though not as hot as the planetoid, and followed orbital paths mere hundreds of thousands of miles apart, but presently they were on the far side of the sun. Orbital mirrors reflected a lot of heat away from their surfaces to numerous power stations, which converted that sunlight into other forms of electromagnetic radiation and sent it out through a collection of space-based runcibles. This place was one of the power stations of the Polity runcible network.

The inhabitants of the two worlds worked in high-tech industries or research, and were involved in the mapping and control of the solar energy being injected into the runcible network. However, it was still not the plum target it might have appeared, for really, if these worlds went down, it would take but a moment for some other energy source to take up the slack. Knocking out the Caldera worlds would do no more, tactically, than blowing a few fuses in a country’s power grid. Besides, this was a dangerous place to assault, for, like the solar system the devastated Polity fleet had retreated to, a lot of the energy being thrown about here could be employed aggressively. There were obviously many more vulnerable and potentially damaging targets that Erebus could attack. Coming here made no sense at all.

‘Okay, we’re here, and I see that your fifty wormships are nearby,’ said Vulture. ‘So what’s the plan — you going to board them one at a time and kill all their captains?’

Vulture expected no reply as he turned to look at the brass Golem. Mr Crane began picking up his toys from the console, one at a time, and dropping them into his pocket. Once he had finished that, he quickly input a course change and initiated it. The two mated ships abruptly slid sideways.

‘Where the fuck are we going?’ Vulture enquired of his Prador friend.

There came no reply, but somehow Vulture located coordinates. There had been some decidedly odd code coming from the ship AI lately, and Vulture reckoned that Jain-tech, spreading through this ship from the legate’s vessel, had finally reached its frozen brain. Of course, they were now heading straight for the wormships. The main screen greyed a little, and bands began passing across its surface, meaning chameleonware was engaged, for what good it would do them.

‘You said to me that “He must pay,” and I thought he did when you tore him apart, but you weren’t really talking about that legate, were you?’

Crane stared at Vulture for a moment, then tilted his head as if listening to something only he could hear. For the first time Vulture felt really annoyed with the Golem’s reticence. He shrugged, stretched out one wing and pecked at its oily feathers, then stamped up and down his bit of console for a moment.

‘Look, I know how you don’t like talking, but I really need some sort of explanation.’

Crane seemed to ponder this request for a moment, then abruptly he turned his chair and reached out with both hands. The action was so smooth and quick that Vulture had no time to react. The metal hands closed round his body, clamping his wings to his sides.