The man turned again. ‘A month or so back, with these injuries I would have been, but the little doctors are quite effective.’ Cormac nearly drew his weapon and fired upon seeing that the injury to the man’s face looked more like some sort of cancerous growth. Definitely similar to the stuff seen in the wounds of those controlled by Jain-tech. But as the man’s words impacted, Cormac loosened his grip on the butt of his thin-gun.

Little doctors?

Mika had told him about some experiments conducted aboard Jerusalem, describing a human blank — a mindless clone — being shot at close range with a pulse gun. It should have been a killing shot, but the clone survived it and stood up again afterwards. Within the clone had been installed a mycelium based on Jain technology, which acted to repair physical damage and sustain the human body despite such serious injury. This mycelium was very much like one Mika had installed inside herself and others on the planet Masada before discovering that they went on to destroy their host while producing Jain nodes.

Cormac again tried to access the local military net, but as yet he possessed no encryption keys for this world, and predators — both ECS and enemy — were swarming in informational space ready to find their way in via unprotected transmission or reception.

King, I really need access, he sent.

Still working on it — but they’re rather busy here, King replied.

‘Stay alert,’ Cormac told the other three as he clambered aboard the platform. Arach scrambled on next, placing himself over to the right of the suspect pilot. Smith and Scar stepped into the space behind him and Cormac leaned on the rail just to the man’s right.

‘When were they introduced?’ Cormac asked.

The man shrugged. ‘About a month ago,’ he replied. ‘My platoon were implanted with them first and realized the greatest danger soonest.’

‘That being?’

‘Overconfidence.’ The soldier pulled up on the platform’s joystick and with a steadily increasing hum it rose into the air beside the steel cliff.

‘If you could explain?’ suggested Cormac.

Again the shrug. ‘You take a few hits that would otherwise have put you screaming on the ground, and you begin to think you’re invulnerable, so tend to take more risks. We lost half the platoon the moment the enemy realized how much of a danger we were.’

‘I see.’

After a minute the platform rose above the upper surface of the atmosphere ship. Armoured bunkers containing gun emplacements and hard-field generators had been ranged along this surface. The sky out towards the front looked like the flank of some translucent scaled beast — as Polity hard-fields were made perpetually visible by constant impacts. These fields, these scales, were flicking off intermittently to allow firing from Polity forces: here and there the turquoise stab of a particle beam, the stuttering fire of a pulse-cannon drawing punctuated lines in the sky like those made by incendiary bullets, black missiles needling out on drives bright as welder lights. The pilot slid the platform across to an area where numerous aircars and troop carriers were parked, and descended to land beside them. As the platform crunched down on the ceramal surface, Cormac observed soldiers like their pilot scrambling aboard a troop carrier, which was an armoured vehicle like a floating barge. There were a few dracomen among them, Cormac noted. Once all were aboard the carrier, it rose abruptly into the sky and accelerated towards the wall of hard-fields, two of its scales parting quickly to allow the craft through.

Here are the encryption keys, King informed him.

Cormac applied the keys and immediately gained access to the the local military network, where he promptly accessed battle plans, logistics, deployments — the whole panoply of this widespread conflict. He discovered that the AI in command here had at first needed to continually adjust its plan, as the attack by Erebus’s forces changed tack, slotting it all together with as little waste of resources as possible. Then the fight settled into a brute contest of strength, until now with the arrival of reinforcements. A query supplied him with further information about the ‘little doctors’. After being developed aboard Jerusalem the schematics for their construction were then transmitted to AIs all across the Polity. Whether they were employed in battle was down to the AIs concerned. Here the AI, Ramone, and its physical commanders on the ground, had decided to give this new technology a try, but were still undecided about its efficacy. For a start, it needed to be deployed with considerable forethought about its psychological effects on those carrying it. One hazard was overconfidence — just like the man said.

‘Stand down,’ he told the others, transmitting to them the details. Arach’s hatches slammed shut, Smith reached out and clicked on the safety catch of his proton carbine, and with a metallic slither Scar replaced a carbide hunting knife in the sheath at his belt.

A further query revealed that the ones Cormac needed to see here were called Romos and Remes, avatars created by the city AI to take charge of the defence.

‘Ramone’s avatars?’ he asked of their pilot.

The man pointed silently towards one of the bunkers, before vaulting the platform rail and heading over to join a group of soldiers gathered around the next carrier due to leave. Glancing back towards the hammerhead Bertha, Cormac saw that troop carriers were spiralling into the sky. It seemed that defence was now giving way to attack.

Arach scrambled to the ground, rose up high on his spider legs and gazed intently at the departing craft. Despite the drone being a chromed spider, Cormac could recognize the yearning in its pose. Checking present battle status, he saw that they would soon be following those same carriers out if they were ever going to capture a legate. He stepped from the platform and headed across to the bunker, his team falling in dutifully behind. But how do you successfully capture a legate? No doubt, on facing capture, one of Erebus’s subordinates would automatically try to destroy itself, almost certainly possessing the means to do so internally. So how to stop that in time? The search engines he used presented three possibilities. Firstly a massive EM pulse might do the job, but it might also scramble any useful information to be garnered. Secondly, an informational attack might work, but first he needed to get through the legate’s defences, and even then the chances of success he roughly estimated at one in twenty. Only the third option seemed remotely viable: instant freezing.

As he finally approached the armoured door to the bunker, Cormac sent his search engines off again, this time to check on the availability of certain necessary items in the vicinity. The door before him opened and a Golem with blue skin and pupil-less green eyes stepped out. He recognized it as a Golem immediately — he could see its metal bones.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ the figure enquired.

‘You’ve not been informed?’

‘No, I heard about your arrival only a few minutes ago, from the King of Hearts’ Obviously one of Ramone’s Golem avatars, the blue one paused and gazed up at the sky, where it now seemed the gods were igniting flashbulbs. He continued, ‘I can’t see what possible purpose is served by—’

There came a thunderous crash, even louder than the constant racket of the ongoing battle. Cormac spun round to the source of the sound and saw a fire trail stabbing down into the centre of the nearby city. Then abruptly numerous explosions bloomed amid the tall buildings, some of which began toppling. Cormac instantly recognized this as an orbital rail-gun strike. Through his gridlink he found chaos on the military net — servers crashing and bandwidth shrinking to choke off information flow — but he picked up enough to find out that several wormships had made a suicide run on the planet just to deliver that blow, and had subsequently been destroyed by the Cable Hogue.