‘We are bereft,’ said the blue avatar.

Cormac turned back to see him down on one knee.

‘What?’

That strike, King supplied. It took out the planetary AI, Ramone.

Erebus could not locate Fiddler Randal, but the attack ship captain was still indefinably there, somewhere, within the massive conglomerate Jain structure that was Erebus’s own body. No matter, for Randal was just an irritation. Erebus now turned its attention to the masses of data coming in from the forty fleets of attacking wormships, and from sensors and agents positioned throughout the Polity, some even having penetrated as far as the Sol system.

Twelve of those forty groups of fifty wormships had encountered heavy resistance and so would not achieve their apparent goal of destroying or taking over the worlds they had targeted. This did not matter, because the three crucial worlds would fall — the three worlds that acted almost like fuses in the section of the runcible network extending into the nearby quadrant of the Polity. With the linkage of those three worlds into the runcible network broken, Polity AIs would not be able to instantly shut down that same section of the network. It would take them three seconds longer, and that would be enough.

Earth Central Security had apparently responded in the only logical way to this attack, by sending sufficient forces to counter it, yet holding other forces in reserve in the quadrant of the Polity behind that attack should it be a feint. It was all exactly as Erebus required, for those reserve forces, those ECS fleets, were easy to locate in the limited number of solar systems with sufficient industrialization to support them. Every one of them was much larger than the fleet Erebus had first defeated, but no problem there, for Erebus had no intention of confronting them.

Chevron? Erebus enquired, using security measures far in excess of those it used even when communicating with its closest parts.

This particular part of itself Erebus allowed a great deal of self-determination, even its own name. Chevron had been a female-emulating Golem aboard the ship once named Trafalgar, whose limited body had once been Erebus’s own. Chevron had been a loyal ally from the beginning, her indifference to the human race growing throughout the war against the Prador to the point where human life had come to mean nothing to her. In its way such an attitude had been a useful trait during that war, for she had been quite prepared to sacrifice as many human troops as necessary to get the job done. However, in the war’s closing years her indifference had turned into utter contempt, and allowing human beings to die had turned into a hobby where she actively sought to get them killed or else slaughtered them herself if she could get away with it. She had subsequently chosen to depart the Polity aboard the Trafalgar because ECS investigators were getting too close to her, and the idea of an AI melding into something else seemed to her a way to escape what she had become, which, oddly, she felt to be all too human. Now she was a part of Erebus, but one it treated with reserve and caution, like a human might treat its own tendency to excess in deviancy or violence.

I am here, Chevron indicated by transmitting a simple response code.

With a U-space link now established to Chevron via her vessel, Erebus first surveilled the vessel’s location. It was currently down in the shallows of an orange sea whose waters were heavily laden with iron salts. Her ship, a flat segmented grub a quarter of a mile long, had piggybacked to this world’s orbit in the U-field of a large freighter, and then covered its descent using chameleonware. It could not have done so now, what with the security measures presently in place, for the freighter’s mass discrepancy — the difference between its registered mass and its actual mass inclusive of Chevron’s vessel — would have been quickly detected, as would the difficult-to-conceal gravity phenomena associated with an anti-gravity descent. But, then, Chevron had arrived on this world called Xanadu almost five years ago. She had landed before Skellor found his Jain node, before a giant arcology on a world called Coloron had been destroyed to prevent the spread of Jain-tech from yet another node, during a time when Polity AIs were ostensibly only just waking up to the possibility of a major threat to their rule.

Erebus began running checks throughout the vessel, and saw that the complex factory housed inside it had completed eighteen thermonuclear imploders. The ship was still drawing in seawater and separating out needed elements to construct the complex components of each device. Jain roots, piercing two miles deep below the sea floor, were working their way along a seam of pitchblende, from which they were busy extracting uranium dioxide. Further refining of that material took place within the ship itself so the isotopes were separated out. Only uranium 238 — after undergoing neutron bombardment to convert it into plutonium 239 — and uranium 235 were suitable for Erebus’s purpose here; both of them being fissionable materials. Out of preference, Erebus would have used antimatter, as employed in Polity CTD imploders, but even the excellent chameleonware aboard this vessel could not have concealed such a large quantity of that substance. No matter, for the effect would be the same.

Update, Erebus instructed, shifting a portion of its attention to ride the murderous Golem’s senses.

Chevron wore the external human appearance of an elfin blue-eyed blonde — a façade that showed nothing of the dense and complex nano-technology that packed her body from head to foot. She was sitting on the balcony of her luxury apartment in the Columbus Tower. Though it overlooked one of Xanadu’s major cities, more importantly for her, it overlooked the largest runcible facility on Xanadu: a labyrinth of geodesic domes between interconnecting lounges and halls designed to accommodate the huge numbers of people arriving and departing.

The desired update came through as an information packet which Erebus opened in processing space secure even from most of itself. Upon her arrival on this world, Chevron had established herself with the local separatist organisation and quickly worked her way up through its ranks by using abilities an order of magnitude above those possessed by anyone else within it. She had also murdered numerous rivals in interesting and extremely painful ways. She hadn’t needed to, but that was Chevron. Now she was indisputably their leader.

Here on Xanadu Chevron now controlled over two thousand separatists, out of which she had selected five hundred for this mission. They had been training for two years and were armed with weapons manufactured by her own ship: assault rifles and automatic handguns, missile launchers and high explosives. These weapons were all created by Jain-tech, but any such tech inside them was now dead, so it would not give off the kind of signals Polity AIs were constantly on the lookout for. Energy weapons too would have been detected, since no matter what you did with the structure of these, they still needed a power supply that could easily be spotted. Hence her need to employ such anachronistic weapons.

The assault rifles were a perfect example: they folded up, and scan would reveal them as no more than deactivated replicas. Opening them out again would make numerous essential connections. The apparently solid metal inside their barrels would melt and void itself, the neutral propellant inside the bullets contained in their clips would undergo a chemical transformation and be ready to fire in moments. Other weapons also bore an initially harmless appearance and could be activated just as quickly. There were bottles of beer that transformed into grenades containing a potent liquid explosive; an old-style drug injector that turned into an automatic handgun, its drug ampoules transforming readily into bullets; and a crate containing large discs of an amberlike resin — a natural product of this world — that each turned into a planar explosive capable of ripping through ceramal armour.