In the darkness she closed her eyes and concentrated. It felt as if there were objects like steel orchids hanging in the meat of her brain, and that when she tried to get close to these, to link with them, to know them, they snapped closed. Only by utterly relaxing herself did the orchids seem to open and lose their density, then utterly weird sensations flooded into her consciousness, along with images impossible for human eyes to have seen, for humans possessed only one pair of eyes each. How much of the Atheter memstore was now lodged inside her skull? And how much else besides? For occasionally other human sensations and images surfaced — those she at once recognized as recorded by aug and gridlink during the sole human mission to the Maker realm. At one point she saw herself fleeing through corridors, escaping from massive beetle-like biomechs. She saw Sparkind soldiers protecting her and dying. These memories, she recognized, were in fact those of the runcible technician called Chaline — a survivor of that same mission who had witnessed what Jain technology had done to the Maker civilization. Mika slightly resented these memories, not because Dragon had pumped them into her mind, but because Chaline had once been Cormac’s lover. It was silly human emotion, but one she clung to. Her life now seemed to be fast straying into the territory of the unhuman, and at least this petty jealousy reminded her of what she originally was.

‘It seems you’ve turned me into a walking memstore,’ she informed the darkness.

Yet from whatever angle she approached this, she could not seem to get upset about it. Almost certainly Dragon had tampered with her mind to make her so readily accept this imposition, and even accept the tampering itself. There came no reply from Dragon, which didn’t surprise her. She lay there contemplatively a while longer, then finally enquired of the darkness, ‘Are we there?’

Reddish light bloomed and she saw she was floating within a fleshy cyst with various organic umbilici attached to her naked body. Abruptly they began to detach and retract into the walls. Glancing down she saw raw holes rapidly closing up in her skin. Her body should not be able to do that sort of thing by itself, therefore she was right about it having been altered. She wondered if Dragon had made further physical changes to her during her recent long sleep, while also filling her skull with both Atheter and human memories. However, even though she was curious about all this, the intrusion seemed no more than that: a curiosity. As the last of the snaky things slid from sight, she reached up to push against the soft ceiling, while she swung her feet down to the floor, though experiencing no real sense of up or down. Thus braced she studied her surroundings and noticed a package, wrapped in some organic caul, bonded to the wall of the cyst. She pushed herself over to it, took hold and felt her fingers rip through the soft outer tissue. Inside, as half expected, she found her undersuit and spacesuit, and began the frustrating task of dressing while in zero G.

‘To reply to your first observation,’ came Dragon’s belated reply, ‘yes, I have turned you into a walking memstore. Then, to reply to your question: no, we are not there yet, though we are getting close.’

‘Why have you put all this stuff into my head?’ she asked.

‘Because you are the delivery mechanism.’

‘Are you going to explain that?’

‘The seemingly easy way of learning — by asking — is not necessarily the best,’ Dragon replied. ‘When you eventually understand, you will understand fully.’

Annoyed at the evasive reply, but even more annoyed with the way she was gyrating in mid-air while trying to fasten the seal-strips of her spacesuit, Mika said, ‘Can’t you at least give me gravity in here?’

Immediately a hand of force slammed her down onto what was now definitely the floor.

‘Thanks so much,’ she said, knowing her sarcasm wouldn’t be lost on Dragon but guessing it would be ignored. ‘Where are we then? At my delivery point?’

‘No, we are here.’

A patch of blackness appeared above her and began to spread. The moment she saw the glint of a star in that blackness, she realized what was happening. The illusion was near-perfect and this looked like a hole in the cyst tearing open directly onto vacuum. It gaped all the way around her until the walls completely disappeared. She hung in void, stars glinting all about her, while the second Dragon sphere became as clearly visible nearby as Luna when seen from the surface of Earth. As a result she felt an agoraphobia she’d never experienced with the Polity version of this kind of three-sixty-degree viewing technology.

‘Be nice to see at least a bit of you,’ she suggested.

Her own Dragon sphere etched itself onto existence around her like the body of a diatom: a glassy entity in which she could see translucent organs pulsing and writhing, and the tubes of those equatorial weapons amid sporadic rosy glows of layered objects she guessed to be fusion reactors. However, this all remained at the periphery of her vision, for looking straight ahead she saw only open space.

‘So why are we here? she persisted.

‘Because we are being followed — and we don’t want to be followed.’

Abruptly the same rosy glows flared and something deep below her flashed light of a colour she could not even name, and twisted itself in a direction she could not point to. The sphere dropped into U-space… and Mika gazed briefly upon impossibility, and found that rather than it driving her mad, she could almost encompass it. She only just managed to repress a yelp of surprise before Dragon surfaced to the real again. She looked at her hand, a claw gripping soft glassiness, and released her hold on the cyst wall. The sphere dropped into U-space again. She closed her eyes, which lessened the alarming perception but did not entirely banish it. Five more jumps, a brief glimpse of a binary star and a closer view of a green sun spewing hoops of fire, then the intense image of something like the head of Medusa, silhouetted against white light. Mika shuddered, reminded of her dreams, but knew what this shape really was. Then the Dragon sphere around her surfaced into the real again, amid the chaos of a killing ground.

Mika flinched as her sphere hammered straight into a visible shock wave carrying assorted burning debris and twisting chunks of shattered wormship. The impact registered as a mere shudder deep down where she resided. However, the sphere’s sudden change of course did throw her to one side, and she abruptly sat down. This then was that ‘other purpose besides’ Dragon had mentioned when they were discussing its new weapons.

Down to her right something glowed like heated iron, and in her peripheral vision she recognized the source as one of the sphere’s equatorial weapons. A sky-blue particle beam stabbed out, becoming blurry and turquoise where it lanced through gaseous cloud. Rising through the cloud like some chthonic monster came a wormship spewing a swarm of missiles ahead of it.

The particle beam splashed against the wormship’s hard-fields, and within the tangled body of the alien vessel a constellation ignited as hundreds of hard-field generators burned out all at once. The beam then winked out as Dragon revolved slightly, then its next massive equatorial cannon fired up. The last hard-fields went out and the new beam sliced straight across the wormship like a sabre cutting through a pile of eels. The beam then played back and forth, tearing the two remaining halves of the enemy apart. Acceleration suddenly flung Mika back against the wall of the cyst. She pushed herself down to the floor and lay there on her back. White lasers webbed through clouds of burning gas all around, igniting black dots to a painful incandescence. Two massive impacts ensued on Dragon’s skin and peripherally she registered glowing dents there with serpentine movement underneath. Distantly she saw another wormship burst apart in some massive explosion, and then observed the other Dragon sphere hurtle through the resulting debris cloud.