‘There has been no—’ The voice began in that same flat tone used by the sub-mind, then abruptly cut off. Then the real Jerusalem continued, ‘It would seem that Agent Cormac and the King of Hearts were given new orders.’

‘It would seem?’ Azroc noted that some of the personnel manning the consoles were now getting up and abandoning their posts.

‘Yes,’ said Jerusalem. ‘Apparently I myself wanted him to proceed to Ramone and there capture a legate.’

‘What?’

‘Cormac and his ship are currently down on the surface of Ramone, though details of his progress are sparse. Communications are intermittent, since encryption needs to be changed frequently by the groundside defence forces there.’

Azroc noted that those abandoning their posts had occupied an area around one particular individual. Azroc saw to his surprise that this was a Golem.

‘Now,’ said Jerusalem.

A length of console and a circular section of deck exploded into the air. At that precise moment all but the Golem threw themselves to the floor. A great ribbed pipe two metres across terminating in a massive four-fingered claw and numerous ports and lethal-looking protuberances shot out of the hole, curved over whip-fast, and slammed down on the Golem. Cryogenic gas exploded out at the contact point, as the claw closing on the Golem tore up part of the console and the metal flooring underneath. Miniature lightning flared and earthed, and there came the bright flashes of particle beams cutting within the mass. Then a glowing white explosion blasted the claw into the air, and an ensuing arc-fire melted both the Golem and everything lying within a few feet of it. The wrecked claw seemed to pause in frustrated hesitation, then retracted itself back down into the hole it had made.

‘Damn,’ said Jerusalem.

‘And precisely what happened then?’ asked Azroc.

‘I was just trying to capture one of the enemy in our camp,’ Jerusalem replied. ‘The same one who gave Cormac and the King of Hearts those false orders.’

Like the impact of a boulder falling, Azroc felt a large mass of fresh information fall suddenly within his remit.

‘I have already analysed this data for other similar false orders,’ Jerusalem explained, ‘and, oddly, it seems there have been no others issued. Yet Erebus’s agent here was in a position to cause us maximum damage by doing so. Now, see what else you can find.’

As Azroc began checking through the files and logs the enemy’s Golem agent had been using, he felt a surge of emotion, again from that point somewhere below emulation. This time, though, he recognized fear. The fact that one of Erebus’s minions had managed to penetrate here, right to the heart of the Jerusalem, told him this was a war that the Polity might actually lose.

The antigravity tank was a disc-shaped affair with a ceramal skirt below and a wide turret jutting above from which protruded twinned particle cannons. Now only one of the cannons was capable of delivering its usual destructive potential. The other had been modified so its accelerating coils could be used to propel helium superfluid doped with iron particles, a supply of which resided in two cylindrical tanks welded to the tank’s skirt. Anything hit by a jet of this stuff would be frozen solid in a second, since the fluid’s temperature was only fifty degrees above absolute zero.

‘Remember,’ said Cormac to Hubbert Smith. ‘If you get a legate in your sights, you nail it immediately.’

Smith nodded briefly and climbed the steps leading to the open hatch in one side of the tank, and then lowered himself inside. Watching him go, Cormac continued to reflect on whether this was all a complete waste of time. Yes, the superfluid would certainly freeze Jain-tech hardware, but it could not freeze electric or photonic signals, so if the legate they targeted happened to contain some sort of explosive device that could survive the freezing process there would still be nothing to prevent it sending the detonation signal. It struck him that Jerusalem was either prepared to expend personnel for minimum gain, or this mission he was about to undertake was an act of desperation, and Cormac hadn’t thought things were going so badly.

‘Three wormships landed and decohered on the surface,’ said Remes. His tone had become leaden since the destruction of the AI Ramone, the one who had brought him into being. Maybe Remes was missing his parent.

Cormac studied the aerial shots showing the disposition of Erebus’s forces, which Remes was now relaying direct to his gridlink. The segmented objects looking like organic trains that had first led the enemy attack had now withdrawn and formed defensive lines two hundred miles long. Further back, behind them, were three Jain-tech substructures like huge spiky mollusc shells bonded together with tar that seemed likely to form the cores of each wormship. The nearest one lay twenty miles straight out from their present position here at the end of the grounded atmosphere ship. And there, he hoped, he would find his legate captain.

‘We’ll start with this nearest one,’ said Cormac. ‘You’ll hold back from hitting all three of the ship cores for the moment, in case we don’t find what we want in this one?’

‘We have cancelled the main assault,’ Remes confirmed. ‘Now that the wormship fleet has withdrawn, there will be no need to expend any further lives — except in support of your mission.’

Comforting, Cormac thought. Without him here, the ground forces would have needed only to maintain city defence while awaiting bombardment of the enemy by ECS capital ships. With the Cable Hogue looming up, he supposed it wasn’t surprising that the remaining wormships had retreated. However, information was now becoming available that this was not unique, for Erebus’s forces were being redeployed elsewhere throughout its concerted assault on the Line worlds.

‘Is that atmosphere gunship on the way yet?’ Cormac enquired.

Remes pointed back towards the city, before turning away and heading for the antigravity platform upon which they had arrived. Glancing where indicated, Cormac observed another massive ship like the one here on the ground drifting towards them like a skyscraper uprooted and turned on its side. Then he glanced round to check the disposition of his own small force.

Two of the bargelike troop carriers were loaded with fifty soldiers each, including twelve dracomen and numerous Golem. All the human soldiers contained those ‘little doctors’. He wasn’t sure why he had asked for such troops specifically, though he had a horrible suspicion he had chosen them because they seemed less human and therefore of less value. He didn’t want to examine his own motivations too closely.

The AG tanks were to go first, after the atmosphere gunship had done its work. The carriers were to follow, surrounded by a selection of gun platforms. Cormac glanced across at Scar, who was strolling back from some sort of draco-conference with a group of his brethren, then he crooked a finger at Arach, who was gazing out intently at their destination from fifty feet up on the side of the grounded atmosphere ship. The spider drone ran straight down the sheer armoured surface, bounced on the ground leaving a small crater, then hurtled across towards him.

‘I don’t need to give you specific instructions,’ Cormac explained to both the dracoman and the spider drone. ‘Everything is fair game, except a legate if we’re lucky enough to come across one. Let’s go.’ He led the way over to a flying gun platform on which a pulse-cannon was gimball-mounted. Since the gun seat was intended for a human, Cormac took possession of that while Scar stood by the control pillar. After hesitating for a moment, Arach grabbed a box containing an extra supply of the ordnance he used, climbed aboard securing the box behind him, then raised one leg, the glimmer of razor chainglass extruding along one edge of it. With two quick swipes he removed a large chunk of the safety rail, then settled himself down at the very rim of the platform. Opening his abdomen hatches he raised into position his two Gatling-style cannons and swivelled them to point off at right angles to each other. Then, as the shadow of the huge atmosphere gunship drew across them, Scar took them up into the air.