Scar glanced towards where Cormac had been standing only a second before, then he wrenched the platform into the air. Soon they were retracing their route into the wormship’s core, hurtling along after Smith’s tank. No detonation yet. Maybe the woman had known what he could see, and so had given him a warning. Within minutes they were outside again, in the hot smoky air.

‘Hold here,’ Cormac instructed, as he watched all the troops piling back aboard the one mobile carrier. He then assessed the perpetually updated model of his attack plan and the relative positions of those within in. Soon everyone who could was out of there and, once they were racing away over the incinerated mud, Cormac signalled for Scar to continue.

‘We failed,’ Cormac announced, both verbally and over com.

‘That’s unfortunate,’ replied Remes from twenty miles away, ‘but now it appears that you weren’t even supposed to be here at all.’

Just then a blast lit up the entire sky.

‘What?’ Cormac turned and looked back in time to see a tsunami of debris bearing down on them. The hot shock wave hit hard, tilting the gun platform and flinging debris past them. He glimpsed chunks of Jain coral hurtling through the air like scythe blades, saw Scar headless at the platform’s controls and Arach tumbling away helplessly through the storm. Then, a boulder of Jain coral slammed straight into the side of the platform like a giant fist. The gun collapsed crushing Cormac underneath it, and something else hit him hard on the side of his head.

The lights went out.

Vulture brought the Harpy and its attached Jain craft back up into the real, only to see the two pursuing wormships materialize almost simultaneously only a hundred thousand miles away.

‘Let me use the chameleonware,’ Vulture requested. ‘We still have a chance to shake them.’ It might indeed have helped, though it was evident the wormships were now using a new scanning format and recognition codes. The one-time bird and now ship AI then tried the chameleonware again, only to find that it still lay beyond his control. Crane, now back in his usual seat beside the ship’s console, had retained ultimate control of the Harpy, and Vulture felt like one of those AIs, before the Quiet War, who had been strictly controlled by their human masters. It was so humiliating. Crane didn’t need to do this to him; all he needed to do was explain himself. The Golem’s dislike of communicating had to be really extreme for him to adopt such measures.

‘Or is it that you don’t want to shake them?’ Vulture enquired.

Crane acknowledged this with a slow nod of his head, then leaned forward and input some new coordinates. Vulture studied them as the two wormships began to close in. Upon detecting a sudden steep rise in radiation from that direction, the AI immediately dropped his ship back into the U-continuum, energies discharging around it like black lightnings as the U-field dragged some small part of a microwave beam strike back down with it.

‘Nearly fried us,’ Vulture observed.

Crane even acknowledged that too, with another tilt of his head. However, as taciturn as Crane appeared towards Vulture, he had certainly been speaking to someone. Though the Golem’s earlier reply to Vulture’s question, ‘Are you still in contact with ECS?’ had been ambiguous, Crane certainly could not have managed such recent feats without Earth Central’s help. However, Vulture felt that there must be more to it than that. Certainly, the Polity AIs, knowing Crane’s intention of going after Erebus for killing the hybrids, would have been prepared to give him any assistance that did not interfere with their own plans, but there were still discrepancies to explain.

ECS had definitely helped Crane get to the location of this ship, the Harpy. Equally, ECS could have given the location of the crashed wormship — the one that killed the hybrids — and it could have given the location of the wormships in the Caldera system too. However, Vulture had a bit of a problem with how Crane had then managed to destroy all those ships. Crane must have known there was a weakness to be exploited, but one that ECS simply could not have been aware of, therefore the brass Golem must have obtained the information elsewhere. Vulture preferred to believe that explanation rather than the alternative — which was that Crane had somehow returned to a previous state and once again fallen through the booby hatch. And now it was time to find out for sure.

As the Harpy travelled through U-space, Vulture next asked, ‘We going anywhere speciAI?’ The coordinates, according to his library, were of a small scattering of asteroids deep in interstellar space and fifteen light years from the nearest star, and, unless there was something else there that Vulture did not know about, the asteroids would be a poor place to hide from the pursuing wormships.

Crane’s response was typical: he silently took out his toys and placed them neatly on the console before him.

‘Are ECS warships waiting there?’ Vulture tried.

The briefest twitch of Crane’s head maybe indicated a negative.

Keeping half an eye on the brass Golem, Vulture began to submerge more fully into the Jain-infected systems of Harpy and the legate craft. He sampled snatches of the code flowing all about him and studied how things were working here. Soon he realized that though some improvements had been made to Harpy’s systems, especially to its chameleonware, the Jain network did not interfere unnecessarily, except through primacy. On the whole it ran in parallel with Harpy’s hardware. That meant Crane could take over whenever he wanted. Sending a few test diagnostics, Vulture found he himself could use parts of that parallel network and he began to look for recorded data, soon finding tens of thousands of caches distributed throughout the Jain substructure.

Some of these sources contained information that was open to analysis. The easiest stuff was visual files and schematics, which Vulture studied avidly. Here a schematic of a wormship segment, there a visual file that had to be part of a virtual model. But it was hopeless. All this stuff could have come from the legate craft, and it neither proved nor disproved whether Crane had been in direct contact with some other entity. Then, out of vast complexity and seemingly endless data horizons, a simple vocal communication:

‘Well, I would guess you’re looking for me?’

‘Who are you?’ Vulture asked, meanwhile running traces to find the source of this voice.

‘I’m Fiddler Randal,’ came the reply.

Vulture traced it back to one particular data store, but even as he accessed that source, its contents began to copy themselves elsewhere.

‘You’re a virus,’ the AI observed.

‘Quite right — but of a kind quite fatal to Erebus.’

‘You supplied Mr Crane with information about the weaknesses underlying Erebus’s attack on the Caldera system?’