‘Bludgeon,’ she enquired, ‘are you ready yet?’ This was merely a politeness for she was monitoring that drone’s progress too.

‘Eighty-eight per cent,’ the drone replied curtly, not being a talkative soul.

‘At your leisure, then, proceed towards the asteroid,’ Orlandine instructed.

It was at this moment that she felt godlike and decided to enjoy the sensation despite her reservations about it. However, it seemed that fate was working overtime this day, for the moment she began to wonder if her seat in the interface sphere could recline to a more comfortable angle, klaxons sounded throughout the war runcible, and those sensors she had set up to watch their surroundings began screaming for her attention.

‘We’ve got arrivals,’ Knobbler informed her.

‘You don’t say.’

This could perhaps be the expected arrival — early by a couple of days.

The three U-space signatures had appeared some five thousand miles out. Two of them were close together and one was a thousand miles to one side. Orlandine studied the images she was receiving: two wormships accelerating towards a smaller vessel and, by the energy readings, preparing to open fire on it. She guessed the little vessel contained the one she was supposed to meet and suspected the wormships weren’t part of the general plan.

‘Weapons?’ she asked.

‘Ready,’ Knobbler replied.

‘No longer at your leisure, Bludgeon,’ she warned the drone aboard her erstwhile ship. ‘Move with a purpose.’

‘Acknowledged.’

Heliotrope’s drive ignited and it accelerated away from the war runcible. Gathering data, Orlandine began to set in motion the programs for making the calculation needed to receive something through this war runcible gate. It was easy for her, but the sheer speed her mind needed to work and the number of calculations that needed to be completed made her appreciate the feat of that hero of the Prador-human war, Moria Salem — the female runcible technician who, using little more than an advanced augmentation, managed to employ a cargo runcible to throw a small moon at a Prador dreadnought.

Perpetual diagnostic feeds from the mycelium told her that everything was functioning at optimum, so Orlandine quickly ran five fusion reactors up to speed and initiated the Skaidon warp. In the pentagon of vacuum through the centre of the war runcible reality flickered, then a shimmering meniscus sprang into being.

‘Done,’ said Bludgeon.

Glimpsing the scene through Heliotrope’s external cameras, Orlandine saw how a similar meniscus now shimmered between the three horns of the cargo runcible positioned at the nose of her ship.

‘Go to expansion immediately,’ Orlandine replied.

While she watched, the three horns disconnected from their seatings and, impelled out by hard-field projectors, their positions relative to each other accurately maintained by laser measurement, they began stretching that meniscus, that Skaidon warp — that skin over reality. They also turned over on their way out, folding that same skin over themselves so that effectively the gate was without any material edges facing forward. This was not necessary right now, but would certainly be necessary for the cargo runcible’s ultimate purpose. Bludgeon seemed to be doing fine, so she returned her full attention to the war runcible and sent instructions to the numerous thrusters peppered over its surface. They ignited at once and the massive structure began to turn.

‘A very critical test,’ Knobbler observed.

‘Stay on those weapons,’ Orlandine replied. ‘This might not work.’

She only momentarily considered instructing the five segments to detach so as to widen the war runcible’s gate, but it was already wide enough. Anyway, it wasn’t hard-fields that would impel them apart but very accurate steering jets. She could see that, with how this device had originally been constructed, the controlling AI would have experienced all sorts of difficulties operating it, especially while coming under attack. Each section of the runcible needed to be very accurately positioned, since the room for error in all the calculations was minute, yet firing the weapons positioned on each section might well knock them out of alignment faster than could be corrected for. With everything now cohered by the Jain mycelium, she could supposedly calculate and factor in the inertial effects of the firing of each weapon full seconds before they even fired. However, right now it would be stupid to risk the alterations she had made failing.

There were other factors also making this easier for her. It wasn’t as if she intended to transfer anything through the runcible that needed to survive that process or pass through at anything less than the speed of a meteor. For normal runcibles, calculations needed to be made to correct for relative speeds by inputting the precise energies at the departure runcible, and bleeding off into the buffer the correct amount at the arrival runcible. Simplified, these calculations involved the input of energy required to push the traveller through the Skaidon warp, plus the energy required to accelerate or decelerate him from his initial relative speed, so he came out of the gate at the other end at zero speed. But that was an extreme simplification.

Another factor in the complex calculations was the C-energy, this being the input energy of the transmission and also that drawn into the runcible buffers at the destination runcible. The events on a world called Samarkand had luridly demonstrated what happened when that energy was not removed by the receiving runcible. There the runcible buffers had been sabotaged, so that one traveller who arrived on that world by runcible came through at a fraction under the speed of light. His arrival had caused massive devastation and loss of life. Ironic, therefore, that he himself had been a runcible technician.

‘I am ready,’ said Bludgeon.

Orlandine studied the situation out in space. The little ship was now running towards them. While it might be either a friend or an enemy, there was no doubt at all about the status of the two pursuing vessels. She aimed a signal laser at the little ship.

‘If you want to survive, I suggest you get out of my targeting frame,’ she sent.

The reply was, ‘Mother of fuck,’ and the ship went into a high-gravity turn that Orlandine realized no human could have survived — which meant there were no humans aboard.

‘Knobbler,’ she said, ‘I’m going to assume that little guy is the one we are here to meet, but damn well keep a rail-gun on him till we find out for sure.’

‘Will do,’ Knobbler replied.

They were ready now — she didn’t want to give those worm-ships time to separate.

‘Proceed,’ Orlandine instructed.

She observed Heliotrope drive the cargo-runcible meniscus down, like a catch-net, onto the tumbling asteroid, swallowing it whole. Since the war runcible was linked only to the cargo runcible, she did not need to check what was now coming through, just make the necessary calculations and apply the required energies to accept that item in the war runcible’s U-space spoon, and then bring it through. And she did not bleed off the C-energy.

The million-ton rock came out through the war runcible’s Skaidon warp. In U-space the asteroid’s speed relative to realspace had been far above the speed of light. As it returned to the domain of Einsteinian physics realspace strictly applied its speed restrictions and the asteroid departed the war runcible at just a fraction below the speed of light. A material object travelling at such velocity was often described as photonic matter. You cannot see light unless its photons enter your eyes, so it should not have been possible to see the path of this object, yet it left a luminous trail like the disperse beam from a particle weapon, for there was a sufficient scattering of atoms throughout this region for it to hit and smash a few of them.