‘Can you deal with it yourself?’ Cutter enquired.

‘Mebbe,’ came the other drone’s reply.

During the war it was always Bludgeon who dealt with the informational stuff while Cutter got physical. Bludgeon’s job had been to open an undetectable way into Prador vessels or stations, and then Cutter’s chore was to go in first, usually to scatter the interior with pieces of the crablike aliens and paint the walls with their foul green blood.

‘You’ll not need to use any of her stuff?’ Cutter suggested.

‘I could do it meself,’ said Bludgeon, ‘but you would need to enter the satellite to make a few physical alterations.’

‘Just like the old days then.’

‘Well, at least there’s nothing alive inside that satellite…’

The other war drones, and Orlandine herself, would have been astounded to hear Bludgeon string together more than three words. But being able to talk like this only to Cutter was Bludgeon’s particular wrinkle, his particular bit of faulty programming or maybe damage to his crystal or the mind it contained. All of the war drones on the war runcible had some similar fault — something that excluded them from normal Polity society or simply made them not want to be included. They would argue vehemently about these being faults.

‘I’ll head over there now, shall I?’ said Cutter.

Cutter’s own particular fault was his utter refusal to abandon or even blunt the edges of a body made for turning the insides of Prador vessels into abattoirs. He could not actually move about the Polity as a normal citizen, since the slightest mishap, his own or that of some other, could easily result in multiple decapitations and amputations. Cutter’s edges were of a form of heat-treated chainglass that remained constantly honed down to one chain-molecule thickness. He could slice up steel with the same ease as a chef dicing an onion.

‘No,’ said Bludgeon.

‘What do you mean “No”?’

‘I’ve learnt the coding protocols and have the perfect tool for dealing with that satellite from here.’

‘You mean one of her tools.’

‘You have to lose your fear of the technology Orlandine provided, Cutter.’

‘I ain’t frightened of it. I just don’t like depending on it, is all.’

‘But we must depend on it. Nearly everything in this ship depends on it to some extent, and without it we won’t be able to carry out our mission.’

Cutter grumbled and shaved away slivers of the wall, then grudgingly turned his attention to what Bludgeon was doing. The bedbug-like drone had opened up a cache of programs provided by Orlandine, selected one, a worm, and sent it in discrete parcels to the satellite. The worm must have reassembled itself within a matter of seconds, for that’s all the time it took for the satellite to fall under Bludgeon’s control. It seemed that simple computers were easy to subvert, and computers in places like this, where security had never been an issue, were easier still. Seemed to take all the fun out of it, though.

Now, as Bludgeon ignited Heliotrope’s fusion drive to move them closer, Cutter turned his regard upon Anulus. This black hole, of approximately six stellar masses, was surrounded by a disc of rock and gas it was steadily drawing into itself. Spindlewards of this disc, the output of energy dwarfed the output of suns. Apparently Orlandine had known much about this particular curiosity because it had once been suggested as a site for a massive construction project proposed before the Cassius Dyson sphere — some kind of energy tap to utilize that vast spindleward energy output.

The light here was glaringly bright, one glimpse with a human eye would burn out that eye in a moment. Already, even at this distance, Heliotrope’s hull was heating rapidly and thermal generators distributed throughout it were converting this to electricity and storing it in numerous laminar batteries, capacitors and in the high-density storage facility of the cargo runcible’s buffers. All this was mainly being done with Jain tech, and though Cutter didn’t like it, he was prepared to admit it was damned efficient.

‘I suggest we wait here,’ said Bludgeon.

Cutter gazed upon the virtual model of the debris disc his companion had created. The position indicated was just in from the edge of the disc where the asteroidal chunks were large enough and close enough together to shield them from the worse of the radiation.

‘It will put you in the shade,’ said Orlandine.

Cutter had almost forgotten that she remained in constant communication with them, so long had it now been since she last spoke. He considered trying to explain his attitude then decided not to bother. If she didn’t like it, tough.

She continued, ‘I estimate that I will be in position some twenty hours from now, so you’ll need to head for your entry point into the fountain in about twelve hours.’

Cutter gazed through Heliotrope’s sensors and thought that ‘fountain’ was much too gentle a word for that thing out there. The debris ring heated as it fell towards the spinning black hole, turning at first molten, then into an incandescent gas and finally to plasma at the event horizon. The radiation and ionization from this process was prevented by the disc itself from spewing out sideways, but there was a larger process involved in the production of these spindlewards polar fountains. The proportion of iron in the debris here was over forty per cent. This, combined with the spin of the black hole, created a magnetic bottle effect which squeezed escaping radiation into narrow channels spearing up and down from the black hole’s poles. The two fountains were fifteen miles wide and consisted of ionized matter — mostly iron — and electromagnetic radiation right across the emitted spectrum. Anulus was like a natural particle-beam weapon — only of the kind you might need in order to take out planets.

The planetary system Erebus occupied with its main forces had changed visibly. Great curtains of rod-forms hung down from space into the upper atmosphere of the gas giant, where they still kept filtering out vital materials even as they were starting to withdraw from that world and separate. Three of the gas giant’s four moons were utterly covered with Jain substructure and had shrunk visibly since Erebus’s arrival here. The last of the rod-forms to have grown deep down within those moons, like animals putting on fat for the winter, were launching to bring vital materials to the orbiting wormships. The moons looked like apples destroyed by maggots.

Nearer the sun, massive mirrors made of sodium film were directing light sufficient to power all this industry, and already this new input was causing visible storms across the face of the gas giant. This was all to plan, since these storms would stir up some final vital elements for the last of the rod-forms to harvest before returning to their mother ships, if they had them. The ships shaped like lenses Erebus had decided to dispense with since they weren’t powerful enough to stand against most ECS warcraft and, not possessing the modular construction of the wormships, tended to be a total loss once they were hit. They had become outmoded, so it was time to move on, and the rod-forms quickly cannibalized them.

While the first fleets of wormships continued their attack on the Polity border, Erebus had watched with some satisfaction as their number here, initially eighteen thousand, grew steadily larger. The ships first increased in size and mass with the intake of materials, then began dividing like bacteria — there was something to be said for the productive methods of life. Now there were over nineteen thousand wormships in orbit around the gas giant and, when the time came to head out, Erebus hoped to be back up to strength with over twenty thousand of the major vessels. But each of the new ships needed a controlling intelligence with at least some degree of independence.