‘I take it you two have met?’ she said.

Then there was this Golem. She knew the story of the prototype that was stolen from Cybercorp, even though the theft had taken place before she was born. She knew about the tapestry of legend that had grown up about this same killing machine. But the reality of it was even more worrying. Mr Crane was heavily armoured, and what lay inside him was mostly impenetrable to scan, but what she could see hinted that he had been severely remodelled and contained some kind of technology definitely not developed in the Polity. Then there was the other stuff she had received on informational levels. His communications were mostly machine code and almost incoherent in their brevity, yet behind that she got the sense that she was communicating with something as complex and powerful as a major AI, like Jerusalem, Geronamid or even Earth Central itself.

‘Yes, we’ve met,’ said Cormac, still gazing at the Golem. ‘Mr Crane was trying to kill me at the time.’

‘Then perhaps you know that Dragon helped repair his mind.’ Orlandine smiled at him. ‘He’s all better now.’

Cormac turned and focused on her, and something about his poise worried her. She knew she could move very fast, but wondered if she might be quite fast enough if he tried anything. Then she dismissed the idea: nothing could be that fast, here.

‘You broke my link to the CTD,’ he observed.

‘You won’t be needing it.’

He carefully reached into his pocket and took out the dart, and Orlandine felt her throat constrict. Earlier he had taken it out of his pocket and asked her about her brothers, and she had then instantly made the connection.

‘When my mother Ariadne and I were on Europa she missed Ermoon and Aladine a great deal. She saw two of the dart guns for sale in a shop — they use them there in the underground sea — and immediately bought them for my brothers.’

‘She then sent the guns to them on Klurhammon,’ Cormac suggested.

‘Yes.’

‘Where Erebus killed both of them?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I did not use the Jain node he gave me for the purpose intended — I fled with it both from him and from the Polity AIs.’

‘To cover your escape you murdered someone — a haiman called Shoala, I believe.’

‘I’m not proud of that.’

‘Continue,’ said Cormac, the tone telling her that she had been judged for that act and found wanting.

‘As I took the node apart I realized I was supposed to use it with less caution than I did use it. I was supposed to become a weapon that destroyed a large portion of the Polity.’ Orlandine paused, appalled at how much this was hurting her. ‘I fled and I continued to learn. I learned how to find Jain nodes and tracked the course of a node aboard one ECS attack ship of a fleet following a legate out of the Polity.’

‘I was aboard one of those ships.’

‘I see… I followed and I got trapped by the same USER disruption that trapped your fleet. And, for the record, I destroyed that USER thus letting what was left of your fleet escape.’

‘How noble of you.’

Orlandine felt a surge of anger, then quickly repressed it. ‘I did not do what Erebus wanted me to do, and Erebus saw me destroy its USER. Erebus took revenge on me by killing my two brothers. I was sent a recording of their… deaths.’

‘So that’s the why,’ said the agent. ‘Now tell me the how.’

‘With the resources I now control it was not difficult to seize this war runcible.’

‘But how did you manage to put yourself here in Erebus’s path? To have done so surely means you knew something of Erebus’s plans.’

Orlandine decided to lie to him rather than get involved in explaining the complicated saga of Fiddler Randal. ‘When I returned to the Polity, I encountered one of Erebus’s wormships. I extracted information from it before destroying it.’

‘I see.’

But he had. She could tell he had seen right through her and knew that last utterance to be a lie. It didn’t matter, as she just needed him to believe that she was genuinely here to destroy Erebus. It then occurred to her to wonder why she did so much need him to believe. Certainly he, like that ugly little drone squatting behind him, was dangerous, but she felt confident she could wipe him out in a second. Then she understood what this was all about, what she was feeling here. She wanted absolution.

‘And now him?’ he said, raising a hand and pointing at Mr Crane.

‘A source of further information,’ she replied. ‘Ever since Erebus destroyed the hybrids on Cull, who were considered by Mr Crane to be in his charge, he has been Erebus’s enemy. He has supplied me with the ‘ware and recognition codes that now conceal this war runcible.’

Cormac nodded slowly, one hand now hovering over his other wrist. Orlandine had a laser pointed straight at his head from the ceiling. He would die if he threw that nasty little device on his wrist — just as the nasty little device would die too.

‘I must return to my interface sphere now,’ she said. ‘Erebus is coming and I have to be ready. So what are you going to do, Agent Ian Cormac?’

He took his hand away from his wrist. ‘I must wait and see what the outcome is here.’

Orlandine turned away from him and stepped back into her sphere, sweat slick on her back under her carapace. Her many eyes watched him from the ceiling, but he made no move. She guessed he would just wait for that outcome then. If she and he survived it, he would probably try to kill her. ECS agents never forgave murderers.

Ensconced within her interface sphere Orlandine quickly and fully reconnected herself to the war runcible and began viewing scan-data being flagged for her attention. She ran a deep analysis of a massive disruption in U-space, and this confirmed the initial analysis she had made while speaking to Cormac: something big was on its way towards the corridor through to Earth.

She called up realtime sensor data through her U-space link to Heliotrope and saw that same ship currently bearing down at a sharp angle on the polar fountain from the Anulus black hole. Even heavily filtered, the view ahead of Heliotrope was a painfully bright storm of energy and ionized matter. The ship was heating up and Cutter was routing the heat through superconductors into thermal generators, then firing the excess energy off into space by means of the vessel’s supply of evaporant. She was about to suggest that starting up the cargo gate would give the vessel some shielding, when Bludgeon turned it on anyway. Mounted on the jaws of the ship’s front grab, the runcible’s triangular gate sprang into being. It could not be seen that it was as reflective as a mirror, for the fountain’s fire turned it into a charcoal silhouette. The energy hitting the other side and passing through the Skaidon warp now accumulated in the U-space spoon, since as yet it had been given no destination.

‘Erebus approaches,’ she told the two drones aboard Heliotrope.

It was Cutter who replied, since Bludgeon was deep in the mathematical realm of runcible mechanics. ‘We’ll be in position within minutes. Bludgeon calculates that, once in, we’ll be driven along the course of the fountain, even with the gate open, since there’ll be pressure against the Skaidon warp.’ Cutter paused contemplatively. ‘But why am I telling you all this? You already know every detail of what is happening here.’