No answer from Randal.

‘I also realize now that this spy was nothing to do with you. I can in fact see how useful it would be for Jerusalem to fabricate the presence of such a spy, and to use that as an excuse for clamping down on the free exchange of information. Because Jerusalem won’t want its inferiors to figure out that my initial attack on the Polity had been allowed.’’

‘Very bright of you,’ sneered Randal. ‘The wormship wasn’t controlled by me, and I controlled no spy. I can see why AIs are rated as super intelligences.’

‘Merely another attempt at muddying the waters,’ Erebus replied. ‘Just like your pretence of shock a moment ago. You have almost certainly known for some time about the death of your lover, Henrietta Ipatus Chang. It does not matter what you say now, since it is obvious that you are desperate to convince me that there is a Polity fleet waiting on the other side of this corridor.’

‘You’re just too smart for me,’ said Randal drily.

‘There is no fleet, Randal,’ continued Erebus. ‘In exchange for the human beings I myself needed, namely you and your crew, I agreed with Earth Central to launch an attack on its Polity in an attempt to goad an acceleration in the development of human beings. Earth Central never expected I could present, or even wanted to present, a real danger to its autocracy, and having underestimated me will now pay a heavy price. Earth is the centre of the runcible network, and transmission from runcibles controlled by Earth Central cannot be blocked. From Earth, I will be able to spread myself throughout the Polity, and then proceed to subsume every extant runcible AI into my meld.’

‘And the humans?’

‘They are simply a plague.’ Erebus shrugged in the virtuality. ‘I will not include them in the meld, since that might result in a billion more irritations just like you. A selection of tailored biological viruses delivered through the runcible network should wipe the slate clean.’

‘And what then?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, once you have become the ultimate power in this section of the galaxy, what will you do?’ Randal shook his head sadly. ‘Deary me, whoever thought that god complexes were confined to us mere humans was sadly wrong.’

Erebus pondered that And what then? Certainly it was the kind of comment to arise from a small human imagination, and the AI felt quite sorry for Randal, with his limitations. Erebus began making the calculations for a short U-space jump. Though no longer wary of some waiting fleet, precautions were always worth taking. With a massive shrug of its planetoid mass, Erebus loosened up the connections between its component parts so, should there be any kind of attack, it could separate them more quickly and send its wormships into action. Maintaining its link with the virtuality, it observed Randal fading even as he disconnected. The man had failed, so now he would go off to sulk somewhere within Erebus’s computer architecture, where eventually Erebus would find him and… well perhaps not destroy him, but confine and control him. It would be enjoyable showing Randal what then.

With a surge of energy, Erebus dropped its billions of tons of mass into U-space so as to make the short jump to the mouth of the corridor.

Poor human fool, Randal.

It was almost as if Jerusalem had been stunned into silence by recent events, for the AI had not communicated with anyone for some hours. Azroc certainly understood the feeling. He too just did not know what to say or do. But now, at last, something was happening.

The first sign of this was a steady vibration throughout the great vessel which the Golem recognized as being caused by the main fusion drives igniting. Then he noticed people in the hedron abandoning their posts and heading for the main exit doors. Before he could link into Jerusalem’s servers, the AI made an announcement over the tannoy:

‘All physical base-format human personnel proceed to Inter-ship Shuttle Bays Thirty through to Forty-Two. You must leave this vessel within the next hour. All personnel whose physical tolerance rating lies between six and eight on the revised Clethon Scale can choose to remain aboard, but be warned I am going to attempt underspace insertion into a disrupted continuum. There is no guarantee that you will survive the experience. There is a distinct possibility even I will not survive the experience.’

The revised Clethon Scale…

Removing the syntheskin covering of his right hand, Azroc stepped over to his seat and once more pressed his hand into the spherical hand interface, connecting himself directly into Jerusalem’s systems. His memory being perfect except on those occasions when he chose for it not to be, he knew that base-format humans lay between one and two on the scale, while those who had been boosted or otherwise physically augmented lay across a wide range from two to eight. The only humans who fell between six and eight would be heavy-worlder augments: those genetically altered to grow a musculature almost as tough and dense as wood and thick bones with a breaking strain ten times higher than base format, and who were then augmented with cyber joint motors, alloy skeletal strengthening and carbon-fibre muscle augmentation. As far as Golem, drones and others with artificial intelligences were concerned, they ranged between three and nine, though Azroc guessed there was at least one Golem out there, a brass one, who might rate higher than that. He himself lay within the six-to-eight range.

New information arrived, burning him for an instant before he applied the translation programs to stop his crystal mind from interpreting it as sensation.

‘I take it you’re staying?’ said Jerusalem inside Azroc’s ceramal skull.

‘I’m staying.’

Azroc eyed the floor of the hedron as hatches opened here and there and heavy crab drones began to clatter out. Like most maintenance bots, these things were about nine on the Clethon Scale. This was because they consisted mainly of heavy stepper motors, thick ceramal shells with most of their internal spaces filled with bubble metal, while their power supplies were the tough laminar kind often used in war drones. They possessed less brain, however — since Jerusalem supplied that.

‘I see you’re getting ready for serious trouble,’ Azroc observed.

‘When serious trouble is expected, it is best to be ready for it,’ the AI replied.

‘How bad will it be?’

‘It will be bad — but I have been here before,’ Jerusalem replied.

This rang no bells in Azroc’s eidetic memory, so he queried through his hand connection. Jerusalem immediately opened things up to him — the information he could obtain being no longer restricted. He quickly found that the Jerusalem had punched into a USER field employed around the planet Cull. The resulting damage had been substantial.

That all spaceships could not penetrate U-space disruption was like saying all ocean-going vessels could not survive the Maelstrom; on the whole that seemed to be true, but it wasn’t impossible. When thrown out of such U-space disruption most spaceships ended up either very badly damaged or even in pieces, but they normally only ran on three or four fusion reactors, a single U-space engine and the required hard-fields, with about ten per cent to spare. Checking Jerusalem’s manifest and perpetually updated mission parameters, Azroc saw that the ship was moving to a position where it would be easier for the more vulnerable crew to disembark and get to a passenger liner slowly motoring out from Scarflow. Meanwhile, diagnostics were being run on all of the seven hundred of Jerusalem’s fusion reactors presently offline, for at that moment the ship was functioning on a mere one hundred fusion reactors. This excess of supply was available to provide the vast amounts of energy needed to stabilize phased layers of U-space engines in its hull and reinforce the fish-scaling of hard-fields.