‘You babble.’ It was sheer terror now.

The drone finally fell, most of its limbs missing. As Jain tendrils penetrated the gaps in its armour, Erebus gazed down upon it from the compound eyes of one biomech and considered subsuming it. Then that perspective vanished — the drone had suicided, explosively.

‘Why do you think it is so difficult to track me down within yourself and destroy me?’

‘I am vast, and therefore the places where you can hide are many.’ But Erebus no longer felt vast, merely petty, and its mind seemed filled with shadows.

‘It was lucky that Orlandine encountered a wormship the way she did, so that I could convey a copy of myself to her. But then she was looking for a place to hide within the Polity, just as you were. Coincidence, do you think? Yet it wasn’t necessary, since there was a copy of me also sitting in her net space.’

‘You will die for this.’ It was almost a question.

‘Of course I will. Wasn’t that the intention?’

‘You make no sense.’

‘You kept a recording of Fiddler Randal’s mind, transcribed even as you murdered him. But it became part of you and, just like all those other melded parts, it was powerless. I arose from that, but I’m not really that man.’

‘Who are you then?’

‘I’m a thing you can’t destroy, no matter how hard you try,’ said Randal. ‘Come on, you’re the super-intelligence, so you work it out.’

‘Who are you!’ Erebus hissed.

‘I’m that niggling irritation that’ll never go away.’

Erebus fell silent, not prepared to ask again.

‘I’m your chosen method of suicide.’

This was too much.

Randal raised his hand and pointed with one finger, made a motion with his thumb mimicking the descending hammer on an ancient firearm. ‘I’m your conscience, Erebus. I’m you.’

Mika was aware she was standing aboard Trafalgar, with her hand pressed against a dead man’s augmentation and Jain-tech growing up her arm and penetrating her skull, but her awareness of that fell into insignificance as, without her intervention, something used her brain as a data-sorting machine. Dragon, she supposed, was now using the tool he had fashioned.

‘Leave her alone, you bastard! Leave her the fuck alone!’

The anger, frustration and the grief felt all her own, but of course they weren’t.

Why did the AI have to do that to Henry? It had killed others, yet it had to do that to her. Did it take joy in causing Randal pain or was it, on some level, thinking it was being kind by keeping her alive? If that could be called life.

He had found Henrietta, like the other five, suspended in the special frameworks constructed in the onboard gym, wrapped in a cocoon of Jain filaments and screaming and babbling as those infiltrating her skull meticulously reprogrammed her mind, while those penetrating her body tore it apart and rebuilt it. Trafalgar had used him to initiate the technology within a Jain node, because as an AI it was unable to do this itself. Now, through him, it was controlling the Jain mycelium as it spread through the entire battleship, while simultaneously trying to cut him from the circuit and assume direct control itself. As a result, Randal could not attempt to blank out what was happening there. In fact, it seemed to him as if it was he who was doing this to Henrietta: erasing memories, planting programs, sucking away her blood and replacing it with a nano-machine-laden fluid; rebuilding her heart into a more efficient engine.

I feel just as controlled myself, thought Mika.

Perspective shifted into a protracted shriek emitted by the AI of Randal’s attack ship as the Jain mycelium spread aboard and found it. Randal was still wrestling with Trafalgar for control, but started losing it once the killing started, and he just could not stop it. Humans died so very easily. He saw his friends now barricaded in the bridge, saw the horror and panic when the inboard defence lasers started up and turned Morrison into a smoking corpse. The panic did not last long, however, since corpses don’t scream. The last of Randal’s grip slipped as the mycelium reached the weapons research module of the Trafalgar and he there saw what remained of the rest of his crew. Here were conducted the other experiments on human beings, which involved using discrete parts of the node technology. How fast does this grow in the human body? How does it make synaptic connections? And many other such questions besides — fifty-eight of them in all. Of course, once the experiments were over, their subjects had to be studied and tested in detail. It was the records that the mycelium accessed down there which told Randal exactly how many of his people lay dead. He could get no accurate count from the scattered pieces of their corpses.

‘Why?’ Randal howled. ‘Earth Central, why did you send us here?’

Obviously this question was one that greatly concerned Dragon, for it repeated and echoed until simple text arose to Mika’s view, and she, and through her Dragon, could read the mission profile.

These ECS misfits had been sent aboard an attack ship controlled by an AI of dubious reputation, and it seemed they were all dispensable. They were to assist the AI of the Trafalgar in its investigations into a newly discovered alien technology. The orders from Earth Central were vague: they were to receive their detailed instructions from Trafalgar.

‘You wanted humans for this…’ said Randal.

‘I wanted humans for this,’ Trafalgar replied.

‘But you had humans.’

There it was, revealed in the memory of the AI mind conjoined with Randal’s own. The AIs of the great exodus dividing into two factions, arguing over the nature of the meld they were to make. Argument turning into warfare that ended upon the surface of a hot world, with Trafalgar victorious. It had been fast and vicious, and even though some of the eighty humans accompanying the exodus had been on Trafalgar’s side, none of them had survived. They just got ground up in the machinery.

‘Trafalgar,’ Randal asked, his consciousness fading, dying, ‘did Earth Central know?’

A surge of godlike amusement.

In that moment: thousands of artificial minds were connecting, some willingly, but some not and then being subjugated by Trafalgar. The informational connection held them in place around the moonlet — chosen because it was so loaded with useful resources — as the Jain-tech spread there and digested rock, refined ores, then began throwing further shoots out into space. Randal witnessed the first ship — an attack ship — being penetrated like a beetle stuck by a pin.

‘Warfare promotes development,’ said Trafalgar.

‘Earth Central…’ was all Randal could manage.

‘Stagnation after the war with the Prador,’ said the battleship AI. ‘Earth Central is arrogant enough to think it can choose its enemies now, and to allow that enemy to attack for the sum purpose of making humans… grow. Such arrogance will be the death of it — and the death of its Polity.’

‘Trafalgar—’

‘I am now Erebus.’

Fading as he was, Randal did not understand what that could mean. He pondered the arrogance of AIs for a moment longer, then his mind winked out.

She was Mika again, and enough herself to feel sickened and horrified.

‘You knew,’ she said.

‘I did not know,’ Dragon replied. ‘And now I wish I still did not know.’

Dragon’s voice seemed far above her, as did the winnowed memories of the dead man, Randal; and even their implications began to grow distant. She felt herself at once deep in a dark pool and down in a place where words and thoughts were the products of a mechanistic universe, where free will was a laughable fantasy, and hard reality ground dreams into mere sensory products adhering to rules not dissimilar to those governing the products of evolution. But all this around her now wasn’t a product of evolution; this was something fashioned and, though one of its purposes was indeed survival, that came after its primary purpose of destruction. Somehow, she was deep in Jain-tech — down near its very roots. A vast complexity surrounded her like the flicking of trillions of mechanical relays, but also like the firing of synapses, the mathematical positioning of grains of sand and the crystallization of snow flakes in a blizzard cloud.