Keech paid his hotel bill and, with his hover trunk in tow, he left the Dome and made his way into the Hooper town. As he walked, he saw Erlin walking ahead of him, also with her luggage in tow and Janer’s stacked on top of it. Rather than catch up with her he turned down a side road and took a track leading out of the town into the dingle. Either side of the track, peartrunk trees quivered to the movement of small leeches in their branches, and frogmoles chirruped and burped from little pools in the centres of ground-growing leaves as big as bedspreads. A stand of putrephallus plants broadcast their presence before they came in sight, and Keech turned off the anosmic receptor in his nose. Attracted to the bright red tips of the stinking plants, a couple of baggy lung birds flapped about and honked noisily. They looked to Keech as if they were about to fly apart, like something ill-made by an apprentice creator. They were sparsely covered in long oily feathers between which showed purplish septic-looking flesh. If these birds had the appearance of anything recognizable, it was of half-plucked crows that had been dead for a week or more. He moved on, down the slope of the island via a path of crushed quartz spread over black packed earth, and out beyond the edge of the dingle and on to a strand of green sand scattered with drifts of multicoloured pebbles. There he ordered his trunk to settle and open, and he began to remove its contents.

Keech’s muscles did not work, in fact none of him worked, except for half of his brain and one eye. Completely stripped of his flesh, the AI Keech would still exist — a skeleton with motors at his joints and other pieces of hardware affixed to his bones and, of course, the aug. The items of Keech’s survival therefore consisted of his cleansing unit and two spare power cells for the cyber mechanisms that kept him moving. Along with these items, he now removed a black attaché case, a pack of clothing, and a small remote control. These had filled only a small portion of the trunk. Keech closed the lid, stepped back, pointed the remote and pressed a button.

The trunk rose half a metre from the ground and the lid split in two along its length. These two halves, along with the adjoining sides, folded down into cranked wings. The front then folded itself down at forty-five degrees and from its top extruded a curved screen. From under the seat, now exposed in the centre of the trunk, a steering column and control console whined forwards and up into position below the screen. Keech stepped in to detach cylindrical thruster motors from each side of the seat — revealing the AG motor underneath — and to reattach them at the ends of the wings. The back of the trunk tilted out to make a luggage compartment and Keech put his belongings in this before mounting the hover scooter thus created. He would have smiled had he been able to. He pressed a touch-plate on the console and spoke.

‘This is monitor Sable Keech registering AG transport on Out-Polity planet Spatterjay,’ he said.

From the console a mild voice replied, ‘According to my records, monitor Keech, you are dead.’

Keech paused for a moment — that was a very quick interception by the Warden.

‘That is correct,’ he said.

‘Oh, I’m glad we’ve cleared that one up,’ said the AI Warden on the distant moon of Spatterjay. ‘But perhaps you can provide some further explanation?’

‘My monitor status remains unchanged I take it?’

‘It does.’

‘Then I am not required to give an explanation.’

‘No, you are not.’

‘I’m a reification,’ said Keech. ‘I would have thought you’d already found all that out, if not when I first came through the runcible gate, then at least when I crossed the Line to come out here.’

‘Yes, I see that now. I don’t monitor all inward runcible traffic unless it comes with an attached record. The Dome gate was being run by one of my subminds at the time, and it did not see fit to inform me of your arrival. I must have words with it.’

Keech let ride the fact that he thought it unlikely that he had not come through with an attached record.

‘I am clear to use AG transport, I take it?’ he asked.

‘You are, monitor Keech.’

‘Thank you,’ said Keech.

After running a diagnostic on the console, he thrust the column forward and, blasting up a cloud of sand, shot out over the sea.

With something of smugness in its attitude, the Warden observed the planet through a thousand pairs of artificial eyes. After a brief scan, it refined this fragment of its attention to just one pair of eyes and the complex little mind that operated them. On an atoll on the opposite side of the planet from the main human settlements, and where no human had set foot, waves lapped gently at a beach of jade and rose-quartz pebbles. Below the pellucid waters off this beach, the stony bottom was alive with movement. Swarms of infant hammer whelks shifted in a slow and intricate dance, their shells glinting like coiled pearls, and leeches oozed between them searching for softer prey. A disturbance where the bottom dropped into emerald depths had the whelks clamping themselves safely to the stony bottom and the leeches turning as one to investigate.

Out of boiling foam rose the baroque shape of a seahorse the length of a man’s forearm, leeches hitting its iron-coloured skin and falling away. It rose from the sea and, seemingly balanced upon the surface with a coil of its tail, it slowly revolved and took in its surroundings with topaz eyes. Only someone with a very sophisticated underspace detector could have heard the communication that followed, and even then it would have taken a mind superior to that of the Warden to decode it.

‘SM Thirteen, you were instructed to transmit yourself to Dome Gate One for your assigned watch, and I see now that this did not happen,’ said the Warden.

‘Sniper took that watch. He had some business to conduct through the local server. And I have my so very important studies to complete,’ replied the Warden’s thirteenth submind, from its odd drone body.

‘Why then have I received no report from Sniper?’

In the pause that followed, the Warden considered then rejected the idea of subsuming Thirteen, of reintegrating the little mind with itself in order to get at the truth. But the Warden had found from long experience that an amount of individualism in its subminds allowed them to originate insights it never experienced by itself.

‘Nothing of significance to report?’ suggested SM13.

The Warden sensed agitation in the little mind and allowed it to stew for a few microseconds.

‘The arrival of a dead monitor pursuing a seven-century vendetta I do consider to be worthy of note,’ it said.

‘Well that’s not my fault,’ said the seahorse drone. ‘Take it up with Sniper. It wasn’t my decision to employ an obsolete war drone, even if it was once a hero.’

The Warden did not answer this. It withdrew and did a brief search in the local server. That SM13 and the war drone Sniper both had accounts with the Norvabank evinced in it some surprise, though only some. The third account it found there, by tracking past transfers, gave it more than some surprise. It would have to watch this situation very closely; it might lead to questions about the rights of humans to exist on Spatterjay.

Janer woke with a sick feeling in his stomach and the apparent evidence that a small animal had expired messily in his mouth, probably squashed by the farrier who was making horseshoes in his head. He shoved the tangled blanket off, sat on the edge of his bunk, and tried to figure out where he was. The wooden room he lay in was moving, and loud snores came from the Hooper lying in the bunk opposite. Janer stood, swayed for a moment, and then abruptly sat down. His detox pills — one of his most important survival items — were in his backpack, but where the hell was that? His nausea abruptly increased its hold on him and he quickly stood and staggered to the door. Immediately outside the door there was a short corridor terminating at a ladder. He moved towards this and, for no immediately apparent reason, staggered into one wall, then back across the wooden flooring straight into a door. He shook his head. What the hell was that sound? From all around him came racketing and clacking sounds, creaks and groans. Upon reaching the ladder, he unsteadily climbed up it towards greenish light, then stumbled out of the deck hatch to a wooden rail, and retched into the sea below. As he did this he realized he had done so before, and remembered where he was: on board the ship.