In both cases their sexual organs were standard format, and came together in the usual manner. But this was how haimans began sexual relationships. Cyber-linked orgasms and sensory amplification came later, when they trusted each other more, for that was personal.

Orlandine now skipped the virtual pornography, for she could already feel an anticipatory wetness around her suction catheter. And because she decided not to view this start of her relationship with Shoala, she realized she had already made her decision about that as well.

‘That’s a Prador spider thrall,’ said Shoala, after the sex together, pointing into the glass-fronted case. ‘What are the stones, though?’

Hidden in plain sight, thought Orlandine, as she sat up and swung her legs off the rumpled bed. She stood and walked over beside him, running her finger down the hard edges of the plugs in his spine.

She pointed at a wine-red sphere. ‘Star ruby. It’s natural—from Venus.’

‘The metallic ones?’

‘Ferro-axinite, but with weak monopole characteristics.’

‘And that?’

Orlandine peered into the case at the egg-shaped object he indicated. She decided this time to tell a half-truth—maybe later she would reveal all to him. ‘Something quite possibly Jain. There are what look like nanotech structures on the surface. You notice the cubic patterns? One day I’ll get round to investigating further.’

He turned to her with a raised eyebrow. ‘Is it listed?’

‘It is—and I’ve two years in which to commence study. If I haven’t got around to it by then, it must be passed on to Jerusalem—the AI whose purpose it is to investigate such things.’

One lie turning into a larger lie.

‘And the display case is secure?’

‘Yes, but this is low risk level. It was previously scanned and threat-assessed.’

And yet another lie.

Orlandine allowed this memory to fade, and then abruptly deleted it. Now the only copy of it lay in the organic part of her brain. After a pause she accessed her private files and studied the lists of other things concealed there. Many of them were products of her personal study of the Jain node, yet she had so far only uncovered two per cent of its secrets, and most of those related only to the physical nano technology on its surface. What she now wanted concerned the subversive programming aspects of that technology. The contents of one file would be enough, since the receiver of that file trusted her implicitly. Checking the sphere map she saw he had yet to shed his carapace and depart his interface sphere.

‘Shoala, I’m sending something over for you to take a look at.’ She copied the file into a message titled ‘Sexual Electronics Part VII’—it was their private joke.

She knew he received and opened it the moment the channels to his sphere began opening to her. Through a visual link she saw him lying back, his eyes closed. He began shivering. How far was she prepared to go? The viral attack isolated his sphere, but in a way that would not be picked up by the others. Now viral monads formed chains, deleting stored information, wrecking memories, trashing files and overwriting them time and again, so nothing could be recovered.

He opened his eyes. ‘Orlandine?’

Her throat tight, she squeezed tears from closed eyes. This was so wrong: virtual murder. A haiman encompassed more than the organic brain. It was that, true, but so much more running in crystal-etched atom processors.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.

‘Why are you doing this?’

‘I… I cannot give this up. It’s too much… It’s what we all seek.’

Of course, the memories of that Jain node, and the lies she told about it, were from human time. It was not something wholly stored in crystal. It also rested between his ears.

He was mostly gone now, just the human part left. Orlandine blocked the signals he was desperately sending to detach himself from his carapace, and she herself began to isolate and control its systems. Into the positional map for its structural supports—the insectile legs of the louse-like carapace—she introduced a half-inch error, and cancelled the pressure-sensitive safeties. Now she stood on the brink and, stepping over it, there would be no return. What she had done thus far would be denned only as an assault, though a serious one for which, if caught, she would certainly lose her haiman status and be subject to adjustment. She sent the final instructions and forced herself to watch.

His carapace retracted its ‘legs’ from the sockets attached to his ribs, hip bones, and head, then repositioned them half an inch up, and reinserted them. No sockets lay waiting where they reinserted. The two on his head pressed against his skull above his ears, one slid off tearing up a flap of scalp, the other pushed his head sideways until it too slid off, ripping more skin. The eight ceramal legs, mis-positioned either side of his torso, penetrated between his ribs, puncturing his heart, lungs, liver. The two over his hips stabbed into his guts. He vomited blood, then coughed out more, his arms and legs thrashing. Arterial blood foamed down inside his carapace in steady pulses, until after a moment he hung limp, blood dripping to the floor.

Orlandine stared. Now, if they ever caught her, she would be mind-wiped. Best to make sure that never happened. The subversion program she had sent could destroy itself, but there would be something left: fragments that might easily be identified as a product of Jain technology. She used that same program to locate his back-up power supply—a head-sized U-charger that ran on an allotropic and isotopic liquid pumped through vanadium-silver grids. She inverted his external power supply and fed it all directly into that charger. The trick was to make sure it drew no more than his expected requirement, but that would be enough. Now less than an hour remained before the charger overloaded and his interface sphere became radioactive wreckage.

Time to go.

Thorn, apparently standing a mile out in vacuum but actually ensconced in VR aboard the spaceship and seeing through a remote camera, studied carefully the Not Entirely Jack. The vessel was one of the new Centurion-class attack ships. It bore some resemblance to the Jack Ketch in that its main body bore the shape of a cuttlefish bone, however here the weapons’ nacelles rode either side of the ship’s nose and another nacelle protruded below its stern. The ship’s skin constantly bloomed with colour like some ancient screensaver, but with those colours seen on polished steel as it is being heated. With omniscient vision he then surveyed surrounding space. Numerous other ships orbited the nearby planet, and many had already landed; this was no more than to be expected considering the possibility of Jain technology being scattered over its surface. But the strangest sight in this system was the organic moonlet at bay. Thorn focused in on this—increasing the magnification of his vision many hundred times beyond what would be possible with his naked eyes.