‘Modular construction,’ he commented.

‘Get this,’ said Karischev, pointing at something new displayed on another screen.

Now they watched as the Battle Wagon headed into a conglomeration of enemy ships, its weapons firing and wreaking havoc all around. Spiral ships burned internally and spun apart, rod-ships detonated like linked firecrackers.

‘This is not going to last very long,’ said Azroc.

‘Yeah, maybe,’ said Karischev.

Azroc was about to comment further when he picked up something over general tac-com channels, and then saw the same information flashed up on the displays before them. Another larger and more powerful USER had just been deployed within the system.

‘Oh fuck,’ said Karischev.

From behind the ringed ice giant rose into view that other strange metallic planetoid—its presence briefly acknowledged in initial reports from the NEJ. It was no longer so smooth and clearly defined, for massive outflows broke from its surface like cold solar flares. A frame selected this object, and focused in on the surface movement. Azroc now saw the planetoid unravelling, returning to its component parts—which were thousands of enemy ships.

‘You might be right,’ said Karischev.

‘Pardon?’

‘This might not last long at all.’

The initial part of her report Mika delivered with much reference to her notescreen but, of course, in the latter stages of events she had been unable to make any notes at all. She spoke slowly and carefully, visualizing events in her mind as she described them. D’nissan, Prator Colver and Susan James—the last recently returned from her enforced and medicated rest—all now wore the top level of augs and showed impatience with that sluggish transference of information called speech. When she finished, they thanked her and, with no social niceties, quickly departed.

‘Was that entirely necessary?’ Mika asked, as she began stripping off her Dragon-repaired clothing while heading for the shower.

‘Your clothing,’ instructed Jerusalem, ‘place it in secure sampling cylinders and send it to D’nissan’s laboratory.’

Mika grimaced. She should have thought of that already, but excused herself because she had, after all, been through a lot. Naked, she picked up her strewn clothing and carried it through to her own laboratory, stuffed it into two sampling cylinders, sealed them, then placed them in the wall hatch, whence they sped away. The system was similar to that one used to send cash cylinders by compressed air through pipework leading down into the vault of an ancient casino, though of course much more sophisticated.

‘How often do I do the unnecessary?’ Jerusalem enquired as she finally stepped into her shower.

‘That is something on which I can only speculate.’

Though already thoroughly scanned, she somehow felt Jerusalem, speaking to her here and now, to be intrusive. Absurd, really. AIs constantly monitored their charges, and she had been thus monitored for many years. Why did it bother her now? She supposed that might be because of her recent intimacy with Dragon, and tried to ignore the feeling.

‘Your three fellow researchers, like many others aboard this vessel, require constant grounding in the real world. I give them this whenever the opportunity presents.’

Mika ignored the air-blast dryer—she did not have the patience for it—and stepped out of the shower to grab up a rough towel from the dispenser. As she dried herself a sudden panic surged in her throat, as she glimpsed into the immediate future. She would dress, eat and drink, but she did not feel like sleeping. So what then? She could not rejoin the other three in their research of things Jain unless she too upgraded herself, either with a gridlink or with one of those augs. The two Dragon spheres, now orbiting the Jerusalem, lay out of her reach—any data that could be obtained from them at a distance was already collected.

What do I do now?

She decided to attack. ‘You used me as confirmation of events—extra evidence to persuade the other Dragon sphere to our side.’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘No denials, then. Just that: you did. You played me like a pawn in your game. I could have died.’

‘Obviously there were risks, but the possible gains outweighed them.’

Mika considered that, and also considered the utter pointlessness of protesting. AIs, so they would have humanity believe, calculated their actions on the basis of the greater good for all. She just sometimes wondered what their conception of the ‘greater good’ might be.

She tied a loose robe about herself and slumped on her sofa. During her interview with the other three she had felt the Jerusalem enter underspace.

‘Where are we going now?’

‘To the edge of a scene of conflict, though a USER prevents us from entering.’

‘Could you elaborate on that?’

‘You have not been keeping up-to-date. Let me begin by telling you about a being called the Legate…’

As Jerusalem explained the situation, Mika began to feel ashamed. She realized that while she occupied herself with such petty concerns, Cormac might be dying, or already dead.

It would have been foolish to try flying through the approaching Polity fleet, even in U-space, so Orlandine necessarily waited until it entered the inner system.

Too long.

With delight Orlandine had manoeuvred the Heliotrope out of the comet and back into space, but that delight only lasted a few minutes—until the second USER came online. A trap for someone else, obviously, but one that snared her as well.

Again.

But now what? Should she return to her hideaway inside the comet and wait until this ended? Checking U-space interference, she first realized this USER field extended for much further than a mere light year… then that it was strongest in her present location, which seemed to indicate the device generating it must be nearby. Its activation had been perfectly timed so as to drop the Polity fleet ships into a trap in the inner system. Scanning her immediate vicinity revealed the usual quantity of cold lumps of rock, but the candidate she eventually plumped for was a planetoid half the size of Earth’s moon, and only 100,000 miles away from her. Passive scanning revealed it to be much warmer than it should be, at this distance from the sun, and that it contained an ocean of liquid methane inside a crust of rock and water-ice as hard as iron.

Rather than immediately send Heliotrope in that direction, Orlandine waited and began to take measurements. Within a few hours she ascertained that the shift of USER-field strength exactly matched the planetoid’s orbital path. Confirmation, then. Now she needed to figure out how to get herself over there without being detected. The Heliotrope’s drifting path diverged from that of the planetoid, and firing up her engines out here would be like igniting a flare in the darkness, so any detectors would pick her up instantly. It took her only seconds to work out the solution to this dilemma. Using air jets, she could manoeuvre into a position which, in twenty-three minutes, would bring her into collision with one of the asteroidal masses. Prior to that collision she could fire her fusion engines undetected for 0.6 of a second into the asteroid’s surface. This was predicated on any detectors being sited only on the planetoid, which was a risk she would have to take. This move would take her on to the next asteroid. Three similar trajectory changes in all would result in Heliotrope being set on a course to intercept the planetoid’s orbit. Landing there without using the engines would be well within ship’s specs, and Heliotrope possessed mooring harpoons that could prevent it bouncing away in the low gravity. After that things would become rather more complicated, for Orlandine must somehow figure out how to destroy a USER, which she rather suspected lay in the methane sea, a thousand miles below the surface.