Ah, there…

It lay in the middle of the track bulldozed through the ruins, directly below the lethal wire strung across. As Herman moved closer he observed four German boys clambering down the pile of rubble to loot the headless corpse. They managed to get away with some chocolate, condoms, a wallet and an automatic pistol.

‘There’s another one coming!’ shouted a fair-haired boy, and they all scrabbled from view.

Herman wondered if they themselves had set the wire, and if this ploy had really proved worth the effort. It never occurred to him to question how he could understand their language, any more than he questioned his ability to traverse the non-region of U-space around the planet. Nor his intrinsic understanding of the events unfolding upon that planet. He was only a boy, yet he knew about that million-degree eye that had opened over Hiroshima. He was a boy yet he understood what had happened in that forest-bound camp where now the perimeter wires and posts lay bulldozed into heaps and the long sheds burned to ash, and where still a stinking miasma rose from the mass graves.

Another jeep arrived. This time with an upright steel bar bolted to the vehicle, which snapped the wire just as the right front wheel rode over the previous visitor’s dusty detached head. The jeep turned and slid sideways to a stop, as the two passengers jumped out cocking M2 carbines. Herman stepped away, half a mile this time, to reappear just outside a courthouse. A little later an American gave him chocolate, peering with a puzzled expression at his asiatic features. Over the ensuing weeks Herman tried copying such expressions, concentrating on manipulating the muscles in his face. Only after the judges arrived did he realize, after seeing his reflection in a shard of mirror, how unreasonably successful he had been. Thereafter he unwrapped the filthy bandage he had bound around over the top of his head and running underneath his chin.

Getting inside the courtroom was not possible at first, but he picked up so much by just listening and lurking around. In this way he learned about the film to be shown as evidence. Upon hearing instructions given to the guards about having to put out the lights, he managed to transport himself inside at precisely the right time. No one there noticed him: their eyes riveted to the screen and many of them quietly crying. He wept then for his parents, for the horror of the world, and for the lot of a humanity he no longer felt a part of. And with a wholly adult relish he sometime later transported himself to a spot nearby to watch a stiff old gentleman in a baggy uniform, climb with shaking legs some wooden stairs to have his neck snapped at the end of a rope.

After detaching her carapace from the interface sphere, Orlandine stepped out of it and headed aft, through the living quarters, through a hold space packed with equipment, and into a storage chamber for haiman tools. She needed more than one set of hands for this job, and that’s where they were available.

Within the chamber, four assister frames were racked. Ignoring them for the moment she found a lightweight spacesuit adapted to haiman requirements and donned it, then she approached the first of the frames. This contrivance hung in its rack just like a spider carcase fashioned of silvery metal. She backed into the body space designed to accommodate her carapace, felt the numerous locks and optic plugs engaging, and her own control software coming online. One arm, human in length and terminating in four fingers, came up underneath her right arm, locking soft clamps above and below her elbow and just above her wrist. Now, essentially, her right arm possessed eight fingers—four of them metal. The pseudo arm that now connected to her left arm terminated in a three-fingered clamp over a micro-manipulator and s-con and optic interface head. Pseudo limbs simultaneously clamped themselves down each leg. These terminated in large three-digited claws protruding backwards from her ankles, which were usually used to anchor a haiman in place while working in zero-G. Folding out at a point just above her midriff were two additional arms, terminating in hands each with two opposable thumbs. She extended one of these out in front of her, wiggling its metal fingers. Now she was totally haiman.

This transformation was a psychological thing, related to ego and self-image. With just her carapace engaged, though her mind became larger and more extensive—capable of processing information like an AI and able to handle multiple tasks—it only extended from the two-legged two-armed ape. The next step was opening her sensory cowl. The moment she did that, the ‘ware loaded to handle multiple sensory inputs: she could perceive radio, infrared, ultraviolet, microwave, detect complex molecules in the air… But still she remained psychologically no more than a human using tools; peering through a nightsight, binoculars, whatever. But the assister frame’s ‘ware undermined her self-image in a way that seemed integral to her being. Her metal fingers were as touch-sensitive as her organic ones. She knew their position, their relation to each other and to her own soft self; her micro-tools were sensitive to textures not far above the atomic. She became the goddess Kali and the all-seeing Watchmaker combined.

Am I insane? some part of her wondered. But it was a very small part indeed.

Initiating detach, she stepped away from the support frame, then scuttled insectlike to the airlock. Once outside she clung to the hull and looked around. With her cowl spread, her surroundings seemed as bright as day from the residual infrared emitted from the ship’s thrusters and the further fluorescing of complex ices nearby.

The cell she had entered was a hundred yards across, its six walls nearing sixty feet high. Orlandine pushed herself from the hull and dropped slowly towards the floor. Making contact with it, she began walking away from the ship with a steady floating gait. In a moment she realized that the low gravity here would prove an inconvenience. If she moved everywhere like this, it would take her forever to get anything done. Using the enhancement of her legs she leapt forwards, hitting one of the walls ten yards up but absorbing the shock through her other enhanced limbs. As she dropped down beside the wall surface she studied it contemplatively, turning to look back at the Heliotrope only as her feet connected with the floor. This chamber she would prepare first for the rapid escape of the ship, and perhaps in time she could convert it for her own comfort. She would pressurize it and insulate it, maybe move out of the ship itself. In the wall behind her she would cut a hole and construct an airlock, and the cell beyond would then become her laboratory. That would be perfect. The Jain node would sit between clamps right in the middle of it: the focus of every resource she could muster.

Aphran considered the facts of her life, if it could be called that. Even though she was a second generation recording of the original Aphran, a sentence of erasure hung over her because of the crimes that original one had committed. No claim of being a changed person, of having understood the error of her ways, of now being prepared to actively support the Polity, would change that. Aphran had murdered people, hundreds of people, and nothing she could now say or do would bring them back. Her sentence remained suspended only because ECS currently found her knowledge very useful, and because she had become intertwined so closely with Jack that her erasure might damage him in the process. But Jack was slowly untangling himself from her, and her usefulness to ECS was decreasing. She was a dead woman, and felt sure she would soon be a non-existent one.

Tracking Freyda as she came aboard, Aphran recognized another walking dead woman. Their captive wore a security collar which could paralyse her in a second, or blast a toxin straight into her carotids. She strode with a kind of arrogance, ahead of the bobbing telefactor, and Aphran knew Freyda probably thought she could get through this using just nerve and lies. Soon she would have to wake up to reality. Jack had appointed Aphran to the task of administering the cold shower.