The Legate held out a fist, closed, until Thellant turned to regard it.

‘Then I shall provide,’ said the Legate.

The fist opened, each long finger folding out and snapping straight. A dark layer of something coated the palm and the inner surfaces of the fingers and thumb. At the very centre of the palm rested an ovoid, an inch and a half at its longest axis. Silvery cubic patterns decorated its surface and, as Thellant watched them in fascination, they seemed to slowly shift.

‘This is what Skellor used,’ the android informed him.

Thellant stepped forward and began to reach out. He hesitated. ‘How did he… control it?’

‘It forms nanoconnections to the mind—very similar to those made by augs.’ Cold eyes regarding him, the hand extended a little further. ‘You would then be able to create all the processing space you require. You may of course have this object analysed, but I suspect you do not have sufficient resources for that.’

Thellant kept a straight face. Obviously the Legate did not know about the scientists and technicians he controlled, or about the computers and data stores he had isolated from the AI nets. He reached out and picked up the ovoid, inspected it closely for a moment, then dropped it into his other palm to study at a distance.

‘It seems such a small… it’s cold… Shit!’ He shook his hand to fling the thing away, but it seemed stuck there. It was as if he had grasped something direct from a deep freezer that now froze to his palm. The cold of it then became something else, eating into his skin like acid. Thellant gasped, stumbled back still shaking his hand, and tumbled rearwards over the coffee table, hitting his head against the floor. Hot wires now seemed to be spearing up his arm.

The Legate stepped forwards and peered down at him. ‘What causes it to react is complicated. Simply, it becomes aware that it is within an artificial environment then it bonds to the first… intelligent organic contact. Strangely it will not bond to animals or plants—only self-aware and intelligent organic beings. I am excluded, as are Golem and other AI biomechanisms. You must therefore consider yourself privileged.’

The thing, working up his arm, was making his fingers move one after the other as if trying them out.

The Legate added, ‘I neglected to mention that Skellor used a crystal-matrix aug to accept the connections and control the technology. In this case it will connect directly to your brain. That means you may experience some… difficulties.’

Hot wires now in his shoulder, searing up through his neck and into his head. The node, still in his hand, deforming and melting into him. As he began shrieking, the Legate made a contemptuous little moue with its hard mouth, and departed.

Cormac brought his craft in over a curving landscape of living flesh tegulated with scales ranging from the size of a thumbnail to a yard across, which seemed almost like jewelled facets cut on red and green opal. He crossed a trench from the rim of which sprouted pseudopods like giant cobras with blank sapphire eyes where their mouths should be, and passed low slopes strewn with writhing red tentacles like a growth of lianas. The manacle, as ECS personnel now called it, rose over the sharply curved horizon ahead of him. A mile long, it followed the curve of Dragon’s body, and at the centre of it lay a trapeziform building fashioned from the same block of highly polished ceramal. The metallic strip was thirty feet wide and a yard thick and, as Cormac flew above it, his craft dipped then compensated as it encountered the tug of gravplates mounted in its surface. The agent brought his craft down on the metal, where it settled in one Earth gravity, and contemplated what he had landed upon.

The manacle held itself in place with hooks driven into draconic flesh—injuries that meant nothing at all to Dragon. Many instruments pierced the entity, measuring, sampling, testing and perpetually monitoring. The AIs did not intend to miss out on this opportunity to study Dragon up close, but all that equipment was not why this object had come to be called a manacle. As well as more conventional armament, Dragon contained a gravtech weapon. The giant entity had once destroyed a Polity warship with it, by breaching antimatter containment within that ship. The manacle itself held numerous CTDs whose antimatter flasks would also be breached should Dragon try to use that same weapon again. The bombs could be detonated remotely by those entrusted with their code.

Cormac knew that code.

Arach, the spider-drone from the Celedon station, had wanted to come across too, but Cormac refused. This situation did not warrant the presence of an irascible war drone and, anyway, there was not room for it in this one-man craft. Arach had suggested clinging externally to the craft’s hull, and only desisted in wheedling when Jerusalem intervened.

Cormac closed up his spacesuit’s visor, hit purge, and unstrapped himself while a pump rapidly drew the cockpit air into a storage cylinder aboard the craft. He touched a panel beside him and a wing door rose, while his seat swung towards the opening. Stepping out, then down onto the polished ceramal, he looked to one side and saw a row of pseudopods silhouetted against the ice giant, waving like cilia. Considering his previous encounters with other incarnations of this entity, it surprised him that the pseudopods did not all gather around him menacingly, for Dragon loved to play such games. He wondered what the game would be this time, and if Dragon really understood how the odds were stacked against it.

He trudged the few yards up to the nearest wall of the building. The airlock there consisted of an outer metal door and an inner shimmer-shield. Quickly going through, he entered the single room of which the building consisted. It looked like the housing for a small swimming pool, only the pool itself contained scaled flesh. Controlling his spacesuit via his gridlink, Cormac retracted the visor down into the neck ring, then collapsed the segmented helmet back over his head so it settled into a collar at the back of his neck. He sniffed: familiar terrarium smell, cloves and something slightly putrid. Moving around the edge of this minor expanse of Dragon’s surface, he finally came to a small area off to one side containing VR and laboratory equipment. These were intended to be used by those who wanted to get this close—Mika being foremost of thousands aboard the Jerusalem who had volunteered. He sat in a VR chair, right elbow resting on the chair arm and chin cupped in his hand, and contemplated Dragon.

‘Are we all sitting comfortably?’ he asked over his gridlink.

‘I do not sit,’ Jerusalem replied.

‘Oh, get on with it,’ said Mika impatiently.

Only these two, excepting Dragon itself, could speak to him directly while he was here. Many thousands of others listening in could lodge requests, ideas or questions, which were filtered through Jerusalem and stored ready in Cormac’s gridlink should he require them. Through that same device he checked his access to many files and to the controls of the equipment within the building. The holographic projectors specifically interested him.

‘Dragon, I think it is time for our little chat,’ he said out loud.

How many words of dialogue had that Dragon expert Darson recorded all those years ago when Dragon stood as four conjoined spheres down on the surface of Aster Colora? Millions? And how few solid facts. As far as they went, Cormac had learnt so much more in his own brief exchanges with the alien entity. It was all about exigency: it seemed that the less critical the situation Dragon found itself in the more Delphic its pronouncements tended to be. Cormac supposed that having nowhere to run and having many CTDs attached to its surface would be making it feel pretty exigent right now. However, its lies might be even more convoluted. He needed to judge the answers behind the answers.