Jack replied, ‘Thellant’s main base is inside the newly cut perimeter—further proof that he is the host. After the failure of the initial strike to halt Jain growth, Coloron projected a protective acentric growth of the structure, so encompassed it inside that last strike. Outside that perimeter, monitors are now moving in on secondary Separatist bases, which on the whole are central to the riots or lie in the no-go zones. Dracomen are meanwhile checking their safe houses. Due to the cell structure of the Separatist organization here, not all of these will necessarily be found.’

‘Right.’ Thorn paused. ‘We need another way to search. Has Coloron tried hunter-killer programs?’

‘Coloron has tried and failed. Its programs are not sufficiently sophisticated to penetrate Jain informational architecture. Coloron is not Jerusalem.’

Thorn reached into his pocket and once again took out the memstore containing the HK program. It was dented now and there was a burn on its surface—from the shots fired through the roof of Thorn’s aircar on Osterland. He thought, however, it gave the box character.

‘Program… you are, I take it, up-to-date with current events?’

‘I am,’ the box vibrated.

‘Could you gain access to the Jain growth here via one of the prisoners?’

‘Substructure would be best.’

He pocketed the box. That figured; always the hard way.

Thorn led the way across the landing platform to the drop-shaft terminus positioned centrally, Scar and the other twenty dracomen falling in around him. He knew that his investigation might be coming up against a wall here. Thellant N’komo was the next link in the chain, so they must capture him, question him. But how did you do that considering what it seemed Thellant had become? Thorn could only try his best.

He stepped into the irised gravity field of a shaft, dropped through one of the ceramal tubes below the platform, past where chainglass windows showed packed soil beyond, was slowed at an exit with dracomen backing up behind him, and then stepped out into an open park surrounded by high foam-stone walls pocked with balconies and windows. Ahead, a line of monitors stood ranged behind delicate-stepping autoguns, beyond which a mass of humanity surged past, running until slowed by the crowd density around a nearby exit tunnel.

‘Keep moving. Keep moving,’ some com system instructed them.

Above the crowd hovered two gun platforms manned by monitors. Panic was palpable, and it turned to screams when explosions suddenly shuddered through the arcology. A high-up balcony belched smoke and dropped burning stick figures.

‘Keep moving.’

Thorn paused, checking his palm-com. ‘Just received a map.’ He turned, scanning around. ‘The crowds are too thick here. We need to go that way.’ He led the way to a closed maintenance door, which clunked and rumbled as he approached and slowly swung open. Next, a gantry alongside a sheer steel cliff beside which welding robots rose like the front ends of giant beetles with their wing cases and abdomens chopped away. The gantry widened into a fenced semicircular platform fronting a wide roller door for transferring heavy equipment. The door was jammed. Before Thorn could even speak, Scar fired his proton weapon into the ridged metal surface. In viridian fire, most of the door slewed away like foil in an acetylene flame. They ducked through, avoiding a small sleet of hot metal from one still-burning edge.

Narrow accessways. More doors. Corpses strewn across a deck where heavy robots stood on gecko-stick caterpillar treads; their owlish metallic heads bowed over multi-jointed arms for handling and cutting foam-stone and sheet construction materials. The dracomen spread out, checked the bodies.

‘No Jain,’ observed Scar.

They were just citizens ripped apart by rail-gun fire. Thorn guessed he would probably never know what had happened here, but he filed away the fact that dracomen could tell by the merest touch whether someone contained Jain tech.

Further access ways, then down into a small monorail station where a single carriage of one train awaited them. They climbed aboard and it smoothly accelerated away. Past them from the opposite direction came a seemingly endless train packed with people, their faces pressed against windows. Thorn’s team left their carriage when it stopped briefly to let them off by a maintenance tunnel a few hundred yards around the bend from a busy station. Thorn could not see the crowds waiting there, but their sound was a constant roar. Before he and the dracomen were even out of sight of the line, another train returned along the maglev track, their own carriage at its head, and now crammed full of humanity.

A stair from the tunnel eventually gave them access into a public corridor, along one side of which hothouse porches, lit with sun lights and crammed with foliage, led to private homes. Down the maintenance ladder of an inoperative drop-shaft, then along a gantry suspended above an autofactory. Below them monolithic machines conveyed ceramal casings to each other, hissing and reconfiguring themselves, cold-forging metal, electron-beam welding, inserting components in flickering blurs of hydraulics, spinning bright new metal and passing the casings on. Thorn noted exit shafts, like those out of some hive, through which departed floating lines of the leaf-shaped drones those casings had become: bare-metal, utile, armed. Coloron’s war industry was at full production, but the businesses of killing and destroying were easy. Concurrently, the AI’s logistical nightmare of trying to move its citizens out of the way was akin to pouring a bag of flour through the eye of a needle.

Finally they arrived at the perimeter Coloron had cut, where smoke gusted across a burnt-out stadium. Every surface was layered with soot-streaked fire-retardant foam. Gobbets of foam tumbled through the air like spindrift, and the grass pitch was blackened. When the smoke cleared momentarily, Thorn could see only half a stadium. The smoke gusted from fires blazing on the other side of a gulf. Here, the arcology was sheared right through, and across the gulf he could see incinerated wreckage and girders projected into the air, separate floors shown in cross section. Thorn realized he was looking out at one edge of a separated piece of the arcology, standing like some vast tower block, bomb-wrecked all around its exterior.

Down on the blackened grass were deployed monitors and a sparse scattering of dracomen, autoguns, and two armoured vehicles with twin front turrets that mounted proton cannons facing the gulf. Thorn also recognized Sparkind down there—not by any uniform they wore but simply by the way they moved. What was the human cost of this? No way could Coloron have moved the entire population out of there before sectioning off the area. The AI had made a choice and cut, excising Jain gangrene while necessarily removing healthy tissue as well. It was a harsh emotionless calculation of loss and gain, probably assessed down to a hundred decimal places.

‘Azroc, Golem,’ Scar pointed.

Thorn glanced at the dracoman, accepting that Scar was communicating with AI systems at a level he himself could not. He wondered if he should really get himself an aug or a gridlink, but resented the idea. He led the way down steps between charcoaled tiers of seats still crackling and plinking as they cooled. The Golem stood beside one of the armoured vehicles, leaning against it, with a pulse-rifle tucked under one arm. His back was to Thorn and the dracomen as they approached, but he pushed himself away from the vehicle and turned as they drew close.

‘I would be interested to know how you intend to capture and contain the cause of all this,’ Azroc said and stabbed a thumb over his shoulder back towards the newly burnt canyon and, almost as if in response, there came from the gulf a distant flashing followed by dull thunder. ‘See,’ the Golem continued, ‘I’ve a hundred thousand troops surrounding the area, a hundred and fifty thousand drones and that figure growing, Sparkind’—he nodded to some of the troops gathered round to hear their exchange—‘and an interesting array of weaponry. But we won’t manage to contain it for much longer. Come with me.’ He led the way across to the jagged melted edge where the stadium had been sheared right through. More flashes from below, more thunder. Thorn recognized the air-rending scream of proton fire.