Mika nodded, shrugged her acceptance, then pressed a hand against the panoramic screen as if she wished to touch the vast construct. ‘There’s seven more of these stations still mothballed. You know, most Polity citizens cannot quite grasp the scale of that conflict—just what a mobilized interstellar civilization can do.’ She turned, shrugged. ‘It’s been like that ever since war was industrialized.’ She gestured behind her at the screen. ‘This place was built in only three years and churning out dreadnoughts, attack ships and war drones just about as fast as the construction materials could be transmitted in. It could not keep up with demand during the initial Prador advance, since on average one medium-sized ship got destroyed every eight seconds during that conflict.’

‘But still we won, in the end,’ said Cormac.

‘Won?’

‘Well, we survived, which had not been the Prador’s intention.’

‘The new king of the Prador made the right decision to withdraw. Had they continued they would have lost completely, but as it was they retained some autonomy.’

Cormac smiled to himself. Mika knew this subject and was extremely interested in it. All these facts, available to him with a thought, were now common knowledge: casualty figures, number of worlds burned down to the bedrock or obliterated, the stories of moonlets fired through enlarged cargo runcibles to take out Prador heavy dreadnoughts, the abominable coring trade out on the Polity rim—how Prador enslaved humans in their millions. But it was now history, and as such seen by many as not quite real, not really anything to do with them.

‘Why did Earth Central choose this place as an Isolation station?’ she asked.

To business, he thought.

‘No other place large enough and isolated enough. Two more of these places are also being used. So far there’s over eight million people aboard this one.’

‘Not nearly enough—we should have gone straight to Coloron.’

Cormac shook his head. ‘The runcibles are closed to incomers for the duration, and it would take four months by ship even at Jerusalem’s top speed. By the time we got there it would all be over one way or another.’

‘So what is the plan now?’

‘You, D’nissan and all the others stay aboard the Jerusalem and continue doing what you do best: you study Jain technology and learn what you can from Dragon. Jerusalem predicts that after the initial rush to the runcibles on Coloron the pressure will drop off. In the inevitable lulls, ECS Rescue and military personnel will be transmitted through. I intend to go through then to link up with Thorn.’ He glanced at her. ‘Jerusalem is holding off until the situation on Coloron has been clarified. If required, this ship will make the jump to there. If not it will head back to either Cull or Masada.’

She mulled that over for a while, then nodded. Cormac could see her torn between undertaking field work on Coloron and continued research here on the Jerusalem with its huge resources. Probably what inclined her not to ask to come along with him was the mile-wide being which hung in space nearby, only a few tens of miles from the Jerusalem. Dragon now accompanied them. Its manacle, no longer containing CTDs, was no longer a manacle at all. This had been a test. Had Dragon fled, then some doubt would have been cast on its testimony. It did not, and continued to assist the researchers aboard this ship.

‘How long until you go across?’ She nodded at the screen.

‘When I’m ready. I need something from Jerusalem first.’

She nodded again, then gave him a long assessing stare.

‘By the way, how is your research progressing?’ Cormac asked.

Mika moved away from the screen and sat on his sofa, curling her legs up beside her. ‘We are learning a lot, and very quickly. We will, within days, have developed a system to prevent physical Jain-tech takeover of the human body, though it won’t prevent the subject being killed. Next we’ll be working on a doctor mycelium similar to the one I used before’—Mika looked uncomfortable—’only one that won’t try to grow Jain nodes and thus kill its host. Dragon has offered to give us these items complete and in working order. Jerusalem refused—it does not want us using anything we don’t fully understand. So now Dragon is feeding us the schematics piecemeal.’

Cormac did not feel very good about that somehow. Was it really the case that to survive in the universe humanity must cease to be human? Already transformation had occurred—augmentation, boosting, adaptation, the haimans—and this now seemed yet another step in that direction. If all this present furore led to some all-out conflict against something that was just a thing, just a hostile technology that required hosts, could it be, that if they came out the other side of it, they would be indistinguishable from the Makers? Transformed into something less admirable despite their victory? He winced—of course that supposed humanity was something to admire.

‘How are you progressing?’ Mika asked.

Cormac paused, about to ask what she meant. But a certain honesty, integrity, made him close the impulse down. The conversation was about to progress away from the business at hand, and he repressed the urge to abandon it. He sat down on the sofa next to her.

‘Physically I am in good shape but bad condition,’ he said.

‘Curious description.’

Cormac smiled. ‘Everything is healed, everything is there, but my bone and muscle mass is low. Presently I’m on regrowth factors, steroids, and induction stressing of my bones while I sleep.’ He gestured vaguely to the door leading into his sleeping area. ‘It will be weeks before I’m back in condition.’

‘And your mind?’ Mika asked, leaning closer.

‘Fragile, Jerusalem tells me. Apparently, the last time I asked, I have a tendency to over-focus on the task in hand, with an exclusivity that is borderline autistic’

‘But isn’t that how you have always been? I’ve worked with you intermittently, for some years now, yet I know very little about you. How do you relax—do you socialize, do you have family? With you it has always been the job and nothing else. But I know there’s more… Chaline for example?’

Cormac felt he wanted to get up, draw this encounter to a close… run away. He repressed that urge too.

‘We had a brief liaison at Samarkand, that was all. I was damaged goods then as well—too long gridlinked and apparently losing my humanity.’

‘No inclination to continue where you left off?’

‘The Celedon survivors are heading back to Solsystem.’

‘That’s not what I asked.’

‘None.’

‘What about your family?’

‘Are you trying to psychoanalyse me, Mika?’

‘No, this is what is called social intercourse. You might have encountered it before on those occasions when you weren’t shooting someone.’

Cormac could feel something twisted up inside his chest. Exercising rigid control, he chuckled. ‘My family… my father was a soldier who did not come back from the Prador War, my mother is an archaeologist, on Earth. I have not seen her in forty years. I have two brothers who work in the ECS medical service. I have not seen them in forty years either.’ He waved a hand towards the window. ‘They might even be here, I don’t know. Perhaps we all possess the same narrow focus on our own interests which is why our ways parted. There’s a network family site that I check occasionally, and last time I looked I learned I now also have a sister-in-law, two nieces and a nephew, a grand niece. Also, thirty years back I acquired a stepfather, then a half brother and half sister… shall I go on?’

‘No contact at all?’

‘None. Isn’t it the case now that even when a nuclear family is formed, which is not often, its members tend to drift away. We move about a lot more now, and we’re long-lived so there is less desperation to cling to that centre. Yourself?’