‘I am an orphan and have never been able to trace my family. I don’t even know if they are alive. It’s why I take such an interest in other people’s families, and don’t quite understand the lack of interest I often encounter.’

Cormac shrugged and stood.

‘Should I leave now?’ she asked.

He walked over to the drinks cabinet, reflecting that he still could not quite get used to the luxury this vessel provided. Fashioned of something as near to old oak as made no difference, the cabinet was supplied with all types of glasses, a selection of drinks in glass and ceramic bottles, and even contained an ice machine plumbed into the wall. It also possessed a programmable drinks maker concealed behind the lower wooden doors, which was operable by a touch-console inset in the glass top. Via chrome spigots this could provide anything from hot coffee to yak-buttered tea.

‘I would like you to stay,’ he said, picking up two brandy glasses cut from manufactured emerald—probably made aboard this ship. ‘Brandy?’

‘Please.’

He uncapped a bottle, poured, turned with the two glasses to find her standing facing him. She took her glass, sipped, stepped in close to grip the front of his shirt in one hand and pulled his face down into a kiss. With her pressed up against him, he suddenly became much more aware of her as something more than Mika in Medical, Mika explaining Jain tech, cell-welding wounds, and dissecting alien flesh. She stepped back, looking almost angry. He sipped his drink.

‘Don’t you pull away now,’ she warned.

He pursed his lips, turned and deposited his glass back on the cabinet. ‘It seems I have to take you out of that neat little box in my mind now and reassess you.’

‘I’ve got a better idea,’ she said, stepping past him to place her glass down beside his. ‘Let’s just cut all the cerebral crap and get physical. You can do a reassessment afterwards, maybe build some programs to analyse the Mika pheno…’

He slid the back of his hand down her stomach, pushed his fingers into the top of the loose slacks she wore, pulled her close and kissed her hard to shut her up, then towed her behind him towards the sofa. By the sofa she broke away from him, slid a thumb into the stick-seam of her slacks, slid them down, kicked her way out of them.

‘Get undressed and lie down,’ she ordered.

Cormac found no problem in obeying this authority figure. She wore no underwear and was quickly astride him, though still wearing her loose oriental top. Grabbing his penis she slid her hand up and down—now I’m in charge. After a moment she shuffled forwards and, easing herself down with a hissing exhalation, began gently to revolve her hips. He closed his eyes, tried to remember the last time he’d let anyone get this close—so many hurried sexual encounters organized when they could be fitted into his schedule, last time on Elysium while he awaited the end of the quarantine imposed there; the rest of the time using drugs to repress the need, control it, like he controlled every other aspect of himself.

‘Don’t you dare come,’ she ordered, stripping off her top, ‘not yet.’

‘Would you like to tie me down to this sofa?’ he joked.

‘Not right now,’ she replied, ‘I hardly know you well enough for that.’

Cormac laughed, then felt shocked—wondering when was the last time that had happened too.

Thorn brought the AG platform down opposite a burnt-out shopping centre and eased it in over a tangle of ceramal beams flaked and distorted by the heat. Twelve dracomen occupied this platform with him, while Scar and eight others occupied the platform immediately behind. He looked around him. The chainglass windows of the shops remained intact, but were blackened from the inside. Burnt bodies lay on quartz paving, black and curled foetal. A low-walled garden, running down the centre of the shopping mall, still smouldered—all the smaller plants incinerated, though jagged cores of cycads still stood. He swung his platform over to the right of this garden, while Scar took his to the other side.

‘Okay,’ Thorn spoke into his comlink, ‘we’ll land up at the end here and see what we can find. Scar, have your people spread out and cover the landing area—not too far mind, we might have to get out of here fast.’

At the end of the mall stood a row of drop-shaft entrances, with a corridor leading away on either side. Thorn swung the platform over near a bar beside the entrance to one corridor. Most of its furniture was scattered but a table and three chairs still stood upright. Grotesquely, one chair still supported a charred corpse slumped over the table.

The dracomen moved fast once the platforms landed. Two of them headed up the adjoining corridor, three covered the drop-shafts, and all the rest, except Scar, spread out to form a protective perimeter. Scar came over towards him.

‘Where would you suggest?’ Thorn asked, eyeing the dracoman intently.

‘It is all around us,’ Scar replied.

Thorn listened. He could hear creakings and shiftings as of wreckage settling and cooling. There came a faint scuttling sound, too, like rats in the walls. He scannned around and located, just inside the corridor entrance, a row of public-service terminals. ‘Over here.’ He led the way.

Each terminal consisted of a simple touch-console and screen. Thorn propped his proton carbine against the wall, drew his thin-gun and blew a hole in the wall beside one of the screens, then jammed his fingers in beside it and pulled. The flimsy screen tore out of the wall, revealing only the optics behind. No sign of anything unusual there. He holstered his gun, took hold of the wall panel immediately below the screen, wiggled it back and forth then tore it free: more optics, branching off from a main duct, to the console above. He was gazing at this junction when he heard the distinctive sound of a chair scraping back.

Proton fire flashed like summer lightning through a ruby. He glanced aside to see the dracomen firing at something further down the corridor. Pulse-gun fire stitched across the wall above his head. The single alfresco occupant of the bar stood up, pulse-rifle braced at the hip, then disappeared in a flash of red fire, tumbling back in pieces amidst tables and chairs blasted to fragments. Other figures began appearing, weapons firing, dracomen moving to counter them. Then, tentacular new growth began sprouting from the incinerated gardens. Thorn took in all this in a brief glance, reached down and grasped the duct cover, tore it away. Bundled optics behind, but something else as well: grey vines and fibres packing every cavity, silvery tendrils that shifted slightly. He snatched the memstore from his pocket, already extruding a nanofibre interface from one of its end ports. He selected one of the thicker, unmoving vinelike growths and pressed the interface head against it. Immediately hairlike fibres extruded and penetrated, bonding the memstore in place. But other silvery fibres then began whipping from the bundled optics, surrounding the interface head, spreading up around the memstore itself.

Thorn snatched his hand away. Damn.

He pulled back, taking up his carbine, turned and squatted. The dracomen easily held back the human-shaped attackers, but they were not all to be reckoned with. He saw a tentril spear up from the floor, punching through it like a bullet, whipping twice around a dracoman’s legs, then penetrating his chest. No time to try retrieving the memstore, no way to find out if the HK’s penetration had been successful.

‘Go! Go!’ he bellowed.

They ran for the platforms. Thorn boarded one first, lifting it a few feet from the floor. Scar leapt on behind him. A dracoman tried to raise the other one, but something held it down. The dracoman leapt free, just as a mass of tendrils fingered over the edge.