Cormac halted. ‘Rid himself?’

From the intercom Jack’s voice suddenly issued, ‘I feel I should rename myself as I am now in singular control of this ship. However, there is some truth in the current name Not Entirely Jack.’

‘Has sentence been executed upon her?’ Cormac asked.

‘Aphran no longer exists,’ replied the ship AI.

That, Cormac realized, did not really answer his question, but he let that go as he turned and walked to the circular door leading from the bay, which promptly irised open before him. He stepped through and found himself in a corridor resembling a pipe. The flat surface of the gravplate floor laid in that pipe was covered with blue carpet moss, bearing a repeating pattern of white nooses—a pattern copied from the original Jack Ketch, though its carpets had been plain fabric. The rest of the corridor remained strictly utile: padded walls and ceiling, diffuse lighting, and soft hand grips in case the gravplates should fail. Cormac wondered if Jack made his usual baroque and sometimes gruesome additions elsewhere, for the original ship had contained various human execution devices of antique design that the AI liked replicating down to the smallest historical detail. Cormac waited until Thorn stepped through beside him.

‘Which way—I’ve been unable to access any information on the layout,’ he said.

Thorn stepped aside to allow Arach also into the corridor. The drone scuttled over to one side and reared up as the dracomen filed out next to head along the corridor. Cormac noted how the dracomen eyed the drone curiously before moving on.

‘Well, you certainly do get some types,’ commented Arach, coming back down on its sharp feet.

Cormac assumed there had been some inaudible communication between drone and reptilians, but simply classified Arach’s observation as interesting before turning back to Thorn, who gestured down the corridor, saying, ‘These corridors run in a grid throughout the ship, all gravplated on one side, so you can walk anywhere using them. There’s no movable drop-shafts.’

Cormac nodded to himself. Drop-shafts were a hangover from older ship geometries in which the builders felt some need of up and down. Jack had used a movable one to get his passengers to different locations inside the old Jack Ketch. This construction, he surmised, was for enhanced structural strength. ‘Are we heading now for the bridge—if that’s what you still call it?’

‘No, Jack can project anywhere in this ship and there’s something I thought you might like to see.’ Thorn led him through a bulkhead door, then into a long corridor curving down the length of the hull. Three bulkhead doors later they entered another corridor carpeted with flute grass matting and filled with hot terrarium air. Until now, all the corridors they traversed were boringly prosaic. Perhaps baroque interiors were something Jack had grown out of.

‘More dracomen,’ observed Cormac.

‘Nearly a hundred of them aboard.’ Thorn paused reflectively. ‘You know there’s thousands of them now on the planet below?’

Cormac nodded: he did know. He followed Thorn past a series of rooms occupied by the reptilian creatures. Finally the two men came to the cylindrical training chamber, with gravplated floors at either end and a zero-G section in the middle, which spanned the ship. Here Cormac observed dracomen at play, or training themselves to kill—there probably being little difference. He headed over to a stair and climbed to a platform positioned just below the zero-G section, his feet light on the metalwork where the gravity effect from the plates at one end of the cylinder partially cancelled out the effect from those at the other. Thorn moved up beside him.

‘Okay, Jack, what do you have for me?’

A line cut down through the air below disporting dracomen, and out of it folded a humanoid figure.

‘This is the Legate,’ announced Jack.

Cormac studied the image for a moment. ‘That tells us very little. Any AI or any human could take on that exterior form if they wished. Do you have any idea what’s inside it?’

‘Thellant attempted a scan of this particular entity, but that revealed only an empty shell. I surmise from this fact that his scanning equipment encountered sophisticated chameleonware. Other facts do confirm that the Legate can make itself invisible.’

The figure in question revolved slowly in the air like some musical doll, the tune played being the sound of fleshy impacts as dracomen continued their contests, above and below, totally ignoring the image. Cormac applied directly to Jack for information, and received a potted history of the association between Thellant and the Legate.

‘So, an enemy of the Polity—nothing new there—but the technologies it employed have heretofore not really been the province of Separatists.’ Cormac paused, applying analytical programs to the history provided, then said, ‘Give it all to me, Jack.’

A hundred times larger than the potted history, this next block of information stretched his gridlink storage space, cutting down space for those programs he needed to analyse it. He reached up to press his fingers against his temple as if expecting a headache. His sleeve dropped back and he glimpsed Thorn’s look of surprise, then amusement, at seeing Shuriken holstered there once more. He ran a search program to find what he could delete to make more space. The memory download from Jerusalem sat temptingly in the list appearing. He returned it to storage, deleted old programs and dated information, then returned his attention to Jack’s new information. Patterns began to emerge.

‘An outside force stirring up our rebels,’ he concluded. ‘Do we have any way of going after this character?’

‘Thellant’s memories did not supply that info. However, cross-referencing his memories with information provided by Coloron has provided us with something.’

‘Don’t draw it out, Jack.’

‘U-space anomalies: within a day prior to every arrival of the Legate here, there would be a mass/U-signature discrepancy for some large arriving ship. Such discrepancies have always been ignored, since they are often due to the registered mass of a large cargo vessel being off by a fraction of a percentile. In the case of the Legate’s arrivals, the mass discrepancy has always been about the same: twelve tons.’

‘So it’s clearly a small vessel piggy-backing in on other ships’ U-fields?’

‘So it would seem.’

‘Is a search being conducted?’

‘This information has been broadcast to all AIs across the Polity. All records are being checked, as are all new arrivals to worlds everywhere. If any ship comes in with such discrepancies, we will henceforth be immediately informed.’

‘So now?’

The hologram of the Legate disappeared, and one wall of the chamber seemed to dissolve too in order to give a view outside. The planet Coloron fell away, starlit space revolving into view. Then came that drag at the very substance of reality, and the view greyed out, as they dropped into U-space.

‘Even as I spoke the words,’ announced Jack.

‘What?’ asked Cormac.

‘Twelve-ton discrepancy detected, within the parameters of the Legate’s last departure from here. Other forces are already on their way.’

‘Other forces?’Thorn muttered.

Cormac asked, ‘Where was this discrepancy detected?’

‘The Cassius project.’

It figured: the AIs would be mighty pissed off about anyone messing with that.