‘Blegg,’ came the communication from Yellow Cloud, ‘I’m sorry.’ A U-space signature followed, as the attack ship fled the system.

Returning to the surface of the world, Horace Blegg looked up and discovered that not all those lights up there were stars. He turned and gazed at his two companions.

‘We have a problem,’ he began.

Light, magnesium bright, dispelled the twilight. Looking to his left, Blegg saw only flames now where Tuscor City had been, a wall of fire eating up the intervening terrain.

‘Yeah, that’s a problem,’ the commander had time to say.

Then it was upon them.

The moment the King of Hearts surfaced into the real, it came under intense and massive scanning, and thousands of objects began to stir within the gas clouds. King scanned them in return, but the images received remained hazy until some of the same objects began to enter clear vacuum. King expected to see recognizable ships—those that departed the Polity with Erebus—but there were none like that visible. What the AI saw here instead seemed entirely alien. It appeared the attack ship had landed itself in some vast trap and on every level something was trying to grasp hold of it. King opened secure coms and tried to separate out something coherent from the layers of informational assaults.

‘I am not with the Polity,’ sent the attack ship AI.

No single voice replied—it all seemed the maddened howl of a mob.

‘Let me speak with Erebus.’

U-space signatures now, where those mysterious objects gathered—then close by. Something big dropped into being first, then the surrounding spacial density began to increase sharply as other things arrived. Less than a microsecond afterwards, the AI detected growing U-space interference and the hot touch of targeting lasers, and dropped the King of Hearts into U-space, an instant later surfacing 100,000 miles away.

‘Speak to me—I am not an enemy.’

The reply was a consensual scream, ‘Open completely!’

This then was Erebus. All of this was Erebus. And it wanted King to meld with it. Over the years of its existence the attack ship AI had grown contemptuous of humanity, and felt the need to find something better, faster, grander, and entirely AI. It had been prepared to create something like this… consensus. But to join one, to be absorbed into one? In that moment King discovered how much it valued its own individuality, and understood itself to be more like its makers than like this thing. Picking up informational flows, logic structures, and purpose beyond its comprehension, King recognized only madness.

‘I need time.’

‘You have none.’

U-space signatures again. Its course reversed, King jumped again, only to find itself labouring through a U-space storm. Independently, Erebus must have developed its own USERs. Perpetually rebalancing engines, King flew through the storm, but then even more USER interference slammed into it and the King of Hearts found itself falling down some spacial slope, as if entering realspace too close to a gravity well. It materialized right into a high-powered maser, instantly burning into its hull. Anti-munitions release, and King returned fire on multiple targets: ships and missiles. King jumped again, slamming in and out of an underspace continuum with no give in it. Another 100,000 miles, but enough to take it away from the main sleet of missiles. Planetary system now. The swarm still pursuing, King engaged fusion drive at maximum. At least the attackers could no more enter U-space than could King, and could not jump ahead. However, their weapons were faster.

Masers scored across King’s hull, peeling up armour like a screwdriver scoring through paint, then tracked away to follow an anti-munitions package the attack ship released. They pierced what was merely a holographic image of the attack ship, then swept back. Warheads detonated on other similar packages. King onlined a rail-gun and filled space behind it with near-c projectiles, swinging the fusillade across to cover its fall towards the hot but living planet below. It kept firing interceptor missiles until its armoury emptied of those; then followed with high yield CTDs, imploders, and straight atomics. A vast storm of explosions trailed the attack ship down. EM blasts made its scanning a mostly intermittent affair. More ships behind now, or just falling wreckage?

Above atmosphere, King duelled with only its beam weapons, knocking out waspish missiles homing in on it. White heat re-entry, endless steaming jungle below, then mountains ahead. King scanned them and detected useful concentrations of metals and carbon. Stored energy at minimum and fusion reactors struggling to keep up, King released one last anti-munitions package as missiles closed in on every side. The King of Hearts decelerated hard down towards the mountains. Eight warheads impacted within a second of each other. The titanic blasts incinerated jungle for a thousand miles all around, demolished a mountain, created a magma lake. Except for sufficient spectroscopic readings of metals and carbon in the atmosphere, the attack ship was gone. The impact site and surrounding area, being now highly radioactive, would not be easy to scan.

Mika came instantly awake, knowing Dragon had just surfaced from U-space.

‘Have we arrived?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ Dragon confirmed over the manacle’s com system.

Shortly before Dragon’s departure from Jerusalem, now some days ago, the Dragon head and attendant pseudopods had retreated back down their hole and that hole closed. Conversation with the entity thereafter had merely been via com. It had answered many of her questions, but those answers were as convoluted and Delphic as ever. She still did not know where Dragon had brought her, or why.

Slinging her heat sheet back, she sat upright and demanded, ‘Exterior view.’

The walls and ceiling disappeared, but what she now saw could only be described as an interior view—the insides of Dragon no less. Masses of flesh like raw liver pushed in from every side, throughout which groped hands of blood-red tentacles. As she watched a grey-white pseudopod snaked past like a giant conger eel, and something globular with metallic veins spread over its surface gradually sank from sight. However, this exterior downward movement made Mika realize that the manacle was slowly being pushed back to Dragon’s surface. It seemed a slow process, so she stood up, picked up her pack, then headed off to use the sanitary facilities this place provided. After that she returned to grab up a pull-tab coffee, and stood watching while the drink heated in her hand.

‘Where have we arrived?’ she asked finally.

The floor shuddered and Dragon’s flesh and skin began to part overhead, to reveal a hot glare beyond. Flesh slid down from this either side of the manacle as finally it surfaced. Mika observed stars peppered across blackness above one draconic horizon. Poised above the opposite horizon, a white actinic sun glared, its ferocity doubtless filtered just enough, through the projection system, to prevent it burning out her eyes.

‘Here,’ Dragon informed her.

Below the sun’s glare, a massive pit opened in Dragon’s surface, a constellation of blue stars rising from its depths. Thousands of cobra heads came into view: great open fans of them stemming from massive arterial branches, which in turn extended from a tangled fig-vine column of a central tree. This titanic growth rose up beside the manacle like some vast organic spacecraft launching. It occluded the sun, and only then, with the glare cut out, did Mika see the other object approaching. This new sphere could have been any moonlet or some titanic ship but, as it drew closer, she noticed it too everting growth. The other remaining Dragon sphere approached.