I am going to die.

Her suit diagnostics made no sense at all, however the static cleaner still operated and shed the blood from the surface of her visor down around her chin. Now she could truly assess the damage to her craft: some god had taken hold of it and twisted it up like an old newspaper.

Gravity weapons.

So it seemed the so-called friendly sphere had killed her. She focused out at vacuum, and a cliff of draconic flesh rose up before her. Something wrong: this part of Dragon was no sphere at all, but egg-shaped with an odd twist in it, with fluids boiling out into vacuum from an opening gashed down one side.

Ah, the other guy, was all she thought, before a writhing wheel of pseudopods—the business end of a fast-moving tree composed of those things—slammed up, closed around her vessel, and dragged her down.

Stupid stupid stupid.

Though the underspace interference field knocked her out of U-space nearly fifty AU from the centre of the action—further than Pluto is from Earth—from which action the light of numerous explosions was only now reaching her, Orlandine was still in the same trap as those ECS attack ships. And she was also exposed in open vacuum between the inner system of planets and an outer ring of asteroids shepherded by a collection of cold planetoids.

Running programs to determine the strength of the USER field, Orlandine quickly realized the USER device itself lay somewhere within that inner system, and estimated a travel time of more than a year before she could distance herself far enough from it to drop back into U-space. Heliotrope possessed cold coffins, so for her the journey would not be so interminable, however she did not much relish the idea of leaving herself that vulnerable. Other ECS ships could jump to the interference field’s perimeter within that time, then come in on conventional drives. The longer the field remained functional, the more defences ECS would install around its perimeter, and it seemed likely they might possess weapons capable of knocking other ships out of U-space once the field shut down. So, the longer she remained in this area, the more likely would be her capture.

Checking her scans of the distant battle, she realized that travelling insystem to find somewhere to hide was no tenable option. Hundreds of alien ships swarmed in the area. She did not expect the Polity ships there to survive, nor did she think her presence here would go undetected for long. But another option remained: the asteroid field.

Orlandine fired up the Heliotrope’s fusion engine, turned the vessel, and headed away just as fast as she could. Somewhere amid those cold stones she should be able to find a place to hide her ship, and there power it down to avoid detection while she awaited the conclusion to events now occurring in the inner system.

‘Why are they holding off?’ Thorn enquired. He plugged a monocular into his visor to gaze out over the red jungle towards the enormous spiral ship.

The sky was growing darker now, taking on a milky green hue as the sun descended behind the cloud cover like a heavy rucked-up blanket. In the jungle around the alien ship, things were moving about, and occasionally half-seen shapes drifted high above. To Cormac’s left, where some cataclysm had denuded the ground cover, swirled errant lights like St Elmo’s fire.

Cormac glanced across at Blegg, who now squatted beside the nearest of those strange cubic ruins, which seemed like short sections cut from a square granite pipe with sides a yard thick. Seven cubes altogether were scattered over the area—just some unknowable ruin.

‘What do you think?’ Cormac asked the old Oriental.

Blegg squinted down the slope at the red foliage. ‘We know that if they wanted to wipe us out, it would be no problem to them: they could just drop a warhead. I would say they are reluctant to destroy a possible source of information, potentially valuable, and certainly easier to obtain than, say, trying to capture a Centurion.’

‘So they’ll still try to grab us?’Thorn enquired.

‘That’s what they tried in the jungle. Why else send in what were effectively ground troops when you could sit in the sky and burn the jungle down to bedrock? I believe the killing only started when the dracomen’s resistance to Jain technology got them reclassified as being not worth the effort to capture.’ Blegg looked around to the remaining dracomen and Sparkind positioned in surrounding terrain, then to the autoguns, and finally up at Arach crouching atop the nearby cube. ‘They will come again, and this time their assault will be more organized. We just have to decide what to do.’

‘How difficult is that?’ said Arach. ‘We fight.’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Blegg.

Cormac understood the man’s reservations. NEJ and the other ships remained out of contact, and it seemed likely they had either fled the enemy or been destroyed by it. So now this small ECS force lay isolated at the bottom of a gravity well, with little more than hand weapons available, and the forces arrayed against it seemed huge. In situations like this soldiers generally considered how they might die.

‘I for one have no intention of allowing myself to be captured.’ Cormac reached into his pocket and removed a small multipurpose grenade—a chrome cylinder no larger than a cigarette lighter, but with a charge capable of turning a human body into so much bloody fog. He gestured with the grenade towards Blegg. ‘You, however, have another option. You can escape. You can translate yourself through U-space.’

‘Yes, there’s always that,’ Blegg replied. He sounded tired. ‘But so can you.’

Cormac grimaced and returned the explosive to his pocket. ‘That is our last option,’ he said, not entirely convinced the option lay open to himself anyway. He needed first to open and absorb Jerusalem’s memory package, and it seemed unlikely he would be given the time for that. He looked around, then focused on Thorn, who had now removed his monocular from his visor. ‘Thorn?’ he enquired.

Thorn replied, ‘With us out in the open, all they need to do is sit up in the sky and pick us off with stunners or lasers, whatever they choose.’ He patted a hand against the envirosuit he wore. ‘The dracomen might stand a chance but we’ve no chameleonware.’

‘The cave system, then,’ Cormac commented.

‘So it would seem,’ said Thorn. ‘All we have to do is survive down there until rescue arrives—if it is coming at all.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Should we send the dracomen into the jungle? They would stand a better chance out there.’

‘I will try giving that order to Scar, but I don’t see him obeying it,’ Cormac replied.

‘Movement,’ said Blegg, abruptly.

Thorn turned and raised his monocular again. ‘Humanoid figure—a familiar one.’ He made to pass the monocular to Cormac, but Cormac waved it away. Ramping his visual acuity, using a program in his gridlink controlling the muscles around his eyes and configuring signals direct from his optic nerves, he soon identified the Legate walking from the jungle and up the slope towards them. He beckoned Scar over to him while he watched.

‘Scar,’ he said, ‘I am going to talk to this… Legate. And when it doesn’t get what it wants, I suspect we’ll be back into a fire-fight. Myself and the rest of the humans, and Arach, are going to run for the cave system and blow the entrance behind us. I want you to take your people into the jungle—with your camouflage you have a better chance of surviving there.’ Scar just stared at him for a long moment. Cormac continued, ‘This way some of us might survive to deliver a report to ECS forces when they arrive.’

Scar held up one hand, clawed fingers spread. ‘I will send five into the jungle.’

‘This is not open to negotiation, Scar.’