Let it go.

A black missile slammed into the hovering shape’s side, detonated and sent it cartwheeling out of sight, coming apart. Spider legs abruptly closed around Cormac and hauled him from the ground. Shuriken came screaming back to the rescue. He just retained the presence of mind to offline the grenade program, and recall the throwing star to its wrist holster, as Arach carried him to cover. Damp darkness then, and a blast throwing dust and rock past him. He finally let go of his consciousness—didn’t want it.

Stalactites poised above Blegg like dragon’s teeth. Damp air groped about his face and somewhere he could hear water trickling. But he focused his attention inward to view another episode in his life, another death, this time on the planet Cheyne III.

Walking out along the jetty towards the boat supposedly containing a Separatist arms cache, there had been no time for him to think his usual To die like this after so long. One moment the boat rocked there on the waves, solid and substantial, the next it turned into a spreading ball of flame. He recollected briefly seeing the jetty flung up like the rearing back of a snake, then the blast hit him. No pain, just a cessation. Then he woke up in the ECS Rescue ship, recovering from cuts, burns and concussion. The reality, he knew, was that nothing larger than what you might scrape up with a teaspoon then remained of the Horace Blegg who hunted Separatists on Cheyne III. Only memories, constantly copied via a link open to the runcible AI.

Here no such link existed, however, and should he die a new Blegg would only remember up to the point he went out of communication with the NEJ, from where Blegg’s memories had been regularly retransmitted to update his back-up. But of course this sort of thing had happened before—these breaks in the narrative of his apparently endless life. When he was thrown to the ground in the Highlands of Scotland, apparently by the blast from a satellite strike, that was a cut-off point. But he now remembered himself lying twisted on his side and gazing in puzzlement at the ribs of his own chest splayed out like bloody fingers, and seeing circuitry patterns etched into his bones. No bump on the head dispelling consciousness, and it hadn’t been a Shockwave that threw him down either, but an explosive seeker bullet. And he just died, very quickly.

But the false bit? Only these extra memories, only these undone deletions told him which they were. Earth Central falsified the day it took him to return to Geneva, probably only to add a certain variety. In reality, EC just took out of storage another body — another facsimile of humanity neither Golem nor human but something else. Another Blegg. When the antimatter bomb struck Tuscor City, the AI had simply placed on hold all his memories concerning events after he left the attack ship Yellow Cloud. So here, now, that whole episode culminating with the searing hammer of that blast finally reaching him, conflicted in his memory with another memory in which he never went down to the planet, since the arrival of the Prador destroyer gave him no time. The bomb on Amaranth Station turned him into slurry, but that small agonizing moment was deleted and replaced with the memory of him having transported himself out at the last moment. Of course, much that ensued was also false, until a new body could be put into place.

Lies, all lies. And what seemed even more cruel was his emulating a human so closely that he wanted to believe his own myth. The Atheter AI had known, for when he gave it his word it replied, ‘I know—it’s the word of a ruler.’ A partial truth perhaps, since he was merely the creation of a ruler. The Legate had known with its, ‘Had we broken them, be assured that you would now be under my control, as would all here, AIs or those using gridlinks or augs… Including you.’

Blegg rubbed his palms together. They felt gritty, just as they had felt when he climbed to the top of the monolith on Cull to find uncomfortable revelation. Similar revelation had occurred to him before. Captured and dragged into a Separatist base on a moonlet that was only a number on the star charts, he faced torture and interrogation. A ridiculous situation since he had not been on a mission then, merely checking out some fossils that should not have been there. The fast picket that dropped him off was not to return for some weeks, so no cover and no AI on hand to record his memories. They used psychoactive drugs on him, physical torture that left him minus three fingers—removed one joint at a time — minus the skin across his stomach, his testicles crushed and burnt. They could not believe their luck in having captured him. Their leader did not believe it, so the interrogation continued. At some point he became a mewling thing with only a passing resemblance to a human being. Awareness then returned to him with a thump and all the confusion suddenly receded. Clarity of mind became absolute, but what initiated it? They had discovered something very strange about his body, were working to keep him alive to take elsewhere for deeper study and a more meticulous investigation. They talked of the technology for probing minds and other things of a similar nature. Blegg remembered previous deaths, remembered what he was, and knew this could not be allowed. But what could he do? He no longer possessed workable limbs. He decided it was time for him to die. However, then came AI linkage to his mind as the attack ship Yellow Cloud entered the system looking for him. It uploaded his memories as far as and including the moment when the missiles hammered into the base and converted it into a glowing crater in the face of the moonlet. Blegg’s new body thereafter possessed no conscious recollection of this inconvenient episode. It did possess something else, though, should something like this occur again and no attack ship be on hand. It contained the seeds of destruction of itself and much else beside. It became a weapon, as well as a vessel for his consciousness. Of course to use that weapon Blegg had to remember he could die, that he had died many times.

Again Blegg felt that potential awaiting his conscious command. It had been used occasionally since that time on the moonlet, but he had no memories of the circumstances involved, since it was impossible for him to have them. Only after-the-event recordings were open to him: the gutted Prador destroyer he was held captive aboard, sludge smeared across a rocky plateau on a world seceded from the Polity—all that remained of a rebel army—and other less dramatic occasions when he lost contact with the AIs and was in danger of being forced to reveal too much.

This time, however, he realized there would be no new Blegg. Now the truth in all its raw and painful detail stood open to him, just as his facsimile human body now lay open to his internal inspection and under his absolute control. There could be no more Blegg because a certain point had been irrecoverably passed. Time, he felt, for this to be made known.

He gazed across the dank cave in which they now found themselves. Cormac still lay unconscious, and Blegg knew that on some deep level the agent probably fought against waking. Thorn had gone the way of Gant—both of those human Sparkind soldiers dead now, both of the men who had joined Cormac at Samarkand.

Blegg watched his fellow agent, waited, and remembered his many deaths.

Consciousness returned abruptly and painfully and the first clear image in his mind was of Thorn’s face melting apart before him. For a moment he could not equate the image with anything he knew, then the full impact of memory hit him.

My decision.

Cormac opened his eyes, ramping up his light sensitivity in the gloom. He lay against a pack which in turn was propped against a rock. He realized his visor was open, but was breathing okay so did not hurry to close it. The planet’s air mix could sustain human life, with only its temperature being too high on the surface. Cool down here.