He sat upright. ‘What’s the situation?’

Too abrupt a move, for he became suddenly dizzy and nauseous. A huge spider tracked across his vision over to the left — Arach—then Blegg loomed before him.

‘We lost many,’ said the old Oriental. ‘There are only seven dracomen with us down here, though five others made it into the jungle. Three human Sparkind surviving, one of them probably not for much longer. Six Golem Sparkind too, some of them badly burnt but still functional. One remaining autogun and Arach.’

‘The enemy?’ Cormac asked.

‘We collapsed a thousand feet of cave behind us. If they want to kill us, I suspect a near-c projectile could penetrate this deep. However, our scanners can hear them burrowing, so evidently they still want to capture us alive. At their present rate it will take them perhaps ten hours to reach us.’

Cormac checked the timings in his gridlink: fifteen hours before the NEJ and the Haruspex could reach the USER, and he suspected that whatever happened there would be concluded very quickly—one way or the other. He slowly heaved himself to his feet and looked around.

They were located in a large oblate cavern in which tube lights, stuck to the walls, revealed to be toothed with orange and green stalactites and stalagmites. Arach reared up against one wall, perhaps feeling the approach of the burrowers through his feet. To one side of Cormac lay an individual wrapped in a heat sheet, a small autodoc clinging at the neck. Difficult, at a glance, even to know the soldier’s sex, the patient’s head being burned raw and featureless. Some dracomen moved about, checking equipment which ran optics to probes sunk in the surrounding stone. The silvery skeleton of a Golem strode past, shedding pieces of charred syntheflesh.

‘Can we go deeper?’ Cormac asked.

Blegg sighed and plumped himself down on a rock. ‘Yes, we can go deeper. A fissure leads down at an angle over there.’ He pointed past the stripped Golem to a dark cave mouth. ‘But we are only delaying the inevitable.’

Cormac peered at him. ‘You’re normally a little more upbeat than this. Surely our whole lives are spent delaying the inevitable.’ He felt a sudden unreasonable anger at what he felt to be Blegg’s fatalism, while in another layer of his mind understood his own reaction being due to the loss of Thorn. ‘Do you suggest we surrender, then, or just kill ourselves here?’

‘I’m presently suffering from a dearth of suggestions,’ Blegg replied.

Cormac allowed his anger some slack. ‘Then let me suggest that it is time for you, Horace Blegg, to take your leave of us. Since you possess the means.’

Blegg stared at him, and it seemed something metallic glinted in the old man’s eyes. ‘My time has been interesting,’ he stated. ‘Since that runcible connection opened to Celedon station, I have learnt much.’ The gleam faded from his eyes and he gazed off into the darkness and continued more introspectively. ‘As well as obtaining the U-space signature for Jain nodes from an Atheter AI, I obtained the beginning of revelation. That AI replayed for me the key episodes in my life since Hiroshima, and only from that alien perspective did I understand how so very fortunate I was to be present at most of the pivotal events in history since then—not enough to make me overly suspicious, but no small number either.’

‘And this is leading where?’ asked Cormac, impatient now to do something, anything.

Blegg turned and stabbed a finger at him, the metal back in his eyes. ‘You, Ian Cormac, believed me to be an avatar of Earth Central, a construct. I tried to ignore that suggestion because the immediacy of my existence has been too real to me, yet you planted the seed of doubt. Is my history my own, is my mind my own? Am I real? I cannot erase doubt, and I see it would have continued to grow.’

‘Would have?’

‘I never told you where I obtained that Jain node.’

‘True, you did not.’

‘Jain nodes are activated by living intelligent organisms, only thereafter can the technology they produce manage to attack and subvert our technology. Mr Crane obtained Jain nodes on Cull. He kept them and they did not react to him, did not activate—perhaps some safety measure built in by the Jain AIs that created them. My doubts were growing; the accumulation of coincidence throughout my long life has reached a critical point from which I cannot recover without huge erasure of memory and much adjustment. Machines are like that, they reach a point where the work involved in patching and repairing is no longer worth the effort. My usefulness to Earth Central is at an end and, in collusion with Mr Crane, EC opened my eyes to reality. Mr Crane tossed a Jain node to me, and I caught it in my bare hand. No reaction. That I am a being that possesses intelligence, I’ve no doubt, but am I that thing so hazily described as a living organism?’

‘I see…’

Utterly emphatic and emotionless, Blegg continued, ‘The Hiroshima bomb blast: all gleaned from witness statements, expanded by AI, and extrapolated into a constructed memory for me. The Nuremberg trials: again that gleaning, because so many people have written about them, speculated about them. All construction, too. Later memories come clearer—is that because those are not so far from me in time? No, because the clarity of recording media in later years improved, and from it better memories could therefore be constructed.’

‘You appeared like a projection once on the Occam Razor, but I touched you and found you solid,’ ventured Cormac.

Blegg waved a dismissive hand. ‘Projection integrated with hardfields—an easy trick.’

‘So all the ship AIs, Jack, Jerusalem, the lot… all colluded in this?’

‘They must have, when it became necessary for them to know about my true nature. Earth Central wanted its avatar to be a human leader, as well as a legend, something to give hope and encouragement. It is a trait of the human race to raise some of its members to high regard, quite often when they are not deserving of such, hence the cults of celebrity in earlier centuries. Earth Central wanted to choose one so up-raised, create that one… I resent not being allowed to know myself, even though I am a part of Earth Central itself.’

‘Are you so sure now?’

Blegg pointed to the mound of rubble heaped to one side of the chamber. There, Cormac assumed, lay their entry point. ‘Out there, the enemy knows, which is why it wants to capture me. That mere fact has brought online different programming within me. I realize now that I cannot translate myself through U-space. I never was able to. I step from Valles Marineris on Mars to the runcible there, transport to the runcible on Earth’s Moon, and step from there to the Viking Museum—all memories created in a virtuality.’

‘So down here, you will probably die with us, or be captured.’

‘I will die, if that is the correct term. There is too much of Earth Central within me for capture to be allowed. I will fight for as long as I can, then, when capture seems imminent, I will activate a nanite weapon inside me, and destroy myself. There will be nothing left. But the question that remains is can you escape in the way I cannot?’

‘I won’t leave them.’ Cormac gestured around.

‘But perhaps’, said Blegg, ‘you should find out if that option is available to you.’ He stood up and moved away.

Damn him!

Blegg’s newly discovered self-knowledge made him appear coldly fatalistic, though it did appear they were in a trap from which there seemed no escape. Cormac began moving around the chamber, till he found the remaining Sparkind all gathered in one area, laying out their remaining equipment and checking it over. One Golem, the side of his face burned down to ceramal, stood up when he approached.

‘Assessment?’ Cormac enquired.

‘We have taken heavy losses,’ the Golem told him. ‘Once they break through—at their rate of burrowing, we estimate in ten hours—with our present munitions, and factoring in their likely rate of attack, we should hold them off for a further half an hour.’