After correcting the Heliotrope’s course so that it matched that of the comet, she used the fore-mounted plasma cutter. The ice fluoresced as it made the transition from complex ice to water ice, and then into vapour. Cutting two deep holes, she opened the claw to its widest point, then manoeuvred the ship forwards until a claw tip inserted into each hole. Then she just fired up the cutter to full power and, over ten minutes, gave the comet a tail it had not possessed in many thousands of years, though this time a brief one that quickly faded into vacuum.

Once the hole was wide enough she detached the grab claw, then swung the ship around and reversed it into the cave. Utter darkness now, but every movement and action she precisely mapped in her extended haiman mind. At her order the ship fired cable-mounted gecko pads against the cavern wall, and drew itself into place. With an afterthought she made it clamp its main grab, like the pincers of some giant mechanical earwig, to a rocky outcrop. Then she powered down all the ship’s systems, before heading out to explore her new home.

After physically detaching her carapace, and herself, from the interface sphere, Orlandine headed aft to don a spacesuit and assister frame, then scuttled to the airlock. Once outside she clung to the hull and looked around. With her cowl up, the cavern seemed as bright as day from residual infrared emanating from the ship’s thrusters and the fluorescing of complex ices nearby.

The cavern stretched a hundred yards across and was four times as long, curving near the end down into a narrow hole. The walls consisted of countless concave hollows holding rounded pebbles encased in tough nodular masses of ice. Gas had bubbled through magma, then cooled, and the subsequent stresses had collapsed thin shells of rock into fragments. The cavern acted like a tumbling machine each time the sun thawed the comet, rounding the fragments eventually into pebbles. Millions of years of thaws and freezes, maybe billions had elapsed. That no pebbles floated free was probably due to them picking up enough frictional heat to stick to the ice as it cooled and supercooled. Orlandine pushed herself off from the hull, floated over to one side wall and grabbed an ice nodule to steady herself. Where her foot brushed accidentally against the wall, pebbles tumbled away like opaque bubbles. She would have to watch that. Careless movement in here could result in the open space being filled with a perpetual hail of them. Taking care to only grab clear ice nodules with no pebbles stuck to their surfaces, she made her way along the wall to the hole leading into another cavern. However, briefly peering in there confirmed just more of the same.

Orlandine spent less than an hour exploring before returning to the Heliotrope. How long could she tolerate waiting here? Back within her ship she decided to explore Jain technology in a virtuality. Perhaps that would keep boredom at bay.

Boredom did not get a chance to impinge.

Some in the cave were resting, others still meticulously checking weaponry. Blegg sat unnaturally motionless on a boulder, his head bowed. Cormac bowed his own head, and in his gridlink opened the memory package given to him by Jerusalem, and uploaded it directly to his mind. First, came the pain, then Cormac became himself, many months before:

They had surfaced from U-space, but for Cormac his perception of the real seemed permanently wrecked—a rip straight through it. Every solid echoed into grey void, and the stale air of the ship seemed to be pouring into that rather than towards some large breach nearby. Gazing at his thin-gun, Cormac saw it as both an object and a grey tube punching into infinity, which, he reflected with an almost hysterical amusement, was precisely what it had been to those he had killed with it. When he entered the bridge, Cento became a perilous moving form casting laser shadows behind it, and when the Golem fired his APW, the fire burned with negative colour…

…

This is memory, and I must not lose sight of that. The pain is not real. My mind is whole, I am whole…

…

Cormac fought against the enclosing structure, but could do nothing to help Cento. When he felt the wash of tidal forces through his body, he knew that in very little time that same wash would intensify sufficiently to shatter the Jain structure, but by then the tidal forces would have compressed and stretched his body to a sludge of splintered bone and ruptured flesh inside it. It occurred to him, with crazy logic, that such damage to himself was required as payment for the pain he already suffered. On another level it occurred to him that he was not entirely rational at that moment.

…

You didn’t try to subvert Cento. You knew you were going to die and just wanted the satisfaction of tearing him apart with your hands. Skellor, you erred.

…

The Ogygian jerked once, twice, then suddenly Cormac lay heavy inside the Jain structure — being crammed over to one side. Grappling claws.

…

Cento and Skellor both slammed into the wall. The Golem was down to metal, and Skellor even managed to tear some of that away. Long pink lesions cut into Skellor’s own blackened carapace, golden nodules showing in these like some strange scar tissue.

…

It became too much: to choose a moral death, then to accept an inevitable one, and then to have both taken away. If only he could strike even the smallest blow. But he could do nothing—was ineffectual. Then, in that moment of extremity, Cormac saw the way. Wasn’t it laughably obvious?

…

Staring into the tear in his perception he saw, only for a moment, U-space entire and, like an AI, comprehended it. Enclosed and trapped in Jain substructure, he turned aside and stepped to where he wanted to be, detouring through that other place that made nothing of material barriers. Three yards to the side of the cage of alien carapace, he stepped into the real, reached down beside a console and picked up his thin-gun. Only then did Skellor begin to react, but not fast enough.

Cormac brought the gun up, his arm straight, and began to fire.

…

‘The cables,’ Cento said calmly over com.

…

Cento, now impacted on the surface of a dark sun, along with Skellor.

…

Gasping a warm damp breath of the cave’s air, Cormac jerked into the present. Checking the time readout in his gridlink he realized that though those events aboard the ancient spaceship Ogygian took very little time, it had taken just over an hour for him to incorporate them in his mind. But what a vast difference his knowledge of them imposed on his thinking.

He had suffered horribly at Skellor’s hands, his mind just as ripped up as his body at the end. But he had translated himself through U-space—something always considered an impossibility for a human being, which was why he had never really believed Blegg to be human. But now Blegg claimed to be the avatar Cormac had accused him of being, and could not translate himself through U-space, yet it seemed Cormac could.

Cormac heaved himself up from the boulder he was propped against, phantom pains shooting through his body as it remembered old injuries, and his mind muggy and seemingly dislocated within his skull. Glancing across the cave he saw one of the Sparkind attaching a CTD to the underside of the autogun. It would be set to detonate the moment that weapon ran out of ammunition. Spikes had since been driven into the rocky lip of the fissure down which they intended to exit, and dracomen and the other Sparkind were checking the cable winders attached to their belts. For a moment Cormac experienced a surge of painful memory: that time on Samarkand when he, Thorn, Gant, and the two Golem, Cento and Aiden, had prepared similar gear for their descent into a shaft cut down into the ground. And how Gant died there—the first time.