Gridlinked

'Will the detector pick them all up?' Cormac asked.

No one felt inclined to answer him.

'Let us hope you can make a counteragent, then,' he finished.

They watched as the section was finally cleared, and the doors closed and hermetically sealed.

'Hubris, we need samples,' said Chaline.

The picture being showed to them changed to a view into the shuttle bay. The camera zeroed in on a section of polished floor. On the floor were dull footprints from which spread black fibres like dry rot. The camera pulled back to show a little remote drone hovering a few centimetres from the floor. It was a chrome cylinder not much bigger than a man's forearm. All along its underside it had pairs of manipulators. In one crab claw it held a sample bottle. As it approached the footprints another arm unfolded. By one of the footprints that arm folded down and smoke spurted up. The yellow laser beam only became visible in that smoke as the drone meticulously cut two strips of flooring, levered them up with what could only be a screwdriver, and dropped them in the bottle.

'I'll have to get down to Isolation,' Chaline said to Cormac. 'I have a lot of work to do. The entire hull of this ship is ceramal.' She waited a moment for him to say something. Cormac let her go without comment.

Back in his cabin, Cormac called up a view into Iso- lation and watched the dracomen eat yet another meal. Could it have been them? he wondered. Somehow that did not seem Dragon's style. It was possible, but why would Dragon do such a thing? Why would Dragon want the people of Samarkand killed? Or perhaps he was asking the wrong question. Why would Dragon want the Samarkand runcible destroyed? He shook his head. There was not yet enough evidence to put any theories together.

'Hubris, any luck with that submind?'

The AI's reply was quick and succinct. 'I do not have the capacity to spare for it at the moment.'

'The mycelium?'

'Two-thirds of my capacity is being used for decoding it and designing a counteragent.'

'OK, can you put me through to the submind?'

'Yes.'

'—throw away archetypes but keep ideas bathwater baby hell hath no hungry mole lord of pain lord of pain where is edge? Sinter snapping hove to green rotting fruit—'

Running his finger down a touch-strip Cormac turned the sound down. He said to the submind, 'The runcible buffers were destroyed by a nanomycelium.'

He turned the sound back up.

'—hungry hungry eater green green grass is green fell into the rainy day bleed break men lizard Janus—'

Men lizard?

'Who destroyed the runcible buffers?'

'—gain gone flee on invisible wings rotting fruit blackthorn thorns peach—'

Cormac clicked the voice off. For a moment he thought he had something there, but would the runcible AI have known who planted the mycelium? It seemed unlikely. Had it known, it would have transmitted more information before its destruction. Had it known, it would have instantly shut down the runcible. Freeman might have ended up lost in underspace, but that would have been better than him causing the deaths of 10,000 people.

'Hubris, show me that mycelium in the shuttle bay.'

The picture on the screen changed. There was no word from the AI. Perhaps it was getting impatient with him. He stared at the picture. Even with part of the deck cut away the shape of the dull footprints was evident. They were long and splayed, with a mark for a back toe; obviously not human and obviously the footprints of dracomen, but was that damning evidence? Anyone who had been to the surface could have carried some of the mycelium away with them. The dracomen had been there longer, so it was more likely to be them.

'Hubris, the dracomen brought the mycelium aboard.'

'Already aware.'

Cormac rattled his fingers on his desk.

What now?

He could try the dracomen again, but his last attempt at communication had tried his patience to the limit. He was sure they were quite capable of speaking with him in some manner, but one of them just sat there and grinned while the other just sat staring at the food dispenser. Perhaps what he needed was face to face, rather than gestures through the viewing window and speech through the intercom.

'Damn it!'

He stood up and headed for Isolation.

As he came from the drop-shaft Cormac saw that Mika was standing before the viewing window to the isolation chamber. She stood in an attitude of deep contemplation, an elbow cupped in one hand and her other hand under her chin. Standing like that she appeared less of a girl. Or was he seeing her differently now? He wondered how old she was. She could be anywhere from eighteen to 300 years. Appearance had not been a way to judge age for the last four centuries. He walked up beside her. She did not acknowledge his presence until he was two paces from her.

'Ah, Ian Cormac.'

'Just Cormac. Something bothering you?'

'No, not really - not bothering me. I'm just intrigued. I did some checking.' She pointed to the floor of the isolation chamber by the far wall. 'You see those?'

Cormac looked across and saw what appeared to be a couple of screwed-up polythene bodysuits. He looked from them to the two dracomen, who were squatting motionless in the middle of the chamber, and noticed that they appeared cleaner, brighter.

'Skins,' he said. 'They shed their skins.'

'They've done it three times since they were put in here. They're regenerating: sloughing off and excreting radiation-damaged cells, and rapidly replacing them.'

'Yes, Hubris told me.'

She glanced at him. 'Did it also tell you that they are also immune to cancer, to replication error?'

'A handy trait, but it is also one we have.'

'Yes, but ours is done by viral or nanomachine repair of our DNA based on the corrected birth blueprint. We still develop cancers and they still have to be cured. This is completely different.'

'I don't know whether or not it is relevant, but, as well as it being proposed that dracoman was one of the race Dragon claimed to represent, it was also proposed that he was some kind of organic machine.'

'We are all organic machines. No, you miss my point… I analysed some of that skin. They are without DNA. They replace cells by direct protein replication. It's been done before, but no creature has ever evolved that method. Far too complex.'

'So they are some kind of machine?'

'If you want to call them that. Philosophy is not my field.'

Cormac felt a twinge of embarrassment. 'I guess that was a stupid thing to say.'

'It was.' She smiled briefly to take the sting away, and went on. 'But these creatures definitely were made in some way. You call them dracomen and in doing that you infer gender, but they are completely sexless: no self-contained method of reproduction. I would say, considering their antecedents, that they were made to serve a purpose, and that purpose is not their own survival and continuation of their genes, as with us; it is Dragon's purpose. They are an alien form of the Golem Series - or any other android for that matter.'

'And what might their purpose be?'

'I have no idea. All I know is that this Dragon built well.'

'There's more?'

'Endless. I could make a lifetime of study out of them.

Their bones are solid; calcium laminated with something similar to tooth enamel, and about twice the size and density of ours. They've got a digestive system which could extract nutrition from a stone.' She turned to him again. 'But, as we know, they take the easy option.' She turned back. 'And their musculature is as dense as old oak. We are lucky Uiey felt no inclination to leave this isolation chamber when we first put them inside. The door would not have stopped them.'