'Wonder how long before we see copies,' said Cormac, when they reached the two Golem and the two dracomen.
'It would be a difficult adaptation,' said Aiden.
'Why's that?'
'It would require extensive rewiring of the nervous system.'
'You mean putting the legs on backwards and making them work.'
'Yes, that's what I mean.'
Cormac allowed himself a strained grin, then inspected Cento. The Golem had a fine network of lines on his face and on his hands. Obviously a new syntheskin covering could not be found quickly enough. He still wore his old one and the joins showed.
'Are you… all right?' he asked.
'All right?' Cento repeated.
'I mean,' said Cormac, 'are you fully functional?'
'I have eighty per cent efficiency. Replacement is better than repair. The welding of my chassis I cannot trust under the full loading of my joint motors.'
Eighty per cent. That meant the Golem could probably rip only one man in half at a time.
Cormac surveyed the crowds, then shrugged and began to pull off his coldsuit. Thorn did likewise. No one paid attention. Under his coldsuit, Thorn - like Cento and Aiden - had the uniform of a major in the ES regulars. Once he had his coldsuit removed, Cormac kept going until he was naked. He stooped and opened the bag Thorn had deposited. Inside he found underwear, chainglass body armour and a uniform. When he strapped on the armour, that drew more looks than his nakedness had.
Over the body armour Cormac donned the green and grey fatigues of a colonel in the ES regulars. It would ease the giving of orders. Once dressed, he again strapped shuriken to his wrist. He would be the only one of them armed. Hardwired proscription prevented the transmission of certain weapons through the runcibles, and it was easier to collect new weapons on the other side, rather than disconnect that wiring. Cormac could only manage to get shuriken dirough because he had managed to get it classified as an antique, but even then he needed special dispensations, and the weapon had to be deactivated. Had he tried to get it through illegally, it would have been reduced to dust by the proscription filter the runcible had inbuilt when he stepped out the other side. The body-armour helmet he dropped into the bag, along with a laptop that held all the information relevant to this mission. This was all he was taking. With a quick inspection of the inside of the sphere, he hoisted the bag to his shoulder.
'All set?' he asked, with a wary glance at the draco-men.
'Ready,' said Thorn, grimly.
Cormac stepped up onto the black glass dais and led the way to the twin horns of the runcible. In a moment they had reached the containment sphere and soon had it to themselves. They gathered before the twin horns.
'Samarkand II, is our destination set?' asked Cormac.
'Ready when you are,' replied the AI.
Cormac mounted the steps to the pedestal. 'Send the dracomen next,' he instructed Thorn, and stepped through the cusp.
STOP.
START.
One pace - and he stepped out of one of a bank of runcibles on the planet Viridian in the Mendax planetary system, in the Chirat cluster, 173 light-years from Samarkand.
The containment sphere was empty. But for the lack of crowds here, he might well have been stepping out in the Samarkand sphere again. Quince and light-cargo runcibles had been standardized for half a century; the big difference here was that this sphere was one of many, as had once been the case on Samarkand and as, hope- fully, would be the case again when Chaline finished her work. As he stepped off the pedestal the dracomen came out behind him, then Thorn, Aiden and Cento.
'Viridian?' Cormac asked, as of the air.
The voice of this new runcible AI had a maturity Samarkand lacked. Irritatingly it still had that patronizing tone, though.
'Sergeant Polonius Arn is waiting for you with a carrier. The weapons and supplies you detailed will be onboard. He will take you to a rendezvous with the ES regulars. They are waiting at a place called Motford, and from there we can head straight for your destination. It's one Viridian day's journey away, just a few hours more than solstan.'
'What about here, when that thing runs?' asked Thorn.
The AI replied before Cormac could say anything. 'In one day's time there will be an evacuation of this port, the surrounding area, and Westown, because of a fluxing antimatter-containment field. From that moment all runcibles here will only open to Samarkand. The Samarkand AI informs me that, from there, newly arrived personnel are being sent back to Minostra. The remaining technicians will return to Hubris, ostensibly to carry out a refit. The reason given is that another crisis has developed at the outlink station of Danet.'
'There,' said Cormac, 'sufficient, don't you think?'
Thorn nodded his agreement. They left the containment sphere.
The embarkation lounge was not crowded, but it seemed to be kilometres long. The four of them gathered round the dracomen and walked quickly to the far doors. Cormac thought that the strange glances they were getting were due to their uniforms rather than the bird-walking dracomen. He noted, with a quick sideways flick of his eyes, two dodgy-looking individuals loitering by a drinks dispenser, and surreptitiously reached down and keyed the start-up sequence into shu-riken. Before he had taken two more paces, shuriken's holster was humming against his wrist.
'You see them?' he asked Thorn.
'I saw them,' Thorn replied.
'Stay alert. We might be walking into it right now.'
'I'm always alert,' Thorn said, a touch of annoyance in his voice.
The doors opened out onto an AGC park surrounded by country with the bleak quality of moorland. Pools like tarnished copper coins were banked round with thick growths of something like sage, speared through with the black blades of sedges. Where there was neither of these, the ground was pebbled with something thick and green and which, without closer inspection, Cormac thought, could be either geological or biological. His momentary curiosity on this matter was assuaged when he saw one of these growths break open to fling a cloud of helicopter seeds into the air. As he walked on, he espied something like a flying rabbit with a split trunk come to suck the seeds up before they reached the ground. It got most of them. Cormac pulled his finger away from the quick release on his shuriken holster.
'Did they follow?' he asked of Thorn.
'Out of the lounge, yes - but not now,' Thorn replied.
'We've been eyeballed then. Probably something set up for later.'
In the distance could be seen a line of bluish forest, and beyond this the sky was cut by a chaos of laminated slabs that could have been alien ruins. Beyond the run-cible facility, the AGC park and a scatter of finned cooling towers that could have been mistaken for something living, there were no other buildings in sight. Viridian had been colonized for a long time. Only on the most recently colonized planets had it become acceptable to establish runcibles within cities - or cities around runcibles. The sky was pale-green, the sun showing through bluish clouds: a green glare of a copper arc light. The planet was well named. Cormac realized, as he stepped out, that this was what the submind had told them. Was there a red moon? he wondered. And what exactly were the 'glass dragons'? Was that a reference to the dracomen, or to the Maker?