All around the circumference of the hatch she heard locks disengaging, then with a liquid hiss the sections of the iris folded back into the outer rim. Immediately a smell as of from a hot terrarium in a reptile house rose from what was exposed below, along with the numbing scent of cloves. She peered over the edge directly at the skin of Dragon. Scales the size of a hand lay in an iridescent swirl across the surface area that bulged up within the circular frame. The whole of it seemed solid as rock but for one retreating red tendril, like a mobile vein, drawing out of sight at one edge.
Mika watched and waited. After a few minutes with nothing more happening she returned her attention to the console and screen. Out of curiosity she called up the list of those personnel authorized to open this hatch and gazed at it in puzzlement. There was only one name on it: her own.
‘Jerusalem?’ she queried.
No reply.
Mika used the console to access other controls within the conferencing unit, then initiated the voice-activated controls — which she soon realized would respond only to her.
‘Full outside view,’ she requested.
The walls all around shimmered and grew transparent. She thoughtfully observed the draconic landscape beyond, the glare of the distant white sun and the glimmer of stars. The other Dragon sphere was not visible, but that didn’t really mean anything. As far as she could see the giant sphere had not moved. She remembered the last time she had been here, and how the unit then planted on the surface of Dragon had been drawn inside immediately prior to the alien entity heading off into space to find its twin. Nothing like that was happening now, and she berated herself for being so paranoid.
‘The structure you occupy is shielded,’ announced the sepulchral voice of Dragon.
Mika turned back as the entity’s exposed surface below her unzipped, pouted for a moment, then began to revolve down into a crevice that opened wider. She peered over the rim into the entrance of a steaming red cavern, saw a flickering of shadow as something began rising up out of it. One limb of a pseudopod tree folded into view like a sprouting plant. Four cobra-head pseudopods then opened out from an inner stamen, their single sapphire eyes gleaming as they surveyed the interior of the unit, as if searching for any danger to their charge. On a thicker ribbed neck rested a human head the size of a boulder. It was different from the last one of its kind she had encountered, and she wondered if Dragon recreated these heads on every occasion. The head resembled that of a fasting shaven-pated priest. His pupils and irises were pure black, his pointed teeth and the interior of his mouth were pure white — as was also the forked tongue that briefly licked out.
Mika applauded ironically then asked, ‘Why did I need to be informed that this structure is shielded?’
The ribbed neck lengthened and looped over, lowering the head just a few yards out in front of her. ‘You did not need to know.’
Familiar infuriating draconic dialogue. She decided to go off at a tangent and get straight to her concerns. ‘What did you do to me last time?’
The head tilted slightly as if to observe her out of one eye that was better than the other. ‘Do to you?’
‘How did the other Dragon sphere — which is essentially part of you — change me after I was injured?’
‘What makes you suppose that it did?’
‘I feel it… and Jerusalem also has noted some physical alterations…’
‘Ah, Jerusalem…’
Mika experienced a sudden sinking feeling. ‘Yes, Jerusalem noted some physical alterations to my body. I would have spotted them myself if I had used a scanner, so there was no point in Jerusalem denying their existence.’
The head nodded. ‘Exactly.’
‘What have you done to me?’
‘We have merely prepared you for what we might encounter.’
‘That being?’
‘Humans are weak and susceptible to Jain intrusion. Their perception of reality is limited, and you will need to see.’
What? ‘Hang on… “what we might encounter”?’
The floor seemed to shift underneath her, and everything outside fell into shadow as the Dragon sphere revolved her away from the sun. She felt a surge of acceleration, only partially countered by the gravplate floor. A strong feeling of déjà vu impinged.
‘Where are we going?’
‘To the very source,’ Dragon replied. ‘Eventually.’
There came a shifting then. Something twisted inside her, and star-speckled space beyond the conferencing unit somehow inverted. The star speckles then became holes, and space between contracted to zero, yet she could still perceive it. She was seeing U-space, yet she remained sane. What had Dragon done to her? Briefly she glimpsed the other Dragon sphere: a massive complexity hollowed out of the underside of reality. And then she and the two spheres fell away from the Scarflow planetary system.
As she clutched the lectern console before her, Mika considered how little, apparently, Jerusalem trusted Dragon, and how she herself trusted Jerusalem not at all.
Construction robots, gathered like an infestation of metallic parasites, were now somnolent around the massive war runcible, and nil-G scaffolds lay distorted in one area where some missile had struck in the past. Debris was scattered about in surrounding space, which necessitated Heliotrope’s collision lasers being in perpetual operation. The runcible was an enormous pentagon with each of its five sides over four miles long — those sides each triangular in section, five hundred yards wide on all three sides. Dotted all around were blisters housing control centres, along with external generators, motors and a multitude of heavy weapons.
Orlandine knew the history of this object as one of a planned network of space-based runcibles for shifting large ships, even fleets through space, or for hurling moons at the Prador enemy. The idea for the latter utilization had come about during the initial stages of the great war when a runcible technician called Moria Salem had managed to use a cargo runcible to fling a moon at a Prador ship and destroy it, but the war had ended before this particular device here was ever similarly used. Subsequently, it was partially decommissioned, its controlling AI removing itself to a planetary runcible somewhere deep inside the Polity. However, it was best to be sure about such things.
The program she had created was in many ways similar to the kind of hunter-killer or bloodhound programs that Polity AIs had released on the nets to search for her. Having captured some of those programs, she remodelled and endowed them with much of what she had learnt about Jain technology. The way this program now differed from its original form was in size, sheer speed and an ability to reform itself to suit different computer architectures. But its main difference lay in the fact that it would become effectively an extension of her mind.
Sensor data of the war runcible showed that there were still things powered up inside it — systems still operating and maybe one or two somnolent war drones still in residence. Certainly, Polity AIs would never have left such a weapon unguarded. Yes, it was partially decommissioned, but it would have still made a good prize for any invader, or maybe for some stupidly ambitious separatist group. She used Polity transmissions protocols now just to initiate the kind of handshaking routine that ship AIs opened automatically upon arriving anywhere new within the Polity. Immediately a reply came back — Interdict area. No com available. Depart at once — along with a bloodhound program sent to check out Heliotrope. She had expected something like this and allowed the bloodhound to do its checking in an isolated system where it would find that this ship, the Draben, was merely a free trader that had dropped out of U-space to check out the war runcible — the ship’s captain indulging a curiosity that his ship’s AI had strongly advised him against. Meanwhile, her own program slid into the runcible’s computer architecture.