— From Quince Guide compiled by humans
Dragon had, probably with the collusion of Jerusalem, kidnapped her again. After their initial exchange, Dragon retreated into itself, literally, and ignored her persistent queries. Mika spent frustrating hours trying to elicit some response, then gave up and began using some of the facilities available in the conferencing unit. She fed herself, got some coffee, then settled in the single acceleration chair before a set of consoles and screens that displayed data from the probes sunk into Dragon’s body and from the scanning equipment all around her. Certainly, there was a lot of activity going on down there that went beyond anything she had witnessed before. What she was seeing could not all be about astrogation or Dragon’s internal organic U-space engines. But what was going on exactly?
Hours of research produced insufficient data for her to interpret, then abruptly the sphere resurfaced into realspace, and the Dragon head with accompanying pseudopods was back to make an announcement: ‘We have arrived.’
Rather than ask where they had arrived and risk receiving a frustratingly obscure reply, Mika used the units’ scanners and astrogation programs to find out. The answer, swiftly returned, made her stomach tighten as if in anticipation of violence. She stood and gazed out through the transparent walls.
Without enhancing the view, Mika could clearly see four Polity dreadnoughts and countless attack ships, but then that was unsurprising here, even before the attack on this system by one of Erebus’s wormships. She gazed at the opalized orb of the gas giant, then down at the familiar world Dragon was approaching: Masada. It was here, some years ago, a Dragon sphere had delivered her, Ian Cormac and others, and then sacrificed itself to create an army of dracomen; here Skellor had come in the massive Occam Razor to create mayhem; and here she had once nearly died. But that was not all, for what had once been a relatively unimportant world outside the Line of Polity, ruled by a space-dwelling theocracy but agrarian on its surface, had become of very great importance indeed.
Subsequent events, here and elsewhere, had revealed that ostensibly wild creatures roaming Masada’s surface — the aptly named gabbleducks — were in fact descendants of an ancient alien race, the Atheter, who chose to sacrifice their entire civilization and their intelligence just to survive Jain technology. This information had been obtained from an Atheter artefact found elsewhere but now residing on the planet’s surface. It was a huge chunk of crystal that contained an Atheter AI which, in exchange for giving the Polity the means of detecting Jain nodes, had asked to be brought and left here.
‘So why are we here?’ Mika demanded.
The Dragon head, which had been gazing at the view, turned towards her. ‘As you know, I already contain all evidence relating to the destruction of the Makers by Jain technology.’
Never a straight answer. Maybe Dragon just liked people to work things out for themselves, though Mika felt the alien entity just enjoyed being obscure.
‘Have you come for your dracomen?’
‘No.’
Okay, the occasional straight answer, when it didn’t give too much away.
She noticed now how the other Dragon sphere was drawing back as this one closed in on the world. She wondered what sort of conversation her host was conducting with those ships out there, or if everything had already been said by Jerusalem, and that the ECS forces here knew what Dragon was here for.
‘You have in here a portable memstore,’ Dragon observed.
‘I have numerous portable memstores in here.’
‘One of two hundred terabytes will be sufficient.’
‘What for?’
‘Further evidence.’
With a sigh Mika walked over to a storage cabinet ranged low along one wall. She reached down and brushed a finger against the touchplate over one drawer and watched it slide out. Taking out a small satchel, she popped it open and slid out a brushed-aluminium box ten inches square and two inches thick, its comers rounded, a touchscreen on the front, and along one edge a removable strip covering sockets for a variety of plugs including plain optic, a nano-tube optic, S-con whiskered, crystal interface and even a multipurpose socket for electrical connections. Tapping a finger against the touchscreen brought up the entry menu and also a status menu. The memstore was empty but for its base format programs, and diagnostics showed it to be working at its optimum. She slid the store back into the satchel and hung it by its strap over one shoulder.
‘Now what?’
‘Now I land,’ Dragon replied.
Even in the brief time it had taken for her to retrieve the memstore, Masada had grown huge. Mika made her way back to the acceleration chair, strapped herself in and tilted it right back. She didn’t expect there to be any problems, but if there were, she would rather survive them without the need for further repairs to her body by Dragon. Soon the sphere was clipping atmosphere, and what started as an intermittent whistling turned to a constant roar as vapour trails unravelled above her. Amid the buffeting, she could now feel the tug of gravity from below running athwart that produced by the gravplates of the conferencing unit. The Dragon sphere rolled slightly, as if to give her a better view, and she now gazed down upon the face of the planet with the horizon blurring in cloud above her head. For the next half-hour, the sphere became completely immersed in cloud, finally breaking through only a few miles above the surface. Mika gazed down upon a mountain range snaking along below, then felt a tug of nostalgia upon seeing the familiar chequerboard of ponds, then the wild boggy flatlands covered with flute grasses.
Dragon abruptly decelerated, the roar from outside turning to a rumbling thunderstorm. As they descended, and as the ground raced up towards her, she briefly feared that Dragon intended burying her conferencing unit in boggy ground, but the sphere tilted up again at the last moment. Outside the air filled with boiling clouds of steam and shreds of flute grass. Mika felt disorientated, since she was being pulled by the unit’s internal gravplates, which rested at an acute angle to the gravity of the planet. The humanoid Dragon head slid into view above her, with a pseudopod on each side of it.
‘Time to step outside,’ announced Dragon.
Mika unstrapped herself and made her way unsteadily towards the airlock, while the head and pseudopods disappeared back inside Dragon. Under the combined effect of two gravity fields, it was like making her way precariously down a steep slope. Once inside the airlock, she carefully closed her spacesuit helmet, since the air outside was too thin for any human to breath. After the airlock opened she tried to convey herself with some dignity to the boggy surface a few yards below but still disorientated lost her balance and fell onto the ground in a heap. Cursing, she struggled to stand upright on a mat of rhizomes, then inspected the black mud spattered all over her suit and began stumbling through the papyrus-like flute to reach a wide area where the vegetation had been flattened.
‘If you would follow the locator,’ suggested Dragon’s voice in her helmet, as a separate frame appeared in one side of her visor. She turned to her left until the frame was centred, then set out determinedly. After a moment the frame winked out.
‘Where, exactly, am I going?’
‘To the location of the Atheter artefact.’
‘I take it there are no hooders in the vicinity?’ Mika asked, referring to a local life form whose feeding habits were a legend of horror.
‘Do not be concerned — I am with you,’ Dragon replied.
‘What?’