Cormac pressed his enviroboot down onto the tentacle, and it collapsed like burned cardboard. A kick aimed at the remains of the central rod-thing caused a yard-wide section of its remaining outer skin to fall in and shatter. Now, beyond that, Cormac could see something else.
‘Stay with me, Arach,’ he said and, drawing his thin-gun, walked slowly around this seemingly dead artefact of Jain technology. The others circled it with him, carefully keeping their distance and their weapons trained.
Face down on the ground lay a man in ragged clothing, the fingernails bloodily torn away from one extended hand. Cormac gazed inside him and observed there a colony of dead snakes. He prodded the body with the toe of his boot, nudged harder when there was no response, then abruptly squatted and flipped him over. He saw no exterior evidence of this individual being one of those hijacked by the Jam technology that now seemed to be falling apart all across Klurhammon — until he used his gun barrel to push aside a flap of torn shirt. This exposed a large triangular wound filled with pink brainlike convolutions. He tapped them with the end of his gun barrel and found they were hard. A more substantial jab punched a hole through the surface and stinking pus welled out. Cormac wiped off his gun barrel on nearby vegetation.
‘Utterly dead, it would seem,’ he decided, standing up. ‘Let’s head back.’
What now? A wormship had been sent here and a legate travelling on it had specifically targeted two human beings and utterly erased them. Finding evidence of who exactly those two victims were and why they had been killed was not something he was presently equipped for. It struck him that finding any evidence now would require a meticulous search of both surviving data and physical artefacts, starting beyond the crater where that ranch house had once stood and, if need be, extending ever outwards to cover the entire planet. This search might well be a task ECS could not at present afford to squander resources on, for even now squadrons of wormships were appearing near inner Line worlds and beginning to attack them. Reaching the ramp, Cormac halted and removed the Europan dart from his pocket, and inspected it again.
‘Any results on the dart number?’ he enquired of King.
‘It was one of a batch originally sold on Europa nearly twenty years ago,’ King replied instantly. ‘Those who bought darts from that same batch by electronic means are currently being located and eliminated from the inquiry. However, more than half of the eight thousands darts involved were sold for cash. Jovian AIs are running traces on those who possess guns suitable for firing such darts but, again, ownership or change of ownership of such sporting weapons is not always electronically recorded.’
‘What about a simple trace of any Europans who visited here?’
‘It is not necessarily the case that the two humans killed were themselves Europans. However, checks are being made across the entire Polity. Had the records here not been destroyed, that would not be necessary. It will take some time.’
‘And the traces of matter on the dart itself?’
‘They were alien genome: ground skate.’
‘Fuck,’ said Cormac out loud. ‘That scrap of skin?’
‘Virally corrupted — so nothing there.’
Cormac looked up to see the three human rescuees gazing down at him from the top of the ramp. Carlton, the elder of the two brothers, unfolded his arms and started down, his brother trailing behind him.
‘I understand that all the Jain technology here is dying,’ he began.
‘So it would seem.’
‘Do you require anything more of us?’
Cormac considered that for a long moment, as it seemed evident that the two of them now wanted to be on their way. The image files and other evidence Cherub had provided had been very useful, and he was loath to let such a vital witness go, but really he could think of no reason now to detain them.
He nodded. ‘You’ve both been very helpful.’
Carlton gestured over to his right. ‘Our home lies about ten miles from here. We would like to head back there now, to see what can be salvaged… start putting things back together again.’
‘Your companion?’ Cormac nodded towards the woman. Despite the loss of her arm, she now seemed in rude health after Smith’s ministrations. She just looked lost and miserable.
‘Jeeder will come with us,’ said Carlton. ‘Her lover and many of her friends are all dead.’ He paused contemplatively. ‘There is, I believe, an ECS Rescue ship on its way.’
‘There is.’
‘They will help, I’m sure, but meanwhile we can’t just sit in the ruins and wait.’
‘I understand,’ said Cormac.
The woman now came down the ramp to join the other two. ‘Thanks for saving my life,’ she said, though she did not sound entirely sure about it.
‘Yes, thank you,’ echoed both Carlton and Cherub.
Cormac watched the three set off. He could have taken them to their home but suspected they wanted to make the break now and rediscover their independence. The people of this world, apparently, had always been big on independence.
‘So what are we to do now, boss?’ enquired Arach.
Cormac looked round at his companions: Arach squatting at Smith’s feet like a nightmare pet, with Scar standing to one side, essentially unknowable. He wasn’t sure how to answer, but King whispered a reply in his ear.
‘I’ve been ordered to join ECS forces who are now attacking fifty wormships that have launched an assault on the world of Ramone.’
‘Well, that’s a ship-to-ship fight so we won’t be much help there.’
‘I’ve questioned the orders and they have been confirmed.’
‘Really?’ Cormac was puzzled to be diverted away like this but had to assume that Jerusalem knew what it was doing.
King continued, ‘There has been a wormship landing on Ramone. You are to liaise with the commander of groundside defence of Megapolis Transheim. Apparently your mission will be to capture a legate.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Ours is not to reason why—’
‘Yeah, no need to go on.’
‘It seems,’ Cormac now replied to Smith, ‘that we’re just about to get bloody.’
Once the two spheres had again dropped into U-space, Dragon retreated into itself and refused to communicate. Mika tried accessing the memstore recounting the Atheter story but found it kept knocking her out of the circuit… almost like it resented her intrusion. Instead, she returned her attention to the data being collected by the probes deep inside Dragon. As she had noted before, there was something going on here that went beyond Dragon’s control of its U-space engines.
Her screen now showed the shifting of large amounts of material, massive energy surges and a great deal of computing… of thinking. Perhaps Dragon was busy doing things it felt constrained from doing while it was under direct Polity observation. The alien entity had, after all, broken its Maker programming and was now free to do and be whatever it wanted, but what did it want? She began running analyses to try and make some sense out of all she was seeing. After a few hours she had worked out that Dragon was building numerous additional layers of skin below its scales — layers of super-conducting meshes and all sorts of complex metallic compounds — and that it was also constructing large tubes that ported at the surface all about its equator. That was as far as she got in her quest when abruptly the entity surfaced to the real.
‘Are we at our destination?’ she asked.
There came no reply. However, the journey till now could not have taken them that far, and somehow she felt that Dragon’s journey would be a long one. Exterior view was still available, but all she could see was star-flecked space and the other Dragon sphere rising over a scaled horizon. Turning the scanners outwards rewarded her with more detail. They were in orbit about a dead sun: there were no planets here, just a massive ring of asteroidal debris. The scanners revealed that the two spheres were closing in on an asteroid shaped like a mile-long chicken egg with a large chunk excised from one side. The images were not particularly clear, for this asteroid lay on the other side of her own Dragon sphere and the scanning equipment had been designed to scan the sphere itself rather than anything beyond it.