‘Choose to die then,’ said Erebus, fading from the virtuality.
The engine was slightly damaged, but still workable. Throwing Erebus a virtual finger, Jack dropped into U-space once again
The transition from sleep to consciousness took Mika through fantastical territories of the mind in which she seemed to experience the sum of many waking episodes throughout her life. Sometimes she gradually surfaced to consciousness beside a youth little more than a boy, then beside a woman much older than her who introduced her to the joys of lesbianism, then with graceless ill-temper let her go when Mika discovered her preference did not lie there, then beside Cormac, his jaw muscles standing out rigid even in sleep, then finally cradled in wet alien flesh light years from humanity.
Waking became an amalgam of associations: sipping coffee, thirstily gulping hot white tea, sex in a tangled eroticism difficult to separate from other bodily needs to urinate, eat, drink and shake off a mind-numbing headache. Gradually, level by level, reality established itself as if it could have no more claim on her than her most grotesque fantasy. Then came a hard clamping convulsion all around, propelling her through a slippery sphincter.
In a splashing of hot slime she fell to a rugose but soft floor, coughed fluids from her throat and drew a hard breath into raw lungs. She scrubbed more fluid from her eyes and opened them, finding herself below a low ceiling in a place where she could see no wall, just reddish fog all around. Pulling herself up onto her knees she looked up to see the sphincter slowly fading away. When she reached up to touch the ceiling, it abruptly jerked away from her, encapsulating her in her own dome. Standing, she scanned around, and noticed that a large egg lay on the ground. She reached to touch this and it immediately split open to expose quite prosaic items wadded into cellular compartments: her clothing, spacesuit and pack of belongings. Her blouse, when she took it up and inspected it, seemed in perfect repair. Only upon studying it closely did she see that in places the seams had disappeared, being invisibly joined. The same applied to her spacesuit, and when she looked down at herself, she guessed the same handiwork applied to her. She dressed—as must surely have been the intention.
Finally: ‘Dragon?’—the word deadened by her soft surroundings.
‘Isselis Mika,’ a Dragon voice replied. ‘I am suitably convinced.’
Now the floor bowed beneath her, and something glimmered in the air and began to solidify out of it: a twenty-foot sphere surrounding her, constructed of glassy struts that hardened into opacity and between which glimmered clear diamond-shaped panes. Similar panes hardened underneath her feet.
‘Convinced of what?’
‘You were used welclass="underline" every memory you contained served to strengthen my compatriot’s case. Now, like yourself, I must be healed, and the processes inside us would reject the alien. Lie down, Isselis Mika.’
Mika obeyed. What choices did she possess? And still she was in a dreamlike state as if all this could not quite be real. Glassy fingers bound her to the inner surface of the sphere, then acceleration dragged upon her body. A tube corkscrewed upwards to flecked midnight. The sphere hurtled up and out into hideous brightness, which slowly faded as the panes around her adjusted. The tumbling sphere slowed as, despite the surgical adjustments to her inner ear, motion sickness threatened. Relative to the two nearby objects, it drew to a halt. The fingers holding her shattered when she strained to be free, and she floated around inside the sphere enjoying an omniscient view.
The part of Dragon entire from which she had been ejected had not returned to its spherical shape. Elongated, torn open, and with thickets of pseudopods waving from many surfaces and rimming raw gaping lips, it seemed offal torn from some beast, though one of leviathan proportions. The other sphere had retained its shape, though one with canyons now excavated through its surface. One of these crossed the manacle, and there hardened splashes of metal gleamed, partially burnt into the scaled skin. Then, like a seed germinating, its side bulged out and folded back like a giant eyelid, and from there extruded a massive pseudopod tree. The damaged sphere’s effort was small by comparison, but they joined again, a thousand blue lights winking out. The two drew together, spinning slowly at first then faster the closer together they came. Next they were one, spinning hard and melding into one titanic sphere.
The spin of this one sphere slowed over several hours. Mika fed herself meanwhile from her supplies, drank thirstily and dozed with her head against a pane that felt warm despite vacuum being less than an inch away. At last she felt some of the mugginess clearing from her head and found the inclination to anger. Jerusalem must have been aware of the first sphere’s intention, had perhaps instructed it to find its fellow. The AI must also have realized what a perfect piece of confirmatory evidence the contents of her skull would make. Doubtless, much that had happened here had been planned. However, she had been in huge danger—probably still was.
When the spin finally ceased the large sphere slowly began to acquire a waist, which grew narrower and narrower until an hourglass Dragon hung in void before her. Finally the two halves separated, and two unmarred Dragon spheres resulted. Mika found she could not maintain her anger, knowing she would be more angry to have missed this. As the glare of fusion flames caught her eye, and she turned to observe the approach of the Jerusalem, she smiled to herself.
Those on the rock face above were the same mix of biomechanisms Cormac fought earlier in the jungle. Below swarmed a multitude of the salamander creatures—all six limbs angled to grip stone as they squirmed their way up. But the rod-ships would come first, from above.
One of them dropped down directly opposite the ledge and slowly drew in. Knowing he could detonate the CTD with just a thought, Cormac decided he would wait until it extruded one of those tentacular growths, then he would turn this place into an inferno. However, the ship halted some yards out, and its side unzipped and peeled back, revealing a figure clamped in the fleshy interior. In the moment it took him to flick Shuriken out ahead of him, Cormac expected to see a hostage. But this was no hostage.
Cormac stabbed a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Arach already killed someone who looked just like you. I guess now it’s my turn to do the same.’
‘Just as humans can be recorded, so can I,’ replied the Legate.
‘That’s nice.’ Cormac peered down at the CTD, wondering why he even bothered with this conversation.
‘Why?’ asked the Legate. ‘Why resist like this and finally throw away your lives?’
Looking up, Cormac replied, ‘Because you will take our minds apart to find information useful to you, and discard the rest. You’ll either kill us in the process but, worse than that, you might decide to use us like automatons. You are Jain-based and that seems the way such technology operates.’
‘We would not utilize anything so ineffective.’
‘Death, then. I take it this “we” refers to yourself and some controlling intelligence.’
‘I am one with Erebus.’
‘Him being?’
‘The one who melds us all.’
Enough.
Cormac sent a command to Shuriken and the throwing star accelerated towards the Legate. Simultaneously, a gap appeared in the craft’s exterior beside the Legate, and something shot out towards Cormac. One of those octopoids he saw earlier. Shuriken veered and sliced through this object.