"You know," he said as he worked, "scoles are the same old biotech as the squerms and sprawns — brought in by the Theocracy when it first established itself here."
"Really," said Eldene through gritted teeth.
"Yeah. No one uses big ugly symbionts any more, and these things cut your lifespan by half."
Eldene turned and stared at him.
"You didn't know that, did you?" he said.
"I did not."
"It never occurred to you to wonder why proctors and priesthood put up with the inconvenience of breather gear."
"I thought… something to do with status…"
"You thought wrong."
Through the shuttle screen, Cormac gazed out at Elysium and saw neither green fields nor any of the blessed. The station was a morass of linked habitats clustered around the kilometre-long monofilament cables and struts that supported the main catchment mirrors of a sun-smelter facility. Here it was that the more free-wheeling entrepreneurial types towed in asteroids for smelting, bought refined metals, ran factories, and generally made large amounts of money — or not — in a grey area where the line of Polity had simply juddered to a halt and dissolved before the onslaught of the wishes of this place's inhabitants. There was a runcible installed, the reason they had stopped here, but as far as the Polity was concerned this was a place you came to at your own risk. There weren't many complaints made: those who might have wanted to did not usually get much of a chance, being given a brief tour of the inside of one of the smelters.
"There's many feel this place should be broken up," said Cento.
Cormac turned to the Golem, who was piloting the shuttle, and once again was struck by his perfection. This it was that told him he must be dealing with a copy of Cento for, since the events on Viridian, the original Cento had retained the brass arm that he had torn from the killing machine, Mr Crane, and this Cento possessed no such arm. Aiden appeared no different from how he had looked the last time Cormac had seen him, but the other Golem was yet another copy.
"There are places like this all across the Polity," said Cormac, "and those who object to them don't have to visit them."
"I like this place," said Gant from behind.
Cormac glanced round at him and Aiden. "You would," he said. "Wasn't it to here you and Thorn used to come for your holidays — a bit of relaxing non-lethal violence and enough high-tox cips to dissolve this shuttle?"
"Good days," Gant reminisced.
Cormac snorted and returned his attention to the screen, as Cento brought the shuttle in towards a conglomeration of habitats below the cylindrical tower of a giant refinery. Looking beyond this, he saw an ancient grabship clasping in its huge ceramal claw the single mountain protruding from the asteroid it was hauling in. As he understood it, the asteroid would be brought to one of the many furnace satellites, and then the sunlight from the mirrors would be focused upon it. While it heated, the automated systems on the satellite would draw off materials when they attained their particular melting or volatile temperatures. Nothing would be wasted: this place produced just about everything on the elementary table, and even the asteroidal ash that remained — such as it was — they used to make soil for the habitats. Thereafter, rough ingots and tanks were transported from the furnace satellites to the refineries and factories, there to be turned into bubble-metals, alloys and pure crystal for electronic applications, composites and complex compounds: every substance used by the material technologies of the Polity.
Soon, amongst the habitats, they noticed a structure like a giant octagonal coin around which clustered deep-space and insystem ships. There Cormac saw many of the multi-spherical varieties — ships consisting of any number of conjoined spheres — also ones with the sleek lines of cuttlefish, and those like baroque sculptures, still others that were replicas of vehicles out of human history: aeroplanes, early rockets and shuttles, and even one ship that had the appearance of an ancient sailing vessel.
"You get some types here," Gant observed.
Cento navigated the shuttle through this swarm and finally brought it to an open bay in the side of the structure. Cormac glanced back through the rear screen and saw that the Occam Razor was still easily visible. The reason given here by the docking control for the dreadnought not being allowed in was that it was just too large to be joining this crowd — supposedly just one accidental burst from one of its manoeuvring thrusters could crisp any number of these ships. He doubted this was the true reason and, to be honest, it irked him that some autocrat here could order a Polity battleship to stand off.
As the shuttle drifted slowly into the bay, through the shimmer-shield, Cento made a sound of annoyance.
"Problem?" Cormac asked.
"Not really," muttered the Golem, "but I have just been informed of what we are being charged for the use of this bay."
"Probably ten times the going rate," said Gant. "We're a type that ain't all that welcome here."
There were people coming towards them from every direction as they headed for the ramp leading down to the catamaran, but in the darkness there was no way to easily distinguish friend from foe, or rather, for all those foes to realize that Thorn and Stanton were not friendly. This did not last though, for somewhere on the barge an auxiliary generator or pile cut in. A searchlight beam lit the area around Brom's cabin, and began to traverse the deck. It found them as they were running down the ramp to Stanton's vessel.
"The mooring cables," Stanton instructed almost conversationally, as there rose an outcry from the barge.
Thorn grabbed the nearest cable and unhooked it from its bollard, while Stanton did the same with the other one. Stanton was leaping aboard as Thorn unhooked the final cable. Someone on the barge then decided it was no longer time for just shouting, and something smashed the cable from his hand, while the ramp behind him erupted into jagged twists of metal. He leapt from the ramp onto one of the catamaran's outriders and found himself clinging to a stanchion supporting the suspended cabin as tractor drives engaged in both outriders, and the vessel began to pull away. Thorn ran along the outrider to the steps leading up it into the cabin, but slipped when projectiles slammed holes through the surface next to his feet, and only managed to prevent himself falling into the water by catching hold of the safety rail guarding the steps. With his legs still trailing in the water, he glanced back at the quickly receding barge and saw one of the gun turrets swinging in their direction, before disappearing in an actinic explosion. From the ramp, most of Brom's people started opening up with hand weapons, while a small group of them set up a tripod-mounted missile launcher. Thorn assessed his chances of reaching the cabin at just a little above zero, and his chances of remaining alive, either there or here, as little different. Then a coughing sound from the rear of the cabin, and something cylindrical and black sped back towards the ramp. The explosion that followed sliced the ramp in half and threw those of Brom's people who were still intact into the water.