Skellor attempted a smile, but his face felt stiff. Going deeper into his Jain structure he began to build further useful… tools.
The corpse was laid out on a table inside the isolation booth while forensic robots, which were complex near-kin of autodocs, swarmed over it like chrome dung beetles as they investigated and catalogued its structure. Cormac observed this process with a feeling of chill that he had brought up with him from the platform on which he had met Blegg. What he had seen down there… what had he seen?
"They were rather touchy, down there," said Mika, as she studied screens and, through the touch-consoles below, tapped in further instructions to the robots.
Down there?
After a moment he realized she was referring to Elysium and the difficulties the three Golem had experienced extracting her from that place. He smiled then, remembering her inability to ask direct questions. "They thought they were about to suffer a Polity takeover."
"An understandable reaction," Mika replied, as he turned. She made a pushing gesture with her hand, exposing the tattoo on her palm that signified her graduation from the Life-Coven on the planet Circe — a secretive place that produced some of the best analytical minds for biosciences in the entire sector. Cormac studied her. She had changed only a little since the last time he had seen her: her orange hair was now shoulder-length rather than the crop it had been, her eyes were still demonic red and her skin pale, but she had acquired some bulk on her diminutive frame that had not been there before.
"Have you had a chance to look at the artefacts?" he asked her.
"Briefly," she nodded to the nearby case in which they were contained, "but such items require deep and intensive study."
"Then they are Jain?"
"Oh yes, but in all honesty this thing is much more interesting." She indicated the creature Shuriken had killed in the Separatist base on Callorum, as some of the forensic robots now burrowed inside it. "You realize that this was once a human being?"
"I saw the similarities, but I assumed it was just some bio-construct of Skellor's and left it at that. He's had a tendency to come up with some nasty devices: poisonous snakes directed by microminds, birds with planar explosive packed into their bones, and more recently an organic gun that fires darts which are apparently just grossly enlarged bee stings but can inject the poison or drug of your choice."
"It's surprising he was allowed to remain free," Mika opined.
"We never had anything definite on him until he started taking Separatist pay cheques, so we left him alone in the hope he'd lead us to others, which he did." Cormac grimaced. "Though now I suspect that maybe we left him to get on with his work for a little too long." He gestured to the corpse in the isolation booth. "You said this was once a man."
"Or woman," Mika replied. "I'll have it sexed in a little while, though I can't see what there is to be gained from that. Essentially what Skellor created here is a melding of calloraptor and human being, but that's not the most interesting part: this creature has a nanotech structure inside it that worked very quickly to repair its body."
"Yes, quite," said Cormac with irony.
Mika acknowledged his tone and went on, "Only by damaging its body so severely did you manage to take it beyond its ability for self-repair."
"We don't possess anything like that."
"No, I would say its source is Jain, as our own nanotechnologies are just nowhere near as advanced." She gestured to the artefacts. "Though I have to wonder if they are that source."
"Meaning?"
"From what little I've learnt from them I know that they are Jain, but they're severely corrupted, and I wonder if any more could be discovered from them than we'd learn from a pot shard about the full extent of the Roman civilization."
"Then Skellor has something else."
"One would think so," replied Mika, gazing past his shoulder to the laboratory's door. He glanced back and saw that Scar had entered and now stood waiting with the usual reptilian patience. Mika continued, "Of course you can ask him yourself once he's found."
Cormac snorted at that, "If we find him."
"He won't be able to hide down there on Callorum forever, and the remote sensors Occam dropped will pick up any ship that leaves or arrives," said Mika.
"You're forgetting his chameleonware. I guarantee he has a ship stashed somewhere on the surface, which he'll be able to leave on without being detected," opined Cormac. He turned to Scar, "What do you want here, dracoman?"
"It is not a case of what he wants," said Mika, standing and moving past Cormac. "Come in, Scar. Let's start where we left off."
Cormac had also not forgotten Mika's fascination with dracomen… and Dragon. That, besides her expertise, was the reason he had brought her along.
The Occam Razor came out of underspace five hours earlier than expected, some time after most of the crew had gone into cold-sleep, but before Cormac himself felt the inclination. In a pensive mood since his encounter with Blegg and his discussion with Mika, he immediately demanded to know the nature of the problem. Occam took a moment to reply as it was not a very co-operative AI.
"Distress call," was all it said to him.
Cormac tossed aside the note screen he had been studying, got off his bed and quickly pulled on his ship-suit and exited the cabin. Perhaps Tomalon might have more to say. Reaching the nearest drop-shaft, he keyed in the deck level from which the bridge pod had previously extended, then he stepped in. On the requisite deck, he quickly found one of the ubiquitous drones, and asked it for directions. Luckily, Occam had not shifted the bridge pod, and soon Cormac was there.
"What have you got?"
Tomalon turned towards him blinking to clear his eyes of the views projected through his link with the ship's sensors. Cormac wondered what it was like — flying the ship, being the ship.
"A landing craft. Looks to be of Masadan manufacture. Life signs evident just for one person, though there may be others in cold-sleep." He nodded to one of the windows and up flickered a view of a battered-looking craft with one of the Occam's grabships heading towards it. This unknown craft was a much smaller version of those ships used to tow asteroids to Elysium.
"The distress signal, what format?" Cormac asked.
"Standard Polity."
"Strange."
The grabship closed on the landing craft like some huge metallic tick, its triple claw unfolding spiderish against the actinic glare of the stars. Slowing to match the speed of the craft and adjusting to match its rotation, the grabship closed its claw and gripped before speeding back to the Occam. When it filled the screen, another view was cast up, from one side, of the grabship decelerating into the maw of a hold: a wasp with captured grub, flying into a hole in the wall of a house. As the hold irised shut behind it, Cormac glanced at Tomalon, who lifted a hand almost concealed in linking technology and gestured to the drone that had just entered.
"I'll take you there," he said.
So that was how much he identified with the ship.
"Have Cento and Aiden meet us there, armed," said Cormac, turning to go.