This entire system of moons was named — so the screen notes informed Cormac — by their discoverer, one Braemar Padesh. Cormac felt the man must have used some strange random search in their naming process. He was already ruminating on whatever preparations were now being made on Flint, and how costly they might prove in human life, when his door chime sounded. Immediately, in the corner of the screen he was gazing at, a view into the corridor outside flicked up.
"Enter," he said, and the door opened behind him.
"There's something you should know," said Mika, walking quickly into the room and perching herself on the edge of his sofa.
"That is?" he asked, after washing down another mouthful of food with a sip of wine.
"There has been some kind of communication between Scar and Dragon."
"Specifically?"
"Just before the sphere was detected Scar showed… signs of distress, collapsed, then went into convulsions."
"Communication?"
"It seems the most likely explanation. I would conjecture some kind of link."
"Why that conjecture?"
"Because dracomen are tough and as far as I can tell there is very little that can cause them distress; because Dragon is here and it has happened now," she replied.
He studied her for a long moment and wondered if she had bothered to ask Scar what had happened to him.
"Where is Scar right now?" he asked.
"With the Golem — Gant." Cormac noted she had no problem describing Gant as such. "They've got to put your prisoners into cold-sleep. Apparently there are communication problems."
Cormac raised an eyebrow, then turned towards his screen. "AI, can you establish a communications link for me with the dracoman, Scar?"
"Drone present," grated the voice of the submind of Occam's he had been using. Immediately the view on the screen changed to show internal structures of the ship swinging past, and finally it drew to a halt on Scar walking along a gangway beside Gant.
"Scar, does Dragon speak to you?" Cormac asked.
Still moving, Scar lifted his head and gazed at the drone that had to be hovering only a couple of metres in front of him, blinked, showed his teeth, but said nothing. Cormac snorted in annoyance: just like his creator — keeping his cards close to his chest.
"Scar, I want you to return here now. You'll join me in the bridge pod when Tomalon is ready, understood?"
Scar gave a sharp nod and halted. Cormac's last view was of Gant slapping the dracoman once on the shoulder, as Scar turned to head back.
"You hope to learn something," Mika stated, clearly uncomfortable with this near-question.
"I like to keep potential dangers close, where I can watch them, and if necessary, deal with them quickly," Cormac replied, spearing a carrot.
Cormac, Scar and Tomalon stood in the retracted bridge pod and watched as ten grabships approached Dragon. Every now and again Cormac glanced at the dracoman. Only when he was turning back to see the first of the grabships positioning itself against the surface of Dragon did he see some sign of what Mika had reported. Scar flinched — then flinched again as the second ship took position. He bared his teeth as the third moved in.
"You can feel it," Cormac said.
Scar nodded.
"What do you feel?"
"Pain."
"As do we all. I thought you could blank it out."
Silence.
"It's not just the pain, is it?"
"It tries to control me."
"Will it succeed?"
"No. But I will."
Succeed at what?
Cormac was about to voice this question when a change in Scar's expression alerted him to something happening on the screen. He instantly looked up. All the grabships were now in position, most of them out of sight from their point of view, and scalpels of fire were probing the night. Dragon was being pushed towards the Occam Razor.
"How will you secure it to the ship?" he asked Tomalon.
"It will secure itself with its pseudopods."
"Any problems?"
"None that are insurmountable. A portion of its body will remain outside U-field, but it informs me that it intends to position itself so as that portion will be part of the radioactive area. That portion will then be left here — cut away."
How to perform surgery with a U-space field generator.
Dragon grew large in the screen. On other screens were views from the various grabships. Cormac saw forests of pseudopodia reaching towards monolithic devices on the dreadnought's hull. He saw the Occam Razor growing larger, and was able to compare the size of the creature with the size of the ship. A Dragon sphere had twice almost destroyed the Hubris, the ship on which he had travelled to Samarkand. But this sphere came like a supplicant to an iron god.
"Are all the scanners operating?" he asked Tomalon.
"They are all operating. The slightest sign of attempted entry, or the slightest sign of nano-attack, and we will know."
"What can be done with it this close?"
"Many things. We can electrocute it, slice it with particle beams or laser, even detonate a thermo nuke between it and the ship."
"And that won't harm the ship?"
Tomalon came back from his sensor to give Cormac a pitying look. "The hull of this ship is half a metre of Thadium s-con ceramal. There are few energy weapons that can touch it, and it can take a surface blast of up to forty megatons."
Cormac wondered if the people inside could. He also knew of one energy weapon that could touch this ship's hull, and wondered how Tomalon would react to being told that the Occam Razor could be destroyed by sunlight. Glancing at the Captain, it also occurred to him that the man looked very much like a creature of myth that could also be destroyed by sunlight, but reckoned Tomalon would not appreciate the humour, and so Cormac continued to watch the show.
There was no feeling of impact as the Dragon sphere took hold where it could and drew itself against the ship. The view of Dragon that Cormac now watched — from one of the grabships as it released — reminded him of a child hugging the legs of a parent. Soon all the grab-ships had returned to their hold.
"Going under now," said Tomalon.
They went.
8
The gabbleduck was his favourite toy. Once initiated, it just would not stop until it had found all of the toy Brothers he had concealed in the area, then chomped them down, and burped after every one. It made him giggle every time when it did that and, even though she tried to conceal it, he knew his mother was amused as well
"Let's get back to it," she said to him, turning away from the instrumentation that had absorbed her attention for some time now. "Where was I?"
"Babbleguck come home," the boy said without turning from his toy, which had just found a Brother shoved under the edge of the carpet but was having difficulty in pulling the man out by his feet — the victim seemed to have got a grip on the underlay.
"Gabbleduck," the woman corrected, then frowned when she saw her son grin.
"Daddy Duck said, 'Who's been eating from my bowl? and Mummy Duck, finding the soup in her bowl had been supped too, said, 'And who's been eating from mine? Baby Duck, not wanting to be left out, looked in its bowl and said, 'Some bugger's et me soup. "