"It's gone," the man called Polas was saying. "It's fucking well just gone."
"Show me," said Lellan.
Polas gestured at the screens. One of these showed a radio picture of the black dots of stars on a white background, cut off to one side by the black arc of Calypse. Another showed an empty grid, while another showed just empty blue. On a ring of lower screens, mathematical symbols and graph representations clicked on and off, flickering and changing as if some primitive AI were trying to justify the impossible.
"What about the recording?" Lellan asked.
Polas grimaced. "The machine dumped it as being out of parameters — thought it had made a mistake." He shouted across to one of his fellows, "Dale, you managed to retrieve it yet?"
The woman Dale shook her head as she continued clattering away at her keypad — chasing down something on her screen.
"The rest?" asked Lellan. "Have they gone as well?"
"So the equipment tells us. There's also that." Polas pointed to the chainglass window. Outside in daylight sky, a smoky disc was dissipating — one edge of it silhouetted against Calypse.
"Okay, it's time to send up the probe," said Lellan.
"Might be software, glitched by whatever that was," Polas pointed out.
"Just do it."
"A probe?" Thorn turned to Jarvellis, who was standing beside him.
"We brought it for them on our last trip. They only have the one," she replied.
"Won't its launch be detected?"
"Dispensable probe, and a separate and dispensable site."
Polas swung a side console across his lap — one with touch-controls rather than the buttons and ball controls of most of the consoles here — and with his fingertips expertly traced out a sequence. The radio screen's view changed to the same one they were seeing through the chainglass window. This view then vibrated as somewhere a rocket probe blasted from its hidden silo and headed into the sky.
"I've got it!" Dale yelled, while they all watched this scene, and she came running over with a software disc. Polas snatched it from her, swung the touch-console back out of the way, and inserted the disc into a slot in one of the more primitive consoles. He quickly rattled over the buttons while gazing at the gridded screen, then triumphantly hit the last button with his forefinger, and sat back.
"About a minute beforehand," he explained.
The screen image changed to show the curved satellite laser array Thorn had earlier seen from Lyric II, except that this view was from below, and he could clearly see the reflective throats of laser tubes open before him. They watched this unchanging scene for slow drawn-out seconds, then abruptly Polas leant forwards and stabbed his finger at one of the smaller screens, showing a tangle of signal waves.
"That's what made it dump the recording. No way can we set this system to accept a U-space signature — it screws everything," he said.
"U-space?" Lellan repeated. "They don't jump this close… what is that?"
On the screen, something gigantic loomed behind the laser array. As they watched, it rolled closer — a vast and incomprehensible shape. From it, off to one side of the screen, a black fleck fell away, then the screen whited out for a second. When it came back on, the laser array was a spreading cloud of debris laced with fire, and the vast shape rolled on.
"What the fucking hell was that?" asked Lellan.
Polas wiped his hand down his face to cover his mouth. Almost as if he didn't want what he was going to say next to be heard, he muttered, "There was something about it. Something out at the cylinder worlds… Behemoth… just a name."
"There's no mystery," interrupted Thorn.
They all turned to look at him.
"That was Dragon," he told them. "And my guess is that things are just about to start getting very complicated — and very deadly."
The agony and the terror left him, sucked away through the growing Jain architecture inside the Occam Razor. Those of his command crew who still had enough of their humanity left to feel their own pain were sobbing, which meant there were only two of them, being Aphran and the man who controlled the U-space engines. Skellor silenced them with a thought and began to analyse what had happened. When he had discovered that, he glared at the corpse of Captain Tomalon and wished he'd not been so hasty in having the man killed. The trouble Tomalon had caused was worth as much punishment as that damned Cormac would receive when Skellor finally got hold of him.
It was the burn again. Through the crew member who now controlled all the Occam Razor's energy shielding and shield generators, he located the huge misalignment. Overall there were eighty-four separate generators that shielded the ship from the hard radiation of space, or attack, and most importantly from the mind-scrambling effects of U-space — which even now were not clearly understood, at least by any human mind. The flat screens — a harder version of the shimmer-shield, and likewise a product of runcible technology — all had to mesh perfectly within a second of the U-space motors dropping the ship into under-space. They also oscillated on and off thereafter — the brief period they were off enabling the U-space motors to keep the ship hurtling through that ineffable dimension. But that had not happened: they'd dropped into U-space unshielded; then, within only a few minutes, had been forced out of it again when the shields started operating out of alignment to the motors. Every one of those generators had been connected in a complex net, and every one of them had been run by something that fell somewhere in between a submind and a plain control program.
"You piece of shit," spat Skellor, shutting down the grav-plate below the Captain's corpse. Then, grunting with an effort that had tears of blood forming in the corners of his eyes, he extruded a Jain outgrowth from the wall behind the corpse, which grabbed it around the neck and hauled it upright and back against the wall. Probing inside the man, he found nothing alive. It was not the shots that had killed him — the man's mind was burnt out like everything else on this ship. There would be no satisfaction there.
Skellor closed his eyes, the rage in him growing beyond the proportions of the human part of his mind, cycling into something difficult to contain. Opening his eyes, he fixed his gaze on the man — the thing — he had created, to control the ship's shielding. This man started shaking inside the Jain architecture that enclosed him, then he started screaming as its material closed about him. His bones broke with erratic thuds, and suddenly his screams were choked off. Abruptly all of him that was still visible shrivelled and turned grey. He diminished, drained away as nutrient for… Skellor.
With his rage finally under control, Skellor slid into a cold analytical mode. There had been no real satisfaction there because what he had killed possessed less sentience than an animal, and the screams had been little more than an autonomic reaction, utterly disconnected and operating in its own limited circuit. Now Skellor must grow a replacement for this erstwhile member of his command crew. He turned his attention to Aphran and saw that she was watching him with terrified eyes — there was still enough of her left to realize her danger. Skellor turned his attention away from her before further temptation to kill overwhelmed him, and gazed out through the ship's sensors. Taking navigational information from those parts of himself and from the command crew wherein it was contained — already he was finding it increasingly difficult to identify those parts as somewhere outside his own mind — he saw that there was a solar system near enough for the ship to reach in a U-space jump of only minutes' duration. There he would find what he needed: energy from a sun, asteroidal matter — all those things he needed to fully control the Occam Razor, and to grow.