Polity Agent

They had surfaced from U-space, but for Cormac his perception of the real seemed permanently wrecked—a rip straight through it. Every solid echoed into grey void, and the stale air of the ship seemed to be pouring into that rather than towards some large breach nearby. Gazing at his thin-gun, Cormac saw it as both an object and a grey tube punching into infinity, which, he reflected with an almost hysterical amusement, was precisely what it had been to those he had killed with it. When he entered the bridge, Cento became a perilous moving form casting laser shadows behind it, and when the Golem fired his APW, the fire burned with negative colour…

…

This is memory, and I must not lose sight of that. The pain is not real. My mind is whole, I am whole…

…

Cormac fought against the enclosing structure, but could do nothing to help Cento. When he felt the wash of tidal forces through his body, he knew that in very little time that same wash would intensify sufficiently to shatter the Jain structure, but by then the tidal forces would have compressed and stretched his body to a sludge of splintered bone and ruptured flesh inside it. It occurred to him, with crazy logic, that such damage to himself was required as payment for the pain he already suffered. On another level it occurred to him that he was not entirely rational at that moment.

…

You didn’t try to subvert Cento. You knew you were going to die and just wanted the satisfaction of tearing him apart with your hands. Skellor, you erred.

…

The Ogygian jerked once, twice, then suddenly Cormac lay heavy inside the Jain structure — being crammed over to one side. Grappling claws.

…

Cento and Skellor both slammed into the wall. The Golem was down to metal, and Skellor even managed to tear some of that away. Long pink lesions cut into Skellor’s own blackened carapace, golden nodules showing in these like some strange scar tissue.

…

It became too much: to choose a moral death, then to accept an inevitable one, and then to have both taken away. If only he could strike even the smallest blow. But he could do nothing—was ineffectual. Then, in that moment of extremity, Cormac saw the way. Wasn’t it laughably obvious?

…