Polity Agent

Staring into the tear in his perception he saw, only for a moment, U-space entire and, like an AI, comprehended it. Enclosed and trapped in Jain substructure, he turned aside and stepped to where he wanted to be, detouring through that other place that made nothing of material barriers. Three yards to the side of the cage of alien carapace, he stepped into the real, reached down beside a console and picked up his thin-gun. Only then did Skellor begin to react, but not fast enough.

Cormac brought the gun up, his arm straight, and began to fire.

…

‘The cables,’ Cento said calmly over com.

…

Cento, now impacted on the surface of a dark sun, along with Skellor.

…

Gasping a warm damp breath of the cave’s air, Cormac jerked into the present. Checking the time readout in his gridlink he realized that though those events aboard the ancient spaceship Ogygian took very little time, it had taken just over an hour for him to incorporate them in his mind. But what a vast difference his knowledge of them imposed on his thinking.

He had suffered horribly at Skellor’s hands, his mind just as ripped up as his body at the end. But he had translated himself through U-space—something always considered an impossibility for a human being, which was why he had never really believed Blegg to be human. But now Blegg claimed to be the avatar Cormac had accused him of being, and could not translate himself through U-space, yet it seemed Cormac could.

Cormac heaved himself up from the boulder he was propped against, phantom pains shooting through his body as it remembered old injuries, and his mind muggy and seemingly dislocated within his skull. Glancing across the cave he saw one of the Sparkind attaching a CTD to the underside of the autogun. It would be set to detonate the moment that weapon ran out of ammunition. Spikes had since been driven into the rocky lip of the fissure down which they intended to exit, and dracomen and the other Sparkind were checking the cable winders attached to their belts. For a moment Cormac experienced a surge of painful memory: that time on Samarkand when he, Thorn, Gant, and the two Golem, Cento and Aiden, had prepared similar gear for their descent into a shaft cut down into the ground. And how Gant died there—the first time.

‘What has the memory given you?’ Blegg, standing at his shoulder.

Without turning, Cormac replied, ‘I don’t really know. I now look around this cave and it seems to me all this rock is as insubstantial as mist, yet I know that if I try to step through it the most probable result will be concussion.’ Now he turned to face Blegg fully. ‘I am not the same person I was then. Jerusalem needed to subsequently rebuild much of my body and my mind, since I was neither whole nor, I think, entirely sane.’

‘Perhaps… in a moment of extremity…’

‘Perhaps.’

Cormac now observed the flesh-stripped Golem crouching over the badly burnt soldier. The Golem removed the autodoc, took some thumb-sized bloody object from one of its manipulators and put it to one side, then pressed some control so that the autodoc folded away all its surgical gear. He then returned it to its case.

‘They wouldn’t have been able to get him safely through the fissure,’ Blegg explained. ‘And he remained lucid enough to make his wishes known… via his aug.’

‘He chose to die?’ Cormac asked.

‘He was memplanted.’ Hence the bloody object just extracted.

‘Oh that’s all right then.’ Cormac felt a surge of anger return, then immediately stamped on it because again he realized its source. The wounded soldier would have been an encumbrance they could ill afford. And in a horrible way he felt grateful that the sheer lethality of the weapons used against them had left so few wounded, yet also horrified about how many they had killed. Including Thorn. He turned towards the survivors, seeing they only awaited his instructions. ‘Okay, we go now. No point waiting here until the enemy start coming through the walls. You Golem run the lead lines down and the rest of us will follow. Arach’—he turned to locate the drone, which came scuttling from a side cave—‘I take it you don’t need a line?’

‘Nah, these extra legs have their compensation,’ the drone grated.