‘No.’ She turned away with a slight smile and rubbed at her eyes with her forefinger and thumb. ‘I was readying a probe to go into the blast-site and search out some fragments of the runcible buffer. It seems there’s a chance it was not all vaporized.’ She looked up at the screen. ‘How are our friends getting on?’

Cormac told her what Hubris had told him.

‘Dracomen . . . I had a quick look in the reference section but all I could come up with was this text called ‘The Dragon Dialogues’? It read like a philosophy thesis and ran to about ten million words. Fascinating stuff, but I don’t really have the time to read it . . .’ She turned to Cormac. ‘What was this Dragon then? Not a fire-breather, I gather?’

Cormac hesitated, and then grimaced. ‘No, Dragon was the name the creature gave itself, for whatever reason . . . Hubris, do you have any film of Dragon?’

‘Enough to last a lifetime.’

‘Show us some, please.’

The screen flickered and showed a contorted rocky plain below a metallic red sky. On that plain stood four vast spheres joined in a row. Pink snow was falling.

‘There’s Dragon. Each of those spheres is a kilometre across.’

‘It was all alive?’ asked Chaline incredulously.

‘Oh yes, very much so. Xenologists thought it might once have been mobile, but when discovered it was like this. It had pseudopods rooted into the ground for kilometres all around. It must have extracted minerals or something to feed on. No one can say for sure, but later examination of the site found the ground riddled with tunnels and lacking in certain minerals found elsewhere.’

‘Later examination?’ Chaline asked.

Cormac closed his eyes as a memory, clear as day, flashed into his mind. He remembered a fantastic road made for him, two kilometres long, marked out by pseudopods five metres high and half a metre wide, each one like a white cobra, but with a single blue crystalline eye where its mouth should have been. That had been a long walk.

Chaline returned her attention to the screen again and continued before Cormac could answer. ‘It must have been made of more than flesh and bone. At that size it would have collapsed in on itself . . .’

‘Alive and a machine,’ said Cormac. ‘There were AG readings from it, and the readings of metals, and some pretty strange radiations. It’s speculated that its bones were some form of bubble metal, or that it supported itself with AG. No one got close enough to find out.’

‘Tell me more,’ said Chaline, her fatigue forgotten.