‘He’s a pompous old fart,’ Maria replied, and Cormac liked her for that.

‘He believes Dragon is psychotic,’ he said.

‘I am not qualified to judge,’ she replied.

Expressionlessly Cormac watched pink sleet slide off the frictionless screen of the AGC. ‘You are qualified to have an opinion.’

Maria hesitated before replying. Cormac glanced at her and could see her discomfort. She was, he knew, trying to decide how to influence him and what opinion it would be best to own. He repressed a smile. She was in a difficult position. Instructions had preceded him: no unnecessary contact, straight to Dragon, the crux. He could see that she was unnerved.

‘The dialogue with Dragon is deceptively human . . . Darson seems to find it difficult to accept the alien.’

Cormac chuckled. The AGC dipped as Maria glanced at him. Unable to find any way of applying leverage, she had answered with the truth. He nodded to himself and looked ahead as she slowed the AGC and began to power it down. Before them lay the Junkyard: the tangible result of people’s flouting of Dragon’s rule of no machinery larger than a man within a two-kilometre radius. Many people had died here. Maria put the AGC on hover. Cormac tapped the com on his belt as the door slid open.

‘I’ll contact you when I want picking up,’ he said and left her.

After reaching the line of smashed AGCs and hover scooters that marked the two-kilometre boundary, Cormac shouldered his rucksack and climbed a rusting hulk. Even through the snow the four spheres were visible, standing like vast storage tanks on a plain of broken rock. After a moment he clambered down the other side of the boundary, peeking in the wrecked AGC at its occupants, whom no one had bothered to retrieve. As his feet touched the ground, the ground itself moved.

Pseudopods.

He stood very still and waited, the taste of salt turning acrid in his mouth. Five metres to one side of him the ground rippled and a thing like a metre-wide cobra exploded into the air. Cormac dropped to avoid a flying rock, then rolled, looked up. It arched above him, a single crystalline blue eye where a cobra’s mouth should have been. The ground tilted and another explosion followed. Then another. Cormac put his rucksack over his head as explosion followed explosion and he was pelted with shards of rock. Then it ceased, and he stood in the silence.

Arrayed and curved like the ribs of an immense snake’s skeleton, the pseudopods had become his honour guard. He walked down the spine.

In the face of total disaster, defiance is the only recourse . . . crazy street-lamps they have here.

Cormac allowed his mind to wander, random-access on subject: