Cormac was not sure he had done any such thing. He turned back to his opponent. ‘I do not like subjective games,’ he said, and knocked the table aside. The dracoman went for him with frightening speed. The hands reaching for his throat he was able to knock aside, but he was still driven to the ground. The hands reached for his throat again. He brought his knee up, then flung the clammy body from him. He regained his feet as his opponent did. The attack was still without finesse, and this time, not caught unawares, Cormac used his feet to counter it. The fight was over in seconds, the dracoman gurgling on the shale.

‘Your second-to-last move was the wrong one,’ said Dragon.

‘I won.’

‘That is not the issue.’

‘What is?’

‘Morality.’

‘Hah, it is the winners who write history and it is the winners who invent morality. Existence is all the reason for existence any of us has, unless you believe in gods. I think you set yourself up too high.’

‘No higher than an executioner.’

‘You threaten again. Why? Do you have the power to carry out your threats? Do you think that you are a god?’

‘I do not threaten you.’

‘You seek to judge me then—to judge what I represent.’

‘In the system of Betelgeuse there is a physicist working on some of the later Skaidon formulae. I predict he will solve some of the problems he has set himself.’

‘And . . . ?’

‘Within the next century the human race will possess the intergalactic runcible.’

‘What?’

The ground shook. A vast shadow blotted out half the sky. With his skin crawling Cormac turned, and there, making its ponderous gargantuan way across the rock-scape, he saw the Monitor; long as a city, its legs like tower blocks. Cormac watched it pass, knew its destination.

‘Another threat?’ he breathed. ‘What is it that you want?’

The head rose higher and turned in the direction the Monitor had gone.

‘Go back to Cartis. When you have seen what you must see, return here.’

Suddenly the head dropped down, and was hovering before Cormac.

‘I control Monitor; without me it is mindless, but you know that,’ it said. ‘I have the power, the power to destroy. Could it be that you know what I mean?’

‘I know the substance of your threat . . . your warning?’ was Cormac’s reply. After a pause he glanced down at the now unmoving dracoman. Then he swung his attention to his rucksack, back up at Dragon, shrugged and walked away, random accessing as he did so, so that nothing could be read from his expression:

Aster Colora: A planet on the rim of the galaxy.

* * *

Maria had been waiting for him at the two-kilometre boundary. She was panicked, out of her depth.

‘The whole city . . . Monitor . . .’

Cormac silenced her and took her place in the driving seat of the AGC. Halfway back to Cartis she had calmed enough to be coherent.