Chaline shook her head in perplexity. ‘Ceramal? No . . . Hubris, what is the temperature outside the probe?’

‘One-eighty Kelvin.’

‘I don’t know why I asked. Ceramal retains its structural integrity down to ninety Kelvin.’

‘Acid? Some kind of caustic gas?’ asked Cormac.

‘No, has to be something more specific than that, else the sampling process would have picked it up . . . Wait a minute . . . Hubris, how old were the Samarkand runcible buffers?’

‘The Samarkand runcible was installed solstan 2383.’

‘Yes,’ said Chaline with satisfaction. Cormac raised an eyebrow and she went on. ‘Wide-spectrum superconductors were introduced in 2397. The Samarkand runcible had the old sort; superconducting ceramic-impregnated tungsten steel and bathed in liquid helium. The room-temperature superconductors they had then couldn’t take the kind of surge a runcible buffer receives. We are talking about a huge EM pulse here.’

‘And?’ asked Cormac, wondering why she felt it necessary to over-explain her area of expertise.

‘Don’t you see? Tungsten steel impregnated with ceramic? That is what ceramal is.’

Cormac nodded.

‘So whatever screwed up those buffers is now screwing up your probe,’ Chaline said. ‘Hubris, would it be possible to run an interior microscan of the probe?’

‘Scanning.’

‘What do you expect to find?’

‘Sabotage . . . too specific to be anything else.’

‘How?’

‘Well, the buffers would have been too cold for some kind of manufactured virus, and are screened to everything bar neutron radiation, so it has to be nanomachines.’

‘If it is nanomachines . . . can you do anything about them? Will you be able to set up your runcible down there?’

Chaline chewed on her knuckle. ‘They would have survived a fusion explosion . . . Getting rid of them is like getting rid of a disease: there’s always one bacillus survives to start the process off again. But . . . but they are not prone to mutation like a bacillus or virus. Once we get a sample, we should be able to make a counteragent.’ She glanced up at his puzzled expression. ‘Counter nanomachines, ones with the singular purpose of hunting down and destroying the nanomachines there. It would take ages though, and years for Samarkand to be clear.’

‘And the new runcible?’

‘Oh, we can protect it. There isn’t a great deal of ceramal used in its construction. The buffers are carbon-seventy-based superconductors. The nanomachines won’t touch them. We will need to set up a proscription scan like that used for weaponry.’

Cormac waited for her to continue.

‘To stop it getting taken off planet,’ she explained, as if tired of dealing with an idiot. ‘Samarkand would also have to be limited to runcible transport until it’s clear. Therefore, no ships.’

‘As a way station it wouldn’t get many anyway,’ Cormac said.

‘True,’ said Chaline, and returned to pushing chips back into place.

‘Nanomycelium detected,’ said Hubris, before the silence between them became too stretched.

‘Mycelium?’ asked Cormac.