‘There could be. We have to seed the counteragent where it will be distributed following the weather patterns since the blast, and we cannot be certain what they have been like since then.’

‘Hubris estimated a dispersal across about ninety per cent of Samarkand.’

‘Yes, a lot of material would have been thrown into the upper atmosphere, and the weather then, during the initial cooling of the planet, would have been a lot worse than it is now. There would have been winds of up to four hundred kilometres an hour. Some of the mycelium has probably been carried right round the planet.’

‘I see . . . but the counteragent will get to it?’

Jane nodded. ‘In time. And this area will be saturated.’

‘Will that be enough?’

‘With safety measures implemented, and ceramal left out of the equation. It’s mostly been replaced with chainglass now anyway.’

Cormac looked down between his feet again and thought about what was down there. He felt a momentary surge of anger, and repressed it. No matter what had been said about his humanity, emotion did get in the way of efficiency.

‘Coming up on first release point,’ said Jane.

She punched out a sequence on the console. On a screen showing a rear view of the shuttle, Cormac saw a contrail snake out from one of the pods as the warm counteragent hit the frigid air. Another screen showed it further back, being chopped into sections and dispersed by the vicious winds. Jane released the joystick and sat back.

‘The automatics will take us in a circle fifty kilometres wide.’

Cormac glanced at the air-speed indicator; 950 kilometres per hour. Ten minutes, then. ‘You’ll save the scatter bomb for last, I take it?’

‘Yes, four pods up here, then we go in low and drop it. An arbitrary decision, really. It makes no difference in what order we do it,’ said Jane.