Aiden eased the joystick forwards and the shuttle slid towards the wall of cloud. He tilted the stick and thumbed a side control. The turbines droned and the shuttle climbed for the top of the wall. Cormac gazed down at mountain chains like puckered yellow scars and at frozen seas of reflected gold. Samarkand was a beautiful planet, but it was the beauty of arctic waste that could be best appreciated up here, rather than down on the ground where it might kill you. Fingers of cloud slid across and hid the view. Soon the shuttle was high above what seemed a second land, one of roiling white over guts of brass. This land seemed to have its own red but lightless sun: an oblate object a kilometre across, which seemed to be rolling above the cloud. There was other movement actually on it as well, a slow rippling of its surface, but that motion was so huge it fooled the eye.

‘It’s almost an insult that something like that should exist,’ said Carn.

‘It’s one of four at the last count,’ Cormac pointed out.

‘Oh, right, I’d forgotten.’

Carn leaned further forwards, perhaps scanning with his yellow eye. He said, ‘No way its orbital velocity is keeping it up.’ He inspected the miniconsole he was holding in his silvered hand. ‘As I thought, it’s using antigravity.’

‘The least of its abilities, one would suspect,’ said Aiden. ‘I know of no runcible gates a kilometre wide.’ He paused for a moment, listening, then he said, ‘Hubris informs me that when it arrived there were underspace distortions similar to the kind left by a ship. Dragon probably has a drive system much the same as Hubris’s.’

They watched the great sphere drift along a thousand metres below and some distance ahead of them. It was an eerie sight and a perplexing one. What was Dragon? A living creature or a machine of flesh? There would never be agreement on that point. Aiden slowly increased their speed and drew them closer.

‘Not too close. I don’t think it would like us to land on it,’ said Cormac.

Aiden eased back and matched speeds. ‘Hubris reports no response on any channel, even underspace, but it’s been picking up a backwash of some powerful scanning of the planet,’ he said.

‘It can’t not know we’re here,’ said Thorn doubtfully.

‘Do we want it to know?’ asked Carn, and returned his attention to his instruments.

Cormac stared at Dragon. Where was the rest of it? Why was only this one quarter here? Had it come for the dracomen? Had it simply sent its agents here to destroy the Samarkand runcible, and was now here to pick them up? What did it have to do with that other thing under the ground? He realized he desperately wanted to talk to it, no matter how convoluted its answers might be. No matter what ridiculous games it might play.