‘The dracomen are in a sealed chamber . . . all I want is some answers. Why were they here? What happen—’

‘You have limited choices. Open this sealed chamber, or I will simply remove it from your ship. To do so I will need to open out some areas . . .’

Dragon was right.

‘Hubris, open the isolation chamber,’ Cormac said quickly.

The shutters slid aside and the pseudopods burst through the window. They were in, then out, in a moment, and the dracomen were lost in the mass of writhing flesh.

‘Pulling back to the drop-shaft,’ said Chaline, though they could all see that for themselves. ‘Hubris, what seal do we have if Dragon disengages?’

‘Have seals for drop-shaft ready,’ replied the AI.

Scene by scene, the screen showed pseudopods being drawn back. One view showed the seals sliding into the drop-shaft behind it like great coins. In the shuttle bay the pods slid back into the fleshy wall beyond. The ship shuddered.

‘Dragon disengaging.’

They all felt the explosion of air leaving the shuttle bay. The great sphere of Dragon drew away. Along with other debris, the shuttle followed it into vacuum.

‘Dragon disengaged.’

‘Cento . . .’ said Aiden.

‘We’ll get the shuttle back,’ said Chaline.

On emergency drives, Hubris limped back into orbit around Samarkand.

* * *

‘Dragon didn’t know all that was going on,’ said Mika as she repaired Cormac’s ribs.

He did not want to see what she was doing to him. He had seen quite enough blood and ripped-open bodies in his time not to be squeamish, but as always it was a different matter when it was your own blood and your own open body. The nerve-blocker on the back of his neck had, after adjustment, numbed him from the armpits downwards. But, as was always the case with such operations, he could faintly feel the tuggings and certainly hear the sounds. Cormac had wanted to just strap his ribs up and avoid this, but Mika had insisted because he was in danger of getting a punctured lung. He glanced aside at the pipes leading into the remote lung, and again experienced that weird feeling of disconnection. The blocker had shut off some of his autonomies, and his heart and lungs were on hold.

‘What makes you say that?’

Cormac’s voice sounded exactly the same to him, even though it issued from a mechanical larynx, much like that of a Golem, operating on the shunted nerve impulses from the nerve-blocker. The object was stuck on his shoulder with a skin-stick pad. It had the appearance of a large snail shell made of blue metal, and fixed sideways to a coin of perspex in which small lights glinted.

‘Well, the dracomen are part of it. I would speculate they were something like remote probes or agents. It wanted them back for debriefing.’

There was a thump in his chest, then a sticky squelching sound.