‘Just one piece of the Jain tech coral would sell for millions on the open market—if it even got there before an AI like Jerusalem snatched it,’ said Thorn. ‘The Jain node itself would start in the billions, and go on up from there, if it was actually possible to buy or sell such items. In reality the planet would end up under quarantine, and the buyer and seller would be mentally dissected by forensic AI.’

‘Ah, but who knew about Jain nodes then?’ asked Fethan.

‘End scenario,’ ordered Thorn abruptly.

At once Thorn was in darkness, and could feel nothing. Then, as the nanofilaments of the VR booth detached from his brainstem and withdrew from his head, he felt cold and stiff. The booth’s door crumped open before him and he stepped out onto the acid-etched floor. Fethan, standing to one side, an apparently old man with snaggle teeth, a mass of ginger beard and thinning hair topping a wiry frame clad in an envirosuit, detached an optic cable from the end of his right forefinger and allowed it to wind back into the wall. He then took a thimble of syntheskin from his pocket and pressed it into place over a metal fingertip that served as a multipurpose plug. Thorn eyed him meanwhile. Fethan was a cyborg, since he retained his own brain and spinal column flash-frozen and bio-gridded in a ceramal case inside him. He was not like Gant: the mind of a soldier loaded to a Golem chassis. But Thorn did not want to think about Gant right then.

‘So, how did you obtain this recording?’Thorn asked.

‘Courtesy of Jerusalem. Apparently there was some bleed-over from Skellor to Cormac while they were linked. Jerusalem copied it while putting Cormac back together.’

Thorn surveyed his surroundings. A large hole had been burnt through one wall by the projectile saliva of a monster called a droon, then ripped open wider when it had crawled inside. The ceiling was missing, peeled back, from when the droon broke out again like a nightmare jack-in-a-box. This VR chamber was one remnant of a ship called the Jack Ketch, on which Thorn had arrived here on the planet Cull. He walked to the opening, stepped through and glared round at the arid landscape. Just within sight lay dusty pieces of carapace that were the remains of a sandhog the droon had killed.

‘And what exactly are we supposed to do with this piece of Skellor’s memory?’ He glanced up as a craft, shaped like an ‘H’ made from copper cylinders, drifted overhead. ‘This place is still under quarantine, and both of us have been in contact with Jain technology.’ Gant, the recorded mind of Thorn’s friend, once resided in a Golem chassis but, when they eventually found him, a Jain tech virus had turned him into something else. Thorn and Fethan had destroyed this object.