The second gift arrived later in his quarters, delivered by a crab drone. It dropped the wrist holster on his sofa before departing.

‘How?’ he had asked.

Jerusalem replied, ‘A member of a clear-up team picked it up when they went to collect the remains of Gant. I used a nano-counteragent to remove the mycelium Skellor installed in it and wiped out his reprogramming of it. I also repaired the damage you caused by shooting it down .. . you do realize how it fought against Skellor’s programming by allowing you to shoot it?’

Cormac had removed Shuriken from its holster and held it out on the flat of his palm. It flexed out its chainglass blades, as if stirring in sleep, then retracted them. He remembered Cull, his long-drawn-out fight for survival there against Skellor, who took control of this semi-AI weapon away from him, and then sent it against him, and how at the last, as he targeted it, it had turned upright in the air to present its face to him full on.

‘Yes, I know.’

He slid Shuriken back in the holster, then strapped the holster to his wrist. It occurred to him to speculate on how subtly manipulative AIs could be. This gesture, now, in his moment of indecision? In the end, he could not step down with the Polity so obviously threatened. He could not live a normal existence with any feeling of equanimity, knowing what was occurring. Family? He protected them through his career just as he protected any other law-abiding Polity citizens. Mika? To remain with her here would be to remain at the centre of events, but ineffective.

Subsequently stepping from his cabin, he found Arach eagerly awaiting him, unable to keep its spindly legs still.

‘Are we on our way?’ the drone had asked.

‘Yes, we’re on our way.’

Now, aboard the ancient shipyard, Cormac began to make his way towards the runcible open to Coloron, Arach dogging his footsteps.

He found crowds crammed into a vast zero-g distribution centre, at the end of which stood a cargo runcible. The horns of this device encompassed a circular Skaidon warp ten yards across. Guide ropes cut in from all sides, tied off on a massive robotic handler crouched before the runcible itself. The base of this multiarmed behemoth ran on tracks extending the entire length of the distribution centre. Through here, warship building materials had once been transported. The handler then passed these off to other minor handlers in the tunnels branching off all around, which in turn took them to various machine shops or directly to the construction holds. This had not been a place for humans since everything moved here at AI speeds, and any human would have been ground up in the gearing. Now the handlers were still, the centre pressurized, and ECS personnel flocked in the air like khaki birds.