Thus he did, and gazed upon the underside of seven Jain nodes leaving prickly thornish impressions in this continuum: organization, pattern, standing out from the underlying chaos of reality; of space knotted and wadded into this thing called matter. Blegg turned away, then quickly back when a subscreen blinked on to show text: ‘ U-signature detected—disperse signal’ ’. It took him some time to track it down, for it lay nearly two light years away, though close in interstellar terms. Without surfacing from U-space, he reset his ship’s course.

- retroact 6 -

‘. . . bright enough to realize the AI rulers were better at governing than any previous human rulers’

He turned to another card, saw them laid out all around him like gravestones.

The autolaser stuttered and crackled, knocking most of the deadly swarm from the air, but it did not manage to hit them all. Corporal Chang made a horrible grunting sound—the impact flinging him up from cover, then the projectile detonating inside him. It blew his guts out and he spun to the ground with only a length of bloody spine attaching his ribcage to his pelvis.

The three remaining members of the unit fired on the nearby slopes with their own seeker guns, then crouched back behind their boulders on the mountain slope. A waste of ammo. The sniper might not even be over that way. It seemed almost as if he knew of Blegg and his abilities, for he had changed over from laser to seeker bullets so there was no way to locate him. But he knew where they were.

‘This guy is not going to be captured alive,’ said Pierce.

Of the recording of events here, Pierce could claim he only stated what he thought were the sniper’s intentions. Reading the man’s expression, Blegg understood the statement to be a promise of intent.

‘Do you still have no idea where this fucker is?’ Blegg asked through his comlink.

‘Only within an area of three square miles, with you at the centre of it,’ Earth Central replied.

‘I thought the cameras on your satellites capable of resolving the date on a coin dropped on the ground?’

‘They do possess that resolution—when there is no cloud cover. It has also become evident this individual obtained, as well as the original tank, a multipurpose assault rifle, development sets of the new chameleon-cloth fatigues and electronic concealment hardware.’

Blegg eyed his companions, ‘Which ECS soldiers have yet to be issued with?’

‘The same.’