That, Cormac realized, did not really answer his question, but he let that go as he turned and walked to the circular door leading from the bay, which promptly irised open before him. He stepped through and found himself in a corridor resembling a pipe. The flat surface of the gravplate floor laid in that pipe was covered with blue carpet moss, bearing a repeating pattern of white nooses—a pattern copied from the original Jack Ketch, though its carpets had been plain fabric. The rest of the corridor remained strictly utile: padded walls and ceiling, diffuse lighting, and soft hand grips in case the gravplates should fail. Cormac wondered if Jack made his usual baroque and sometimes gruesome additions elsewhere, for the original ship had contained various human execution devices of antique design that the AI liked replicating down to the smallest historical detail. Cormac waited until Thorn stepped through beside him.

‘Which way—I’ve been unable to access any information on the layout,’ he said.

Thorn stepped aside to allow Arach also into the corridor. The drone scuttled over to one side and reared up as the dracomen filed out next to head along the corridor. Cormac noted how the dracomen eyed the drone curiously before moving on.

‘Well, you certainly do get some types,’ commented Arach, coming back down on its sharp feet.

Cormac assumed there had been some inaudible communication between drone and reptilians, but simply classified Arach’s observation as interesting before turning back to Thorn, who gestured down the corridor, saying, ‘These corridors run in a grid throughout the ship, all gravplated on one side, so you can walk anywhere using them. There’s no movable drop-shafts.’

Cormac nodded to himself. Drop-shafts were a hangover from older ship geometries in which the builders felt some need of up and down. Jack had used a movable one to get his passengers to different locations inside the old Jack Ketch. This construction, he surmised, was for enhanced structural strength. ‘Are we heading now for the bridge—if that’s what you still call it?’

‘No, Jack can project anywhere in this ship and there’s something I thought you might like to see.’ Thorn led him through a bulkhead door, then into a long corridor curving down the length of the hull. Three bulkhead doors later they entered another corridor carpeted with flute grass matting and filled with hot terrarium air. Until now, all the corridors they traversed were boringly prosaic. Perhaps baroque interiors were something Jack had grown out of.

‘More dracomen,’ observed Cormac.

‘Nearly a hundred of them aboard.’ Thorn paused reflectively. ‘You know there’s thousands of them now on the planet below?’