Orlandine had already assumed this alien to be an agent provocateur, providing her with a Jain node as an act of sabotage against the Polity. She might have gone on to destroy the Polity, whereupon the Jain tech would have certainly destroyed her too. But why was this alien here now? Had it come here to make sure she was performing as expected, to harry her and to push her into fully connecting to the Jain technology? This seemed a rather clumsy move, more likely to rouse her suspicions, make her more wary, and incidentally expose the watching agent to discovery.
‘You wanted me to accept your gift without reservation. I have not done that.’
The being replied, ‘But you will. More ships will come. You will have to prepare yourself, defend yourself. With your knowledge, and such a tool as Jain tech, you will be able to take all the Cassius stations.’
Not even a weak explanation for its presence, rather no explanation at all. Orlandine glanced across at her nanoassembler which, in the last few minutes, had manufactured more mycelia, and more stews of nanomachines. That assembler would be all she would need. She physically detached from the mycelium spread throughout the enclosing segment, but remained in contact via radio. Walking over to the assembler, she shut it down, disconnecting optics and power supply, and picked the device up with her assister-frame complemented arms. For a long moment she gazed up at the disassembled remains of the node—almost invisible now.
‘Why should I want that?’ she asked the alien entity.
Again that pause. ‘You could run, of course, but you know ECS would never stop pursuing you. From here you could negate all that risk utterly. They don’t yet have the firepower available here to destroy this Dyson segment. You could defend it from them. You could take this entire system, take control of all the runcibles here. Take over the Polity.’
‘You sound so desperate,’ Orlandine replied. ‘Trying to recover a scheme that went wrong?’
‘You won’t escape from here. And while attempting to escape, you’ll waste time better spent on looking to your defences.’
Orlandine smiled to herself. Quite obviously Jain-tech subversion also possessed a psychological component which she herself seemed to have avoided: an arrogance, megalomania—something of that nature. Or had she escaped it? Whatever, she did not perform as the alien expected. As she turned toward the airlock leading to the Heliotrope, she copied the solution to the alien ship’s chameleonware and, from a transponder 50,000 miles away from her, transmitted it to the station once her home. If ECS forces had come here searching for that alien ship, now they would find it—it was her gift to them.