During initial contact, the pseudopods within the manacle withdrew from sight, but the humanoid dragon head remained, its neck sinking out of view, bringing the head to rest in the layer of flesh, like a man sinking in living quicksand and tilting his head back for one final breath. Its expression grew slack and unresponsive, as if something had pulled a plug below. During the ensuing hours the entity’s surrounding liverlike flesh hardened and scales rose out of it, like flakes of skin about to break away but then petrifying to gemlike solidity—crystallizing and growing translucent. Further hours passed.

At last something was happening. Observing the magnified section of the linkage between the two dragon spheres, Mika noticed pseudopods detaching from each other and withdrawing. The bright sunlight that previously shone down on the manacle building for twenty minutes of every hour, as the two spheres revolved around each other in the sun’s orbit, was briefly occluded by a titanic pseudopod tree breaking away from the main connection, its fans opening out then folding in vacuum as it retreated into the other sphere. Mika felt the floor shift and observed the draconic landscape rolling all about in fleshy waves. Then the connection between the two spheres really began to come apart. Shucked off scales rained through space at the parting and even the occasional dead pseudopod. The whole connection unravelled like the severing of some vast fibre-optic skein, through which a sapphire light passed.

‘Discussion over, I see; so you convinced your brother sphere?’ She nervously glanced down at the head, expecting it to re-engage with her at this point, or at least for Dragon to give her some response over the comsystem. None was forthcoming, and it worried her that Dragon could not spare the processing power for a simple communication. Then that changed, as the head jerked out of its torpor and opened its eyes, like a corpse reanimated and prophesying doom.

‘Run to your ship,’ it said, ‘you cannot survive here.’

Surfacing after yet another U-space jump, Jack surveyed the planetary system ahead, cataloguing individual planets and scanning for large artificial constructions either on them or in surrounding space. Two light months ahead, the AI picked up some signs of battle: weapons’ flashes with the familiar signature of CTDs and plain atomics, a UV flash followed incrementally by infrared, pinpricks of coherent microwave radiation probably the result of masers firing. The immediacy of U-space signatures was not evident now, since this conflict of course took place two months ago. Scanning did not sufficiently reveal the combatants, though there seemed many low albedo objects in the system at the time. The AI assumed the Legate had surfaced into the real here just to view this scene. Grabbing the opportunity, Jack sent off a U-space information package detailing their present coordinates and events thus far. A return package updated him on the position of a steadily growing fleet of ECS dreadnoughts, a light century behind them.