The Legate’s vessel surfaced half an AU out and proceeded inwards on fusion drive. The moment the four Centurions surfaced, a U-space signature immediately blossomed beside them, and something big dropped into being. They came under immediate and intense scanning from this hugely dense object—a two-mile-wide ribbed ammonite spiral glinting metallic green. The shape seemed to imply something grown rather than manufactured, one that could keep on growing. Organic technology. It launched a cloud of projectiles that Jack recognized as the same type launched earlier from the subsumed Calydonian Boar. These now swarmed towards the four Polity Centurions like twilight mosquitoes anxious to feast. Confident the other ships would be doing the same, Jack engaged his chameleonware and immediately changed course.

More U-space signatures now, on the edge of the accretion disc, then close by. Bacilliform ships began appearing, more spiral forms, lens shapes, indistinct wormish conglomerations breaking and reforming, and sheetlike masses that only closer scan revealed to be constructed of conjoined bacilliforms. Some of these objects were no larger than a human fist, others extended miles across.

‘Doesn’t seem too healthy around here,’ Jack commented. It took him just a microsecond to transmit that message, and he did not see precisely what happened next. The Belisarius must have been struck by some of those seed objects—enough at least to disrupt its chameleonware. Whereupon that Centurion ship fled -masers refracting around its hull, then beginning to impinge—leaving an orange trail of metal vapour through space. A wall of bacilliforms, a thousand miles tall, U-jumped directly ahead of the fleeing ship. Jack shut down his ‘ware, bringing all his weapons online. He saw the Haruspex and Coriolanus do the same. The big spiral ship bore down on the Belisarius, while the wall of rodlike ships folded in around it like some huge tissue employed for catching a wasp. Blights of missiles rained down on all sides. Jack’s CTD imploder hit the big spiral ship first, collapsing its middle section and momentarily leaving a glowing doughnut of matter, before the subsequent explosion obliterated the rest. Anti-munitions scattered illusions around the Belisarius, but not enough. Missile after missile impacted on it, cutting away a nacelle, distorting its shape and peeling away a trail of its armour. It tried to U-jump, but its engine was damaged or some other weapon hit it. It shimmered, everted like a snake skin, disappeared in white fire.