Thorn turned and raised his monocular again. ‘Humanoid figure—a familiar one.’ He made to pass the monocular to Cormac, but Cormac waved it away. Ramping his visual acuity, using a program in his gridlink controlling the muscles around his eyes and configuring signals direct from his optic nerves, he soon identified the Legate walking from the jungle and up the slope towards them. He beckoned Scar over to him while he watched.

‘Scar,’ he said, ‘I am going to talk to this . . . Legate. And when it doesn’t get what it wants, I suspect we’ll be back into a fire-fight. Myself and the rest of the humans, and Arach, are going to run for the cave system and blow the entrance behind us. I want you to take your people into the jungle—with your camouflage you have a better chance of surviving there.’ Scar just stared at him for a long moment. Cormac continued, ‘This way some of us might survive to deliver a report to ECS forces when they arrive.’

Scar held up one hand, clawed fingers spread. ‘I will send five into the jungle.’

‘This is not open to negotiation, Scar.’

‘No, it is not,’ the dracoman replied, and moved away.

The Legate was now only a few hundred yards away, and Cormac thought it laughable how the entity held its hands up and open as if to show it carried no weapons. He knew all its weapons would be inside it. Once the entity had approached to ten yards away, Cormac stepped forwards. ‘I think that’s about close enough. So tell me, what do you want? I would guess you haven’t come here to surrender to us.’

‘It is good that you retain your sense of humour,’ said the Legate. ‘Allow me to acquaint you with realities.’ It pointed upwards with one overly long finger and, in that instant, com was restored and Cormac received a time-delayed information package from the NEJ. He held this package in his gridlink, as loath to open it now as the memory package gifted to him by Jerusalem. He suspected bad news, but more than that he suspected their com codes had been cracked by whatever this being before him represented.

‘Nobody is to open that package,” he instantly broadcast from his gridlink.

It almost seemed the Legate heard him as well. ‘We have not yet broken your com codes, since the algorithms that control them were created by AI. Had we broken them, be assured that you would now be under my control, as would all here, AIs or those using gridlinks or augs.’ The Legate turned its nightmare head slightly towards Horace Blegg. ‘Including you.’