Jack absorbed and processed the fact that Haruspex had just asked the same question twice. Maintaining only a light connection with his avatar, Jack focused most of his attention through his sensors. As the other ship drew closer, Jack now saw strange wormish damage to its hull. Jack immediately focused attention on his memory of the recent battle, and ran through it in microseconds.

Up until the point when they began deploying gravtech weapons, Jack had retained a pretty good idea of the location of the other two ships and their individual involvement in the conflict. He concentrated particularly on his recordings of when they fled the exploding moon and Coriolanus had been destroyed, enhancing these to the limit. The Coriolanus’s forward weapons nacelles detonated, the blast so intense Jack could only obtain one clear image of the explosion. Either an accident, which seemed unlikely, or suicide? Tracking back. Jack searched meticulously, and there it was: the brief, finely targeted spurts from a laser with its spectrum adjusted to match background radiation from the recent explosions. Not a weapons laser, but a com laser.

Three microseconds gone. Jack moved to cut the link with Haruspex and to online his weapons.

‘I don’t think so,’ said the other AI, sensing what Jack was doing.

In the virtuality Haruspex shuddered, hazy lines of pixellated colour passing like interference through the glassy globe. The virtuality shaded into twilight. The glass darkened and began to deform and slowly changed into a naked human male the black of utter midnight. Then, from this dark form, tentacular growths speared out, curving round behind it, and within them organic structures blossomed like grey flowers; half-seen forms like distorted animals melded with machines, partially slipping into dimensions only an AI could see. On and on this spread—the virtuality not being limited by perspective—a massive tangle, chaotic.

‘The son of Chaos, and Night’s brother, greets you, posthuman,’ it intoned, ironic.

Just so, thought Jack and, on another level, fought the storm of informational worms eating through, those same worms that had disconnected him from his weapons and were now systematically attempting to make a direct connection to him. In the virtuality, he clapped slowly.

‘Very dramatic and suspiciously anthropomorphic . . . Erebus,’ he said. ‘How did you get to Haruspex?’

Behind Erebus, the Haruspex itself bloomed into being, hurtling down towards the moon. It ran straight into a gauntlet of fire from the unravelled spiral ship—still surprisingly functional. Obviously damaged, Haruspex tried to turn, but slammed side-on into a bacilliform wall, revealed from its own chameleonware only when the Centurion struck it. Jack observed the ship tumbling out the other side, being swamped by tentacular growth.

‘Haruspex is part of me now. Join us.’