Thorn, apparently standing a mile out in vacuum but actually ensconced in VR aboard the spaceship and seeing through a remote camera, studied carefully the Not Entirely Jack. The vessel was one of the new Centurion-class attack ships. It bore some resemblance to the Jack Ketch in that its main body bore the shape of a cuttlefish bone, however here the weapons’ nacelles rode either side of the ship’s nose and another nacelle protruded below its stern. The ship’s skin constantly bloomed with colour like some ancient screensaver, but with those colours seen on polished steel as it is being heated. With omniscient vision he then surveyed surrounding space. Numerous other ships orbited the nearby planet, and many had already landed; this was no more than to be expected considering the possibility of Jain technology being scattered over its surface. But the strangest sight in this system was the organic moonlet at bay. Thorn focused in on this—increasing the magnification of his vision many hundred times beyond what would be possible with his naked eyes.

The dragon sphere hung stationary in the ether, as if backed up against the green-blue orb of the ice-giant planet. Two dangerous-looking ships, similar to this one, patrolled around it like attack dogs. One large old dreadnought, of a similar design and provenance to the Occam Razor, hovered with all its weapons trained on the alien entity, and not even that was enough.

Thorn did not know precisely what the metallic object stretching around a third of Dragon’s equator could actually do, but its purpose was evident. The entity was under arrest, imprisoned in some way—perhaps the only way possible for restraining a sphere of living tissue nearly a mile in diameter and capable of travelling through space like any Polity ship. The metallic band was its manacle. Dragon, who Skellor came here to find, had also been caught in the trap sprung on that criminal.

‘It seems a shame to leave,’ said Thorn. ‘Things are still pretty interesting around here.’ He reached up, turned off the helmet projection with a tap of his finger, and lifted the VR helmet from his head—it had not been necessary to go to full immersion for this last look around. Unstrapping himself, he stepped down from the frame, then turned to watch as it folded itself together and disappeared discreetly into the wall of the chamber.

‘I take it we can leave?’ he added.

Jack, the ship AI, replied, ‘There is a thousand-mile-wide passage through the USER blockade. The twelve gamma class dreadnoughts guarding it have been instructed to let us through.’

‘That’s good.’