Cormac stabbed a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Arach already killed someone who looked just like you. I guess now it’s my turn to do the same.’

‘Just as humans can be recorded, so can I,’ replied the Legate.

‘That’s nice.’ Cormac peered down at the CTD, wondering why he even bothered with this conversation.

‘Why?’ asked the Legate. ‘Why resist like this and finally throw away your lives?’

Looking up, Cormac replied, ‘Because you will take our minds apart to find information useful to you, and discard the rest. You’ll either kill us in the process but, worse than that, you might decide to use us like automatons. You are Jain-based and that seems the way such technology operates.’

‘We would not utilize anything so ineffective.’

‘Death, then. I take it this “we” refers to yourself and some controlling intelligence.’

‘I am one with Erebus.’

‘Him being?’

‘The one who melds us all.’

Enough.

Cormac sent a command to Shuriken and the throwing star accelerated towards the Legate. Simultaneously, a gap appeared in the craft’s exterior beside the Legate, and something shot out towards Cormac. One of those octopoids he saw earlier. Shuriken veered and sliced through this object.

Time . . .

The blast lifted him from his feet and hurled him backwards. He glimpsed burning flesh fountaining from the top of the rod-ship, around the turquoise pillar of a particle beam. The ship seemed to deflate as it dropped from sight, flames bursting around the now flopping figure of the Legate. As he ducked for cover with the others, towards the back of the ledge, Cormac observed the CTD roll away and fall from sight. Burning biomechanisms rained down, piling on the ledge itself then falling further in smouldering masses. Acrid smoke filled the air. Somewhere a boom, and fragments vaguely identifiable as bits of other rod-ships rained down through the volcanic chimney.

‘What the fuck?’ said someone, inevitably.

Polity?