Cormac glanced around at her. Her ginger hair was even longer than when he last saw her, and was now tied back so her elfin face seemed thinner. She wore skin-tight leggings and sandals, a loose blue blouse. But though she had obviously taken some trouble with her appearance, she looked tired, and the blush marks below her ears were a sure sign of someone who spent too much time in full-immersion VR.

He picked up his brandy, sipped, then said, ‘How are you finding it here?’

She had been aboard the Jack Ketch with him during his pursuit of Skellor, but subsequently defected to Jerusalem where Jain research was being conducted and greater resources were available to her.

‘Do you resent my defection?’ she asked.

He shook his head. ‘No, you did the right thing. Your expertise was needed here and you’re not really a field operative. So tell me, what have you learnt?’

Mika laughed out loud, gesturing to the panoramic window of the lounge with its ersatz view of the stars. ‘What haven’t we learnt?’

‘I’ve studied the overview on the nanotech thus far uncovered, and I’ve seen how far you are along with counteragents and defences.’ He grimaced. ‘But what precisely is Jain technology?’

‘Okay.’ She leant forwards, all enthusiasm now. ‘Put simply: it is self-organizing matter that uses up civilizations for its self propagation. It is not sentient. It is first symbiotic with intelligent beings, then becomes parasitic. Its hosts use the technology to make themselves more powerful, to learn and understand more. But on turning parasitic, the tech absorbs information from them that will enable it to find more of the host’s kind. That information is incorporated into the Jain nodes it then produces while in the process destroying its host.’

‘Made that way or evolved that way?’ wondered Cormac.

Mika shrugged, then glanced up as someone else entered the lounge. Cormac looked up as well. This man was an ophidapt, but he wore a hotsuit, so was obviously a version adapted to low temperature. On the side of his bare scaled head he wore a crystal matrix aug with a buffer to visual and aural interlinks. Despite the technology being discrete, the man lay just a spit away from direct interfacing, and was haiman really. Cormac sent a polite query, and in instant reply received a package telling him all he needed to know.

‘D’nissan, please join us,’ he said.

As one of the scientists who shared Mika’s research into things Jain, Cormac wanted to know what this man had to say. D’nissan studied them for a moment before coming over. ‘An update would be nice.’ He sat down on the sofa next to Mika.

Cormac noticed that, sitting alone on the sofa on the opposite side of the low table, this put himself in the position of interrogator once again. He made a recording of his previous exchange with Mika and transmitted it over.