The woman was suddenly covered in sweat, then the capillaries in her skin turned bright red. One of the telefactor’s arms swept down, knocking away Aelvor’s connection. Thorn felt something slam into his chest and throw him back.

Hardfield . . .

He hit the wall and slid down. Subliminally he saw the same thing happen to Aelvor. Smoke boiling from the ceiling revealed a laser stabbing up from the telefactor. It reached out blindingly fast, its manipulators hooked under the woman’s armpits, dragged her upright, then with her it rocketed through the hole it had cut. The ensuing blast bowed the ceiling, and a column of fire washed down through the hole. Shortly after, the telefactor crashed back through, blackened, its shell buckled. Very little remained of Jane von Hellsdorf. The air stank of burning bacon.

The Jerusalem dropped out of U-space and cruised into the Cull system. In his own quarters Cormac called up the required views on his screen, and once again looked upon his old adversary. Then, whilst he observed Dragon hanging manacled over the ice giant, he cleared his mind and tried to find the gaps in his memory of events here. He recalled Skellor taking control of the local population and using them as hostages to ensure Cormac’s own surrender. He recalled being a prisoner in some Jain substructure aboard the Ogygian—the colony ship that had originally taken Cull’s inhabitants there from Earth. He recollected being utterly under Skellor’s control, but then things started to get a little fragmentary. He knew Cento had concealed himself aboard the Ogygian and, while a kill program in that ancient ship’s computer held Skellor in thrall, the Golem sabotaged the drive to bring that ship into an inescapable orbit around a brown dwarf. The King of Hearts—a rebel AI attack ship—had then fired grapples onto the Ogygian, and while Cento held onto Skellor, Cormac went out to sever them. Somehow he ended up on one of those grapples, and the King’s AI, rather than killing him for preventing it obtaining the Jain tech that Skellor possessed, had released him to deliver a message to Jerusalem: Honest, I didn’t get any, don’t hunt me down and kill me. But how did Cormac himself escape from that Jain substructure inside Ogygian?

Cormac could only assume that Cento must have released him from the enclosing structure, but something still bothered him about that. He closed his eyes and linked into Jerusalem’s servers, then created a search program to find himself there. Jerusalem had recorded him, repaired his brain, then downloaded that recording back to his repaired brain. Cormac felt certain the AI retained a copy . . . and there it was.

‘You will find that difficult to access,’ warned Jerusalem from the intercom in his quarters. ‘Your gridlink does not possess the capacity to sort out that mess.’

‘My mind is a mess?’