Cormac went cold. He shivered. That was purportedly what Horace Blegg could do, but Cormac no longer believed Blegg to be what he claimed. Could he be wrong about that? But he just could not encompass what Jerusalem had told him and felt himself teetering on the brink of some abyss. He tried to dismiss it, to focus on the now.

‘Is there anything else you are keeping from me?’ he asked.

Immediately another memcording arrived.

‘What is this?’ asked Cormac, not daring to open it.

‘To control you, Skellor linked into your mind, but as a consequence you were partially linked into his. This is something you picked up from there—his memory of how he actually obtained his Jain node.’

Cormac viewed it, experienced it: as if he himself stood upon the platform on Osterland and received from Jane von Hellsdorf a Jain node for the bargain price of ten shillings.

‘I should have known about this. This needs following up.’

‘Thorn, some dracomen, and a strange amalgam of the Jack Ketch AI with a dead woman called Aphran, are already investigating. You are not yet stable enough for that kind of mission.’

Cormac reluctantly accepted that.

‘Jack and Aphran . . .’

Even as he spoke he sought information via the Jerusalem’s servers: the original Jack Ketch had been destroyed fighting rebellious AI warships, including the King of Hearts, but Jack’s mind was retrieved by Dragon, whom Jerusalem finally caught up with in orbit of the brown dwarf where Skellor and Cento died. Then Dragon’s meek surrender and return to the Cull system, some kind of bartering enacted at fast AI speeds, with the result that Dragon gave up the ship mind, then the huge band manufactured by Jerusalem and placed around Dragon’s equator—a guarantee that Dragon would not try to use the gravitic weapons it contained in some escape attempt.

Cormac returned his attention to the screen. Focus!

Dragon must now answer some hard questions for there were clear links between it, the Makers, and Jain tech arising here in the Polity. Cormac needed to decide what those questions should be, and how far he was prepared to go to obtain answers.

Thorn rested with his back against an oak tree and waited. He observed Scar, pacing back and forth next to the dome. The dracomen had come back in during the night, obviously bored with waiting. Thorn’s own training made him very patient, and his experience enabled him to value brief moments of peace during any operation. It gave him time to appreciate things like trees, the starlit sky fading into misty morning, trees, the cool air on his face, more fucking trees.