‘What do you mean?’ she asked, looking slightly panic-stricken.

‘Something about the organic interface?’

‘I . . .’

‘Let me put it this way: just a moment ago I wondered, because of the way I feel, if I was chemically depressed. Then I checked, which rather tells me that I am now hooking in to my autonomous nervous system.’

‘The interface,’ said Hannah, as they waited for the spider-gun to proceed through the airlock ahead of them, ‘it’s not a static organism.’

As the airlock cycled, Saul glanced back at the other two spiderguns herding the captives towards the same endcap. Then, with negligent ease, he cracked the coding of transmissions passing between the captives. Messina was busy firing off orders and demands for assessments to all about him, though the replies came mainly from a couple of delegates who had risen high in the Inspectorate hierarchy before joining the Committee. The Chairman was demanding an escape – with a few inevitable losses, surely they could reach a different docking pillar and board another space plane? He was currently being informed that, even only one spidergun was watching them, such an attempt would be suicidal.

‘Smith was stronger than me, to begin with, then weaker,’ Saul said, mentally instructing the airlock to open ahead of them now that the spidergun was through. ‘My integration process with Janus is still far from complete, but even so, that should not result in me being able to connect this way to my autonomous nervous system.’

‘The interface is growing.’

He nodded as he entered the airlock ahead of her, and whilst they stood inside, waiting for it to pressurize, he mulled over the implications. Only when they were back inside the arcoplex did he speak again.

‘Malden’s was static,’ he said.

‘Yes . . .’

‘Mine, however, is growing a neural matrix throughout my brain.’ He paused. ‘What is the organism based upon?’

‘Your own DNA,’ she replied.

He turned and stared at her. ‘So no rejection problems.’

She nodded. ‘It uses your own neural stem cells and grows its matrix from them. After just one day, the connectivity between your organic brain and the hardware in your skull was about the same as Malden’s. Now it should be about twice that.’

‘When does it stop growing?’

‘Only when it matches up to the demand you place on the hardware. If you make further demands of it, the matrix will grow further to accommodate that.’

It struck him as more than likely that such bioware was not on general release. If it had been, then Smith would have acquired it.

‘It’s a prototype, then,’ he stated.