Immediately the unit began taking in water. He could feel it suffusing his flesh and cooling him. Was his bone marrow producing red blood cells now? What would happen first? In seeming answer, his arms began to itch intolerably. As he scratched at them, grey skin began to slew away. His hope of seeing pink skin underneath was dashed when flesh as white as fish meat was revealed. He stopped scratching and inspected his fingernails. Two of them were bent right back. He shook his hand and they fell out, pus now leaking from the ends of his fingers.

N-FACT MESSAGE: DANGER - TANK AMNIOT UNSUITABLE. ELECTROLYTIC REQUIREMENTS . . .

Keech turned the message off. He wasn’t in a tank. The nearest electrolyte he could immerse himself in was this sea, and that seemed a suicidal idea. He’d just have to pray that Erlin could help him. When his irrigator automatically moistened his already wet living eye, he reached up and unplugged it. Some things seemed to be working, anyway. Once the unit stopped drawing in water, he stood, picked it up, and headed unsteadily for his scooter. The nanites could still work on his body while he was in the air, so there was no point in waiting here any longer. He mounted his scooter and dropped the unit between his thighs. From the comlink came that familiar strange buzzing the instant he turned it on.

‘Yes?’ said the Hive mind.

‘I have your package, and I will deliver it,’ said Keech, the liquid in his mouth and throat distorting his synthesized voice. A set of slowly changing coordinates flicked up on the screen map, and Keech lifted his scooter from the stone. Once in the air, he keyed the autopilot and sat back. He didn’t want to fly manually while he was dripping on the controls.

* * * *

Through thousands of eyes the Warden observed the people in the base on Coram and on the planet below. When a situation hinted at ramifications that might impinge on its remit, the AI observed it with greater attention, or assigned a submind to watch it develop. When an SM could not be spared from its particular vehicle: be that an iron seahorse, floating cockleshell, or some other more esoteric sea-shape, the Warden loaded a copy or created one for that specific purpose. Sometimes it allowed these new minds to continue. At other times it resubsumed them. After all, they were only a pattern of information - as was all life.