‘Slow down,’ Dragon abruptly instructed.
In a panic Mika spun the craft with its steering thrusters then used the main engine to decelerate.
‘Coordinates on your screen.’
Mika peered down at a density map of her surroundings, her craft a winking icon amid translucent branches. On one of those branches a small square red frame was also winking. It took her some moments to orient herself, and then know to look up to her left. She could see nothing there so turned the craft to direct its lights that way, revealing some minuscule object secured to a branch. Firing up the steering thrusters again, she took her craft closer, soon seeing something orange resembling the blemish caused by a parasite burrowing into a plant stem. It was only at a distance of a hundred yards that she finally recognized its shape.
‘Oh hell.’
‘This is interesting,’ Dragon replied.
Mika slowed her craft but it continued to drift in closer. The Polity had been making spacesuits that particular shade of fluorescent orange for a long time, especially for those working on the outsides of space stations or ships, so that they could be easily seen or easily found — it was a safety thing. But she guessed the suit makers had never envisaged this scenario. When she was ten yards out from the suit she could see the mummified face behind the visor and the roots of Jain-tech that had punched through the fabric. Did they kill him — or her? Or had the decompression done that?
‘We know that some humans did accompany Trafalgar’s exodus from the Polity,’ said Dragon.
‘I bet they wished they hadn’t.’
‘One has to wonder why this one is stuck out here like this.’
‘Trying to escape?’
‘Most likely — but I will extend my pseudopods to here to investigate further.’
Mika backed up her craft and returned to her course. Now she felt tense, the leaden feeling returning to her stomach, perhaps because she was reminded of her own mortality. Jerking the joystick forward she ramped up the acceleration to get away from there as quickly as possible and for some minutes ignored the collision warning icons. Then she felt stupid and eased off, after a moment putting the craft back on autopilot. Glancing up she saw two blue eyes peering down at her. With concern maybe?
Over the next hour the regular beep of collision icons had the autopilot regularly knocking down her speed. Nearing the centre of the coral bloom, its branches were much closer together and in some cases even melded, with webworks of coral bridging the gaps. Eventually she reached an area that seemed all but impassable, until she checked her density map and found a way through. She carefully edged her craft up close to the mass of coral before her, then peered to one side. There. Turning she motored through a fork, then turned again, her craft bumping against something material nearby. Coral flaked off, frangible as charcoal, and tumbled through vacuum. A short twisting passage to worm through, then she was out the other side and into a wider space.
‘The Trafalgar,’ Dragon announced in her head, and Mika immediately felt her mouth turn arid.
It sat there in the centre space like a pinned bug, though a particularly large one, attached to the remains of the moon it had partly eaten. Numerous thick trunks of coral spread out from it, running straight for half a mile to the point she had just passed through, where they bunched together and then branched. Mika recognized the shape of the vessel, the nose a squat wedge with two enormous U-engine nacelles depending behind it, close together, and another jutting up above. Behind these lay a docking ring with a few smaller ships still attached, then its main cylindrical body, which sat in a huge square-section rectangular framework. The cylinder’s spindle doubtless ran in bearings mounted at each end of the framework. This was clearly a body fashioned for centrifugal gravity, which showed that the warship had been built long before the Prador war, then adapted when the conflict began. To the rear of the main body and enclosing framework jutted the engine section terminating in an array of fusion engine combustion chambers. All over the vessel were gun turrets, the throats of rail-gun launchers and hatches for missile racks, some open and with their contents poking out into space as if ready for an attack. The whole structure was tangled in Jain coral, however — in some places completely shrouded and in others with its hull broken open where trunks of the stuff had smashed their way out.
Beyond Trafalgar, tendrils were heavily entangled around a scattering of asteroids, rock that had melted and run and then hardened in vacuum into baroque shapes, hollow crusts of ash and tough volcanic glass. Debris floated free there, and numerous areas were dark with soot. These were the remains that active Jain technology had left behind, like discarded carapaces and rocky snakeskins — matter with the wealth sucked out of it.
‘So,’ she said, ‘the Jain AIs are the roots of Jain technology, yet here it seems to me that the technology is dead, so how can the AIs be here?’ Though she said these words, Mika really did not believe them, for she felt as if she had ventured into some haunted house where violent spectres were about to come crashing through the walls at any moment. Releasing the joystick, she studied her hand, expecting to see it shaking, but oddly it wasn’t.
‘There is little energy to be utilized here,’ Dragon replied. ‘Let me give you another analogy: trees.’
‘Explain.’
‘The most activity you witness in a tree is at the tips of its twigs where the leaves sprout and where it opens its flowers and sheds its pollen, where it grows its fruit, yet the trunk itself is not dead.’
‘How can you be sure this trunk is still alive?’
‘That fact was demonstrated as you travelled in here. I am seeing it now even as I reach the corpse you saw earlier. There is activity here now — though fed merely by the power of your ship’s lights and the heat from its engines.’ Dragon paused, and Mika looked up at the remote to see that its palp eyes were now directed towards Trafalgar. ‘Note the effect of your lights here.’
In an instant Mika saw it. For some minutes her lights had been shining constantly on Trafalgar, and now, over a section of its coral-encrusted hull, a shifting movement appeared like that observed in the skin of a squid when trying to camouflage itself. Mika quickly found a way to turn down the glare, then turned up the light amplification of her visor to its maximum. Though it would have been safer to kill the lights completely, she left them on because, right then, the dark scared her.
‘I see,’ said Dragon.
‘What do you see?’
‘I am examining our long-dead friend,’ Dragon replied. ‘And through my remote I am also seeing something rather anomalous.’
‘What?’ Mika peered at Trafalgar.
‘Attached to the rear of the nose section — on the docking ring.’
The vessels docked there were swamped in Jain technology, but Mika could not see anything more anomalous about them than in anything else here.
‘I see two small shuttles and an attack ship,’ she peered closer, ‘and what looks like some sort of EVA vehicle.’
‘Look closer at the attack ship.’
‘I’m looking but all I’m seeing is an attack ship.’
‘An attack ship like the Jack Ketch in its original form?’
‘Certainly.’
‘And not like the one you saw on the way in?’