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‘Publicity whore,’ I replied.

‘Not just publicity, mate,’ he’d said, but the banter sounded hollow, forced.

‘Invincible?’ Pagan asked. I’d been thinking the same thing: which fight had Mudge been at?

‘Only Buck died,’ Mudge said, grinning. There was an appalled silence but Mudge didn’t stop grinning. Then Gibby started to laugh.

So everyone was in – strange how I couldn’t get happy about that. I’d spent much of the shuttle’s ascent trying not to get caught by Morag staring at her. She was right: her decision was nothing to do with me. It just seemed such a waste.

We couldn’t pronounce the name of the ship but roughly translated it came out as Spear of Understanding, so we just called it Spear. It was a long-range strike craft, the spaceship equivalent of a long-distance bomber. Stealth capable, it was designed to penetrate Themspace and deliver its payload at asteroid habitats or command ships. The funny thing was, long-range strike craft had been developed from deep-space, system-survey craft. I wondered how long we would have to wait before we could decommission our weapons of war and use them for more peaceful purposes.

Like some of the lighter frigates, many LRSCs were often refitted to use as special forces delivery platforms for jobs that required slightly more finesse than you could achieve with a guided missile. Well, that’s what they’d told us in the Regiment anyway. The elite Kenyan Reconnaissance Commandos had refitted the Spear for just such a use.

We’d inherited most of the commandos’ gear. Most importantly the refitted bomb bay had contained six Mamluk light mechs. In the same class as the Wraiths, the Mamluks were a more up-to-date light mech/exo-armour with improved stealth and sensor capabilities. Lying prone in their modified missile racks, their matt-black, sensor-absorbing, featureless, almost organic outlines were beautiful to look at. It didn’t matter how much you hated the military, if you had served then you still got a thrill from the hardware. The Mamluks were superb pieces of kit, only the best for equatorial special forces, I guessed. They were outfitted for vacuum operations and already had their propulsion/manoeuvring fins attached. Not quite as strong as the Wraiths, the Mamluks’ interfaces and responses from the servos were a lot faster, meaning they would react quicker than the older exo-armour model.

There was also a slightly older American-made Dog Soldier mech. The Dog Soldier was the only special forces mech ever designed to fulfil a fire-support role. It was not as stealthy or as fast as Mamluks or Wraiths, but was more heavily armed and armoured. Balor had arranged to have the Dog Soldier delivered to the Spear while we’d been en route on the shuttle. Now that we were under sail he was busy modifying it with Pagan’s help so that he could fit into it.

I was worried about the Dog Soldier’s lesser stealth capabilities but I was pretty sure we’d need its firepower. The Mamluks were armed with the most modern derivative of the chain-fed, 20-millimetre Retributor railgun and back-mounted, vertically launched, smartlink-targeted, anti-armour missiles. The Dog Soldier carried the heavier Vengeance 30-millimetre chain-fed railgun with an over-slung, magazine-fed, 105-millimetre mass driver. Basically the mass driver was a semi-automatic, much larger-calibre railgun. It also had an anti-missile/anti-personnel, ball-mounted, laser-defence system and two shoulder-mounted, smartlink-targeted missile batteries. I just hoped that Balor got it ready on time. I also wondered how he’d managed to find it and get it delivered to the Spear that quickly. The Mamluks came in at just over ten feet tall, the Dog Soldier was closer to fifteen feet.

Rannu, his face still covered in a medpak, was running Morag through extra-vehicular-activity combat simulations for the Mamluks. I didn’t like the idea, but if she was coming she should at least be as ready as we could get her.

As soon as we’d set sail Gibby had begun tinkering with the LRSC’s controls. I didn’t like space travel at the best of times, so Gibby mucking around with the Spear’s controls while we were moving faster than the speed of light did not go down well – especially when he accidentally managed to shut down life support for two hours – but he seemed to have everything working now. He rarely slept as he was speeding most of the time, and you could usually hear his strangely subdued and melancholy music drifting through the ship.

I’m not sure what Mudge was doing, probably masturbating and recording it with his eye lenses again, and I was busy dying. So we all kind of had something to do, but what we couldn’t do was plan. Gregor had been very insistent but vague about what the plan was. All we knew was that it would be EVA, my least favourite things to do. But we couldn’t work on the plan while we were under sail, while we had eight days to do so, because Gregor was in a fucking cocoon. This pissed me off and not just because it was deeply not normal.

Mudge had discovered it on our first day under sail. It had taken him quite some time to convince us it was real, as he’d been taking recreational psychotropics at the time. Eventually he showed us footage he’d shot in the engine room. It was a huge, resinous-looking pod held upright in the corner by the power-containment equipment. Some power lines had been spliced into the cocoon. Gibby checked the systems and confirmed a significant power bleed. I was too sick to go and look myself, or rather I was saving all the best drugs for the job, but from the footage the pod looked to be about eighteen feet tall.

Gibby reviewed the security-lens recordings from the engine room. The grainy low-quality picture showed Gregor entering the engine room. He was naked, his huge off-kilter physiology making it seem all the more obscene. He was carrying a tool kit. People like Gregor and I knew our way around an engine room because we had been trained to sabotage them. He uncoupled a very heavy gauge power cable. All of us then winced and were thankful for the low quality of the image when he pushed the cable into his flesh where the base of a human spine would be. It looked like he’d dislocated his arm several times to get the cable in place. Then he’d just leant against the wall. That got boring so we fast-forwarded it.

‘He’s got a big cock,’ Mudge said. We all turned to stare at him. ‘I’m just saying,’ he said defensively. We turned our attention back to the image. Gregor was shaking. His flesh beneath the skin seemed to be writhing, flowing and bulging of its own accord as his shaking began to look like a serious seizure.

‘What’s that?’ Morag asked, and then made a disgusted noise. Gregor was producing a substance that looked like viscous black bile. Before long he was vomiting it all over himself. We were all disgusted, but of course we all kept watching. The black substance adhered to him and solidified into the hard resinous substance of the cocoon. Soon he was covered in the cocoon, only his head, a fountain for this black vomit, showing. Eventually that was covered as well. We were quiet for a bit, just looking at the image of the solidifying cocoon.

‘What’s the chance of him becoming a butterfly?’ I asked. Mudge started giggling, seemingly uncontrollably.

‘What the fuck’s he doing?’ Gibby had asked. He was strumming one of Buck’s guitars. We were all in the quarters that Morag and I shared. I was propped up and coughing blood into a bucket every now and then. The interface that Gibby had set up meant that he could pretty much control the ship from anywhere on-board.

‘Maybe he’s just sleeping?’ I suggested. ‘Conserving energy?’ I realised how weak this sounded.

‘He’s drawing a lot of energy,’ Gibby pointed out.

‘Which he has to use for something,’ Pagan said thoughtfully.

‘This is quite interesting,’ he finished and lapsed back into silence. Morag, Rannu, Gibby and I all looked at him expectantly. Mudge was examining his own stomach.