Polity Agent

About fifty dracomen occupied the large chamber at the far end of the corridor. Some of them practised hand-to-hand combat moves in which Thorn recognized some elements of his own training. Why they felt the need to train was beyond him, since a dracoman could tear any normal human apart without breaking into a sweat… not that they did sweat. Others sat at tables, on the strange saddle-like affairs they used as chairs. They were either studying or playing games—it was difficult to tell. Another group dismantled a mosquito pulse-gun—a semi AI weapon that wandered about on six legs and did bear some resemblance to that blood-sucking insect. Everyone looked busy.

‘Up here.’

Thorn glanced up. A catwalk ran around the chamber and on it awaited Aphran’s hologram and some more dracomen. Looking higher Thorn saw almost a reflection of what he saw down here. The cylindrical chamber extended across the ship, from hull to hull, and ended in another gravplated floor on the other side. Equidistant between the two floors, where their effect cancelled out, lay a caged zero-G area where more dracomen practised combat moves. He located a nearby stair and climbed up it to join Aphran.

‘What do you think?’ she asked.

‘I haven’t made up my mind yet.’ Thorn studied one of the nearby dracomen. ‘Now, nobody told me he was going to be here.’

The dracoman turned. He looked much like his fellows, but for an ugly scar running from one nostril up to just below one eye. Nicknamed Scar, he retained that name like the disfigurement itself, even though dracomen could consciously instruct their bodies to heal such physical damage. He was one of the first two dracomen created by the Dragon sphere destroyed at Samarkand, and, if there could be such a thing, was the leader of his kind.

‘Thornss,’ Scar lisped, blinking huge eyes, his slotted pupils narrowing.

‘Why are you here, Scar?’

‘To serve the Polity.’

‘How?’

‘By obeying.’

‘Obeying who?’

Scar extended first his arm, then one clawed finger. ‘You.’

* * * *

Cormac remembered his first sight of the Maker, of that race called ‘the Makers’. On the planet Viridian it shot out of an ancient missile silo like a white-hot jack-in-the-box. He saw the workings of its body like a glassy display of flasks and tubes in a chemistry laboratory—it seemed the fantastic creation of some godlike glass-maker. His overall impression was first of a Chinese dragon, but then that changed. It seemed made of glass supported by bones like glowing tungsten filaments. It possessed a long swanlike neck ending in a nightmare head with something of a lizard and something of a preying mantis about it. It opened out wings, batlike at first, then taking on the appearance of a mass of sails. A heavy claw, or maybe a hand shaped like a millipede, gripped the edge of the silo. Its glowing bullwhip tail thrashed the air, sprouted sails, fins, light. Only later did he discover his initial belief that this was some kind of energy creature to be false. It was all projection: holographic and partially telepathic. The creature went out of his remit then, to Earth. He later loaded a report from there about this being. The creature’s true nature could not be discovered even by forensic AIs. The projection it generated seemed a defensive measure they could not penetrate, and the only fact confirmed was its need to eat specific kinds of vegetative matter, which only proved it to be an organic lifeform.

‘We weren’t due to go into coldsleep until six months into the journey, as there was still a lot to do,’ explained Chaline. ‘But right away all of us started experiencing these weird dreams. The Maker toned down its projection for a while, then requested a Golem chassis and some stock syntheflesh. It took this into the area it occupied—a spherical zero-G chamber it had made secure against scanning—then after two days the Golem walked out. We didn’t know if it was telefactored from inside the chamber or if the Maker now occupied it somehow. Not then we didn’t. But from that moment the Golem became the Maker to us.’

‘What about the appearance of the Golem itself?’ Cormac asked.

‘Male, dark hair, red eyes—very dramatic. Of course then it renamed itself.’ Chaline gave a cynical shake of her head. ‘Called itself, himself, Lucifer.’

Cormac placed his elbows on the table, interlaced his fingers and rested his chin on them. ‘Do I detect something of Dragon’s humour there?’

‘I don’t know. Humour or hubris—you tell me.’

‘Tell me about the dreams.’