Polity Agent by Neal Asher Page B

from the frame, then turned to watch as it folded itself together and disappeared discreetly into the wall of the chamber.
     
    ‘I take it we can leave?’ he added.
     
    Jack, the ship AI, replied, ‘There is a thousand-mile-wide passage through the USER blockade. The twelve gamma class dreadnoughts guarding it have been instructed to let us through.’
     
    ‘That’s good.’
     
    The blockade of USERs—underspace interference emitters that prevented ships attaining FTL travel—positioned a hundred light years away from this point in every direction, prevented any other ships getting close. It illustrated more than any other precaution how seriously Earth Central considered the threat of Jain technology. But as he left the VR chamber, Thorn spied four figures loping along the corridor away from him, and wondered about Earth Central’s other agendas.
     
    The four figures were humanoid but reptilian: their skins regulated with green or yellow scales and their gait reverse-kneed, like birds. One of the four glanced over its shoulder with a toadish visage, bared many sharp teeth at him then loped on. Dracomen—120 of them aboard this ship, all kitted out in military combat suits and armed with the best in portable weapons the Polity could offer.
     
    ‘Is it just a case of putting all the bad eggs in one basket?’ he asked, heading in the same direction as the four.
     
    ‘That is certainly a possibility. Perhaps you’d like to elaborate?’ asked Aphran, abruptly folding out of the air beside him.
     
    He eyed her. ‘Well, we have Jack, a ship AI, now partially melded with the recording of someone who was an enemy of the Polity. That’s one bad egg to start with.’
     
    ‘I am no longer an enemy of the Polity for I no longer agree with the Separatist cause,’ she replied.
     
    ‘Why the conversion?’
     
    ‘I have seen and understood too much.’
     
    ‘And I am supposed to believe that?’
     
    ‘What anyone believes is irrelevant—the facts of my existence, or otherwise, won’t change,’ she said.
     
    ‘Those being?’
     
    ‘I’m a second generation memcording of a murderess, and the only reason I haven’t been erased is because I’ve been useful, and because my consciousness has become closely entangled with Jack’s. I am incapable of doing anything harmful against the Polity because of that last factor, and the moment those two conditions change I don’t think I’ll survive long.’
     
    ‘Okay, I’ll accept that for now. Another bad egg is myself, who has been in contact with Jain technology—just like yourselves. And then there’s the dracomen: the offspring you might say of the sowing of the dragon’s teeth. They’re a product of Dragon and, though they’ve agreed to join the Polity, we don’t fully understand their biology let alone their motivations.’
     
    ‘Yes, those are the eggs,’ said Aphran, and abruptly disappeared.
     
    Thorn considered: Aphran had been useful, she also saved Jack when that AI’s ship body—the Jack Ketch— was destroyed. Quite probably she did no longer espouse the Separatist cause. However, Polity justice was harsh and unforgiving. As a Separatist she had taken lives, and nothing she had done since could change that.
     
    Reaching the end of the corridor, Thorn palmed the lock beside the armoured door, which proceeded to roll back into the wall. Then he entered a part of the ship that smelt like a terrarium full of snakes. A ramp led him down into a wider corridor, with doors along either side. Flute grass matting covered the floor—something the dracomen must have brought from what had been their homeworld of only a few years, since a Dragon sphere sacrificed its own physical substance there in order to create their kind. Treading over this, Thorn peered through one open door into a small cabin containing four bunks—and two dracomen. One of them sat on the floor, its eyes closed while it assembled the component parts of a rail-gun