A Quantum Mythology

by Gavin G. Smith

Genres: Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

Praised by Stephen Baxter and Adam Roberts, reviewed ecstatically by SFX magazine, Gavin Smith is one of the brightest stars of space opera. In the far future, many years after the loss of earth, humanity has changed. Strength is the only way to survive. And the most vicious man alive has a new con in mind... Here and now, a man with unnatural powers hunts down a killer with impossible abilities. Infused with a barely-understood alien technology, the two are merely pawns in a bigger game... A long time ago, the last tribes of Northern Britain face an unimaginable enemy. Demons risen from the sea, absorbing and twisting everything they touch. But there are some among the tribes who have power, who will fight... And all of these times are connected... Gavin Smith's new epic space opera is a wide-ranging exploration of the past, present and future of mankind.

Release date: March 26, 2015

Publisher: Gollancz

Print pages: 577

Sample

 

 

1

Birmingham, 1791

 

Sir Ronald Sharpely may well have been impatient, but the Clock­worker was not to be hurried.

‘The innovation, Sir Ronald, is not in the pepperbox style of the weapon …’ With delicate tools inherited from his watchmaker father, the Clockworker continued finessing intricate adjustments to the complicated powder pan of the seven-barrelled flintlock pistol. ‘It’s not even in the rifling inside the barrel, which will make it more accurate,’ he continued. His Swiss accent was very slight. He turned to look at Sharpely, a well-built man in the prime of his life with the complexion of someone who enjoyed outdoor activities. Sharpely did not like the way the brass-and-leather lens arrangement strapped to the Clockworker’s head made one of the man’s strangely coloured, lifeless eyes look so large.

‘Damn it, man, I was told it would be ready!’ Sir Ronald snapped, looking down at the pale, emaciated figure dressed in dark clothes that made him look like one of last century’s Puritans. The Clockworker wasn’t bald so much as someone who did not quite suit hair. Sir Ronald was pleased when the Clockworker turned back to work on the pistol’s mechanism.

‘You were told it would be ready today. And it will,’ the artificer said absently as he worked with the tools he had rescued from his father’s burning workshop. A religious man, his father. Realising that all sin came from the flesh, he had attempted to replace his children’s flesh with his own devices. To the Clockworker this had been sound reasoning, inasmuch as any religious reasoning was.

‘The rifling will make it much slower to reload than a smoothbore weapon, but after seven shots, if you haven’t killed what you were aiming at—’

‘When will it—’

‘The innovation on this pistol is the mechanism for the pan. All you need to do is turn the barrels as you would normally and my mechanism will refresh the pan with powder. This will of course ­rapidly increase the speed of your firing.’ Sir Ronald watched im­patiently as the Clockworker demonstrated the weapon. ‘Will you be staying in Bromichan tonight?’ He used the old name for the city, which was only just starting to go out of fashion.

‘No, we are staying with friends in Aston,’ Sir Ronald said in exasperation.

‘We? So your family are with you?’

Sir Ronald stopped staring at the finely wrought seven-barrelled pistol that was being constructed for him and instead looked at the Clockworker’s eyes. His face burned red with anger at being addressed so familiarly by a tradesman, even one so singularly skilled as the Clockworker. He didn’t see the Clockworker cut himself with one of his tools. He didn’t see the Clockworker smear blood on the butt of the pistol. He didn’t see the blood absorbed into the wood of the gun as if it had never existed, and he didn’t see the Clockworker’s wound heal itself of its own accord.

‘Damn your impudence! What business—?’

The Clockworker made one more tiny adjustment and there was an audible click from the clockwork pan mechanism.

‘And we’re done.’ The Clockworker held up the completed pistol. The engraved silvered barrels were longer than a normal pepperbox, for greater accuracy. It was a heavy pistol but finely balanced, with a lead weight in the rounded base of the mahogany butt.

Sir Ronald took the expertly crafted weapon from the Clockworker and stared at it with awe.

‘That, sir, is a fine piece of work,’ Sir Ronald said. The Clockworker merely nodded. ‘Excuse my rudeness. I am not a patient man.’ Sir Ronald tested the weapon’s action, pulling the hammer back and then lowering it without letting the flint fall and spark. The Clockworker grimaced as he turned the barrels by hand, forcing the ticking clockwork mechanism. ‘My wife and Elsa, the eldest, wish to frequent the various dressmakers and seamstresses the town has to offer, whereas Alexander, my youngest—’

‘Wishes to see the toy manufactories the city is so famous for?’ the Clockworker finished for him.

‘Just so,’ Sir Ronald said, transfixed by the pistol.

‘Well, I believe our business here is concluded. I make children’s toys also – in fact, I prefer to do so. I am a faint-hearted man, I’m afraid, and the thought of guns … Well, let us say I prefer to create entertainments that make children happy. I have a small workshop on Snow Hill. I would love for young Alexander to see my creations.’

‘What? Oh, yes, we will look for you. If you will excuse me, sir, I must bid you good day.’

The Clockworker watched Sir Ronald walk out of the workshop. No, he wasn’t a religious man, but he knew he had demons in his blood, demons that would do as he bid them.

 

Before it became a reality of soot-stained brick and stone buildings, the city was a cloud of black smoke pouring from thousands of chimneys on the horizon. Houses, forges, mills, manufactories, workshops and churches, all tightly packed together.

The canal boat he was travelling on brought the coal from the Black Country that powered the city’s industry. The Hellaquin had never been fond of cities, and already the stink of the smoke, of the people and animals all pressed together, and of the filth in the street they created was beginning to feel oppressive. Birmingham looked like a slice of hell to the Hellaquin as the narrowboat slid through the water towards the foundry wharf in the west of the city.

The boatmen secured the narrowboat and saw to the horse that pulled the craft as the foundry-men and -women came with barrows to unload the coal. The Hellaquin picked up his belongings: a wooden case just over two feet long and a waxed-leather-wrapped stave some six feet long. The boatmen tried to ignore the two short swords the man with the hulking upper body wore at his waist under his leather coat. They just returned his nod as he climbed off the narrowboat and headed east. Behind him was the orange glow of molten metal being poured from crucibles in the foundry, accompanied by a constant thunderous clanging.

 

On New Street he waded through mud and excrement, both human and animal. The street was packed with people. He hated the way the wood-beamed houses crowded in over his head, almost touching, blocking out the smoke-stained sky. He had been in battles where the press of people wasn’t so extreme. He was appalled to see horses, and even wagons, trying to make their way down the street. The six-foot stave he carried wasn’t making him any friends, either.

There were too many of them, and with the stench, and the smoke, he was finding it harder and harder to breathe. A fat, bald, florid man in a leather apron was screaming in his face now. It may as well have been in a foreign language. The Hellaquin felt his forehead connect with the man’s nose. His forehead came away wet and sticky. The man fell into the filth and ordure.

A horse bumped into him and he staggered back. He almost lost his grip on the stave. He felt the panic rising in him. He was at Poitiers again. Then the panic was gone. He felt the change. The calmness he felt in battle. He had killed horses at Poitiers, when English arrows glanced off curved French plate mail.

The Hellaquin turned away and pushed through the mass towards the edge of the street. He made it to a narrow alleyway, where a crown in the hand of a hard-faced urchin secured him a loyal backstreet guide.

 

Where New Street had been oppressive and closed in, the Froggary may as well have been underground. It was a tangled multilevel warren of ramshackle buildings connected by narrow corridors in which people lived, and it was impossible to tell where one building ended and another began. The Hellaquin followed the urchin through rooms inhabited by entire extended families, sometimes more than one.

Other than crossing two streets, they had pretty much been moving from one building to another, occasionally looking down on crowded courtyards or walking over makeshift bridges. Then the urchin led him out onto the High Street. The Hellaquin didn’t like the press of people out here, either, but his guide forced a path for him through a mixture of pedestrian agility and aggression.

They made their way south over the refuse of the different markets that ran down from New Street towards the corn market at the Bull Ring, in the shadow of St Martin’s Church. The Hellaquin heard the barking of the dogs and the bellowing of a wounded bull long before he saw the small green outside the church.

The ‘Bull Ring’ was a heavy iron ring embedded in the ground. A badly savaged, blood-covered bull was weakly trying to fend off several dogs bred specifically for the purpose of baiting. A number of dead and dying badly gored dogs lay around the green – presumably the bull had put up quite a fight. The practice had been banned in the city some eighteen years past, but too many people insisted that the meat tasted better if the beast was baited first. Those people were prepared to pay extra for it.

The Hellaquin turned away from the death throes of the beast at the teeth of the flat-faced dogs. He could remember when this entire area had been a deer park. In fact, it hadn’t been far from here, in a root-lined earthen cavern, where he’d drunk from the Red Chalice.

Just off the green a crowd had gathered by a large clanking, hissing mechanism with two black iron arms that pumped up and down, steam rising from it constantly. The whole machine must have been four, five yards tall, the Hellaquin estimated. He stopped and stared at it. The urchin backpedalled to stand by him.

‘What is it?’ the Hellaquin asked, his tone equal parts awe and dread.

‘It’s one of Mr Watt’s steam engines,’ his grubby guide answered. Then his tone became more guarded. ‘They say it’s going to replace people soon – working, I mean. Then everyone will be like us. The world’ll be a rookery.’

It was a machine, a device. The Hellaquin knew about those. He had been a man once, but now he was something else. He stared as long as he could manage.

The Hellaquin dismissed the boy and headed south-east into Digbeth, where three- and four-storey stone houses became two- and three-storey wood houses. With fewer crowds than the market centre, the Digbeth Road had dried to cracks and dust in the late-July sun. Horses and carts plied the route under the watchful eyes of soldiers called in to quell the recent riots. They leaned against the walls of houses, sweating in their red coats, bayonets affixed to their muskets. With his big build, his upper body so large he looked almost deformed and his thick leather coat in the hot July sun, the Hellaquin attracted their attention and they watched him go by.

It had been many years since he last felt warmth or cold like others did. So long since he last sweated.

 

He could remember a time when the Old Crown had been a guildhouse and a school. Now it was a hostelry and tavern. The Hellaquin was a tall man, and he had to stoop to avoid banging his head on the ceiling beams inside the wooden-framed two-storey thatched building. Nobody paid any attention to him, not even when his substantial bulk jostled them as he made his way through the press of customers towards the bar. The exception was the Knight. He noticed the Hellaquin. He was sitting at a table in the corner eating a large roast beef dinner that would have fed a family. Like the Hellaquin, he needed a lot of food to sate the devils within.

Their vocations meant they were natural enemies. Even allowing for that, the Hellaquin had never liked the Knight. He wore the clothes of a gentleman who preferred the outdoor life. The exception to his rural finery was the cavalryman’s trousers with leather inner legs. The trousers were tucked into knee-length riding boots.

He wore no wig, and his fine blond hair was tied back into a ponytail with a black ribbon. Both his hair and face had been powdered. Blue eyes glanced at the Hellaquin’s shabby clothes and shoulder-length, unkempt, dark hair with the easy disdain of the aristocrat. The Knight beckoned for the Hellaquin to join him as if he were calling a servant.

‘When it was a guildhouse, at least the wine was better,’ the Knight said by way of greeting. His French accent had become a lot less noticeable during the nearly five hundred years the Hellaquin had known the other ‘man’. ‘Get my friend whatever he wants and a lot of it,’ he said to a passing servingwoman. The Hellaquin asked for stew, bread and ale as he put his case down and slid it under the table. He leaned the stave against the wall. ‘Still carrying that thing, I see?’ said the Knight.

The Hellaquin observed a brace of pistols on the table, and a belt with scabbards for a cavalry sabre and the Knight’s strange Far-Eastern knife hanging over the chair next to him. The Knight noticed the Hellaquin glancing at the ornate, long-barrelled flintlock pistols.

‘Nock of London. Perhaps you should consider joining this new age? I looked for you in America.’

‘I was further north, Hudson Bay.’

‘And the recent unpleasantness in France?’ It was asked casually enough, but the Hellaquin knew it was a test.

‘I don’t think our masters liked my sympathies.’

The Knight stopped eating and looked up at the other man.

‘Why am I here?’ the Hellaquin asked in an attempt to forestall the inevitable argument.

The Knight put his fork and knife down and wiped his mouth on a linen napkin. ‘Very well. I fear I have lost my appetite.’ He stood and the Hellaquin followed him out of the main room of the tavern.

 

The Hellaquin stared at the body of the boy and tried not to shake with rage. The Knight leaned against the wall of the tavern’s back room, watching the Hellaquin’s response.

The boy couldn’t have been much older than five or six. His blood-spattered clothing was expensive, and he looked like he had been well fed and healthy when he was alive. The back of his head had been caved in, which was clearly the wound that had killed him. By far the stranger wound, however, was the ruin of his left eye, into which a tiny, ornate brass scorpion had crawled and then curled up, clamping itself to his skull and eye socket. The Hellaquin had to turn away from the body and found himself looking at an amused expression on the Knight’s face.

‘What happened?’ the Hellaquin asked.

‘The nanny found him just after he had murdered his infant brother. Then he turned on the nanny. It was his mother who beat his head in after she saw what he had done to her other child.’

The Hellaquin crossed himself. ‘And that … that … thing in his eye?’

‘We don’t know where it came from. All we know is that young Michael here had been touring the toy manufactories of Snow Hill with his father.’

‘Somebody gave it to him?’

‘Would be my guess, unless he took it.’

‘The Brass City?’

‘Why? Say what you like about them, they always act with purpose.’ He gestured towards the child.

The Knight was right. There was no purpose to this, outside of madness. The Hellaquin knew there had been questions over the Knight’s views on the Brass City in the past, but when it came down to it, the other man had always acted decisively against them.

‘So we go to Snow Hill?’

‘Tomorrow. Now one of us has to cut that thing out of the poor boy’s skull.’

 

The Hellaquin awoke fully alert. Even though the murmuring from the next room was faint, he could still make out every word. He even understood the glossolalia of both voices – the human one and the strange, dry, old, less-than-human one. He knew the Knight would be lying on the bare boards of the floor, his arms outstretched in the shape of a cross before the ancient severed head. The severed head was known as Baphomet, the Baptiser. The Knight was communing with it. The Hellaquin got out of bed and started to dress himself quickly.

A short while later, there was a gentle tap at the door and the Hellaquin opened it. The Knight saw that the other man was already dressed and simply nodded.

 

The Hellaquin was sure the powerful black horse was almost as unnatural as he and the Knight were. He had no wish to ride behind the other man but Baphomet had told the Knight that something was happening at that very moment, and they needed to move fast.

The city was under curfew, and as they galloped through the streets they were challenged by a number of the redcoats. Few, however, were prepared to fire on someone of the Knight’s obvious station in life, regardless of how disreputable his companion looked.

Only one had dared fire his musket. The Hellaquin felt the projectile hit his back like the blow from a mace, but his leather coat had hardened with the impact and the ball had not gone through. The bruise healed so quickly it practically never existed.

 

Tendrils of wood and lead had grown from the pistol, passing through his hand and his arm, consuming – or transforming – his flesh as they wove in and out of it. The bones in his arm had broken to accommodate the pepperbox pistol and he felt other, smaller strands growing inside his body, his head. Then the demon in the gun started speaking to him. It told him what to do. Showed him.

He had killed his own family first. Killed both their children in front of their screaming mother as, sobbing, he shouted at her about all the times he had betrayed her with other women, most of whom he had paid. The devil had laughed as he wept. When his friend came running to investigate the gunfire, he shot to wound. Then he left a bloody trail behind him as he dragged his friend through the house so the other man could watch his family die in front of his eyes, succumbing to the wound in his stomach as he did so. Then, slowly and with purpose, he descended the stairs and entered the town house’s servants’ quarters. He shot a footman but only injured him. The rest had fled screaming into the night.

He went to sit in his old friend’s study. He wanted to put the pistol-limb to his head and pull the trigger, but the demon in the gun did not want him to die just yet. It had told him so. The demon liked the way the man made it feel.

There is no hell, the demon told him. No place for me but here.

So Sir Ronald Sharpely wept and reloaded the weapon and wondered when the crowd gathering outside would come for him. Or would it be the city watch, or even the redcoats themselves? The devil in the gun – in him, now – revelled in his thoughts, though it knew the best, the sweetest, had already come and gone.

 

The first time he saw heat, like a desert serpent, was when the Hellaquin realised how truly damned he was. How far from God. So much further than all the killing, the stealing, the drinking and the whoring could ever have taken him.

It was a narrow four-storey stone town house in a row of similar buildings on Duke Street in the desirable suburb of Aston. It looked new and expensive, and his own cottage in Cheshire could have fitted many times within the vast swathe of lawn at the back of the house. He was standing in the shadows of the trees at the bottom of the garden, observing the crowd that had gathered on the recently cobbled street in front of the house.

The Hellaquin unwrapped the waxed leather from around the yew stave and flexed the wood to warm it up before stringing it. Even with his considerable strength, that was a challenge. He selected a number of arrows from the case, each one handmade from ash, each one hardened by the dripping of his blood onto the wood, each one just over two feet long. The arrowheads were armour-piercing bodkins made from something called adamantine, which the Knight had told him, long ago, just meant very, very hard. He had chosen these arrows over the ones that contained his own blood in the arrowheads’ cores.

All the while he watched the house he could see the cooling heat of the bodies in the upper floors, and the vibrant oranges, reds and yellows of the murderer on the ground floor. The Hellaquin nocked the first arrow, waiting for the murderer to provide him with a shot.

 

Sir Ronald screamed with hopeless, impotent frustration when he heard the town house’s front door thrown open, and then he was on his feet and staggering into the hall. He had but a moment to take in the well-dressed, blue-eyed, blond-haired man striding across the hall towards him, a pistol in each hand, before the figure disappeared in the smoke from his own guns.

Sir Ronald staggered back as a pistol ball caught him in the chest, but the demon moved him like a puppet now. He raised his pistol arm and fired into the smoke, rotated the barrel as the pan mech­an­ism ticked, fired again, rotated, fired again.

The blond man strode out of the smoke, a sabre in one hand, a knife in the other. Bone poked through skin torn and bloodied by a nasty-looking head wound, but still the man came. Sir Ronald fired, the barrel turned, he fired again, and again. The man staggered as shot after shot hit him, the front of his coat darkening as blood soaked into it, but he kept coming. Sir Ronald moved to one side to get a better shot as the hall filled with yet more smoke.

 

The Hellaquin watched Sir Ronald’s heat-ghost as his arm breathed fire at the Knight’s fainter ghost. Sir Ronald moved to the left. It was the move the Hellaquin needed. He exhaled, visualised the shot, lifted the bow and drew back the string. The poundage on the weapon was such that no mortal man could have drawn it. With hundreds of years of experience and the benefits of the ‘gifts’ he had been given by the Red Chalice, it took him but a moment to sight, and to judge the slight breeze in the hot night. He loosed and heard the window break almost immediately.

 

Shot after shot and the blond man finally stopped staggering forwards and collapsed onto the marble floor of the town house’s hallway. The devil was already devising plans for the body, but first Sir Ronald would have to reload.

Sir Ronald didn’t hear the window break. The adamantine-tipped arrow flew through the sitting room, then through an internal wall, and finally through Sir Ronald’s head before embedding itself deep in the outer wall, quivering. Sir Ronald collapsed forward onto the floor, leaving the demon to slowly fade away, trapped in cooling dead flesh.

 

The Hellaquin stalked through the sitting room and into the hall. He saw the man, his arm fused with what looked like a multi-barrelled pistol, lying face down on the marble in a pool of red. The Knight was lying in a similar pool on his back. The Hellaquin nearly put an arrow in the Knight when he sat up.

‘I almost had him,’ the Knight muttered. The Hellaquin nodded with a sceptical expression on his face. Clouds of grey and black powder-smoke hung in the air. Through the windows at the front of the house, the Hellaquin could see the milling crowd.

The archer kicked the grotesque man onto his back and knelt down next to him.

‘Is he healing?’ the Knight asked as he got up unsteadily and bent to retrieve his pistols, his sabre and his knife.

The Hellaquin looked at the hole in the man’s head made by the arrow he’d fired.

‘Is there a maker’s mark on the pistol?’ asked the Knight.

The Hellaquin picked up the deformed limb and checked the ­visible metal of the barrel, grimacing as he saw up close the fusion of wood, metal and flesh. The Knight was standing in the pool of his own blood as he sheathed his various weapons, the pool shrinking as he re­absorbed it. The healing would leave the Knight very hungry.

‘There’s no mark. What do we do with him?’ the Hellaquin asked, glancing out at the crowd again.

‘Damnation! We can’t take him with us – we’ll have to burn the house down and hope for the best.’ As he spoke, the Knight used his Far-Eastern knife to open a wound in his hand. He squeezed some of the blood from his wound into a small silver cup he had produced from somewhere on his person.

‘What are you doing?’ the Hellaquin demanded.

‘Just a touch of necromancy.’

The Hellaquin crossed himself. ‘I have no taste for this.’

The Knight looked up at the Hellaquin. ‘We need to know where he got the gun. If you don’t want to bear witness, go upstairs and set the fire.’ Then he poured the blood from the cup into the dead man’s mouth.

The dead body started to convulse and writhe, flesh flowed like hot wax and the screaming started as the demon in the dead man’s flesh fought with the devils in the Knight’s blood. The Hellaquin climbed the curved marble staircase, trying not to look down, trying not hear the twisted words wrenched from the corpse.

‘Where on Steelhouse Lane?’ the Knight shouted at the writhing carcass.

Upstairs, the Hellaquin found the bodies. All he could offer them was a pyre on a hot summer’s night.

 

 

 

2

A Long Time After the Fall

 

Vic lay dead on the deck of the Church frigate the St Brendan’s Fire. Scab was watching the most valuable uplifted monkey in Known Space die. She was dying because foreign nanites were trying to ­colonise every last bit of her body.

Even as she gasped for breath, Scab was able to appreciate how beautiful she was. He might have felt nothing, but he understood aesthetics. If there was artifice in her genetic make-up, then it was old, powerful and elegant. She did not look sculpted like most in Known Space. She looked like she had been born with perfect bone structure, dark eyes and thick brown hair. She was tall, slender to the point of gauntness. Her skin had a porcelain quality to it, or at least it had until the advertising virals started crawling across it when she fell victim to the ambient nanite pollution from which most people were protected by their nano-screens.

Scab watched her die. He understood that she was a nat, unaugmented. He’d seen them before. They were bred in protected environ­ments for study, as pets, kinks or food – curiosities, little more. So why was this one so sought-after? The Church, the Monarchist systems, the Con­sortium – they all wanted her. Why was this nat so important? He felt sure she was from before the Fall, but there had to be more to it than that. How could she be the key to bridge technology? Why had she been aboard the strange S-tech craft? Why had the Church monk’s hand opened the cocoon?

Absently he noticed that the red steam in the air was coming from his blood meeting the still burning-hot energy dissipation grid woven into his clothes. More smoke billowed as some of his corrupted blood dripped onto the frigate’s deck. Vic had done more than his fair share of damage before Scab had driven the – very illegal – S-tech energy javelin through the other bounty killer’s chest. The powerfully built, hard-tech-augmented insect’s chest cavity was now a hollow fused mess.

The codes Vic had ’faced to Scab before Vic chose to attack him gave the human bounty killer complete control of the Church frigate the ’sect had stolen on Scab’s orders. The ship’s AI was putting up a fight against the high-end control-virus program attacking it. Their erstwhile employer had been generous with the expenses, but that arrangement was at an end now as Scab intended to double-cross his employer.

Most of the few surviving crewmembers aboard the frigate were locked down. Scab absently reprogrammed the frigate’s security nano-screen, weaponising it, turning it into a self-replicating flesh-eating nano-swarm.

He looked down at the girl. The closest thing he had to a sense of ­humour was tempted to let her die there. Let it all have been for ­nothing. On the other hand, that wouldn’t help him get what he wanted.

Scab watched her for a moment longer. Then he picked her up, ’facing instructions to the frigate’s med bay as he carried her out of the loading area. The screams of the crew being eaten by the nano-swarm echoed along the corridor. Scab found himself really craving another cigarette.

 

The Monk stood on one of the catwalks that ran over the dolphins’ nutrient pool in the Command-and-Control chamber of the Church capital ship, the Lazerene. The large chamber was illuminated by the warm orange glow coming from the pool, and the smart-metal bulkheads of the chamber projected a panoramic view of the surrounding space. Holographic telemetry and other system information ran vertically down parts of the view, though all the data would be directly ’faced to the dolphins and to the crewmembers of various races bobbing around the chamber seated on AG platforms.

It had been a star system once. Now it was going dark, consumed by squirming, maggot-like forms of nothingness momentarily lit from within by the sun’s fusion as they devoured the light of the system’s star. The same process had already taken the fourteen planets, a number of habitats and countless asteroids.

The Monk stared fixedly at the image of the sun. The estimated number of deaths in the system was available to her, but it was large enough to be abstract.

‘We give them access to an apparently infinite universe, but then we pen them in until they teem over everything like termites,’ Churchman said. ‘We’ve overpopulated space. Who’d have thought that would happen?’

‘I’m not sure I want cod philosophy right now,’ the Monk said angrily, knowing her fury was misplaced. The dolphins were motionless in their fluid.

Churchman wasn’t actually here. Every ship in the Church fleet had AIs modelled on downloads of Churchman’s personality. Each one had been allowed to develop independently,