* * *

  The Client had spoken and now, with my connection to it renewed and affirmed, or maybe some parts of my mind reprogrammed and updated, I had no choice but to obey. As I stepped out of the repair cabinet and donned newly cleaned and repaired clothing, I felt sick, bewildered by my human form, and still wishing I could change the past.

  “Time to finish this now,” I said.

  “Finish it?” Harriet perked up.

  I did worry about her love of mayhem for it seemed her main interest now. Once she had been an “exotic dancer” who used various reptiles in her act and then, like many such people for whom appearance is all, she acquired an accelerating addiction to change. First had been changes of skin colour and the addition of snake eyes, then scales, claws and numerous internal changes, adaptogenic drugs and enhancements, and change thereafter for its own sake. At some point the jobs she had taken to supplement her wealth had displaced the dancing, and she became a full-time bounty hunter, and she further adapted herself to that work. I had employed her to hunt down a rogue war drone said to possess some strange piece of U-space tech which just might have been part of the farcaster, but as it turned out wasn’t. The drone fried her, leaving not much more than her brain and a bit of nerve tissue. I managed to get her out, in an ab-zero stasis bottle, and thence to a hospital in the Graveyard. I didn’t hold out much hope for her. Had we access to a Polity hospital her chances would have been better but, since quite a few of her bounties were paid upon delivery of a corpse, or parts thereof, she couldn’t return to the Polity. But the next time I saw I got a bit of a shock.

  Her change into a troodon dinosaur had been out of a catalogue that explored the “limits of the feasible” apparently, and she was idiotically delighted with it. They’d shoe-horned her brain into this reptile body, where it didn’t seem to fit right. They’d turned her into something like an upgraded pet that could speak, but didn’t possess the hands to do anything more complicated than tear at meat. I felt responsible, and so allowed her to stay at my side.

  “Yes, finish it,” I said, the feeling that I occupied some nightmare form slowly receding as I worked the controls, targeting both colony rafts and the Cleaver watch post, then pausing to study the only weapons option.

  The Frobishers and Cleavers were nasty and certainly deserved some sort of response, but there had to be innocents amidst them. What I was about to do sickened me, but I simply had no choice … or did I? I now struggled against my own mind, because my instructions did offer me some leeway, and I opened com channels covering all the radio and microwave frequencies the two families used, and set the equipment for record and repeat.

  “This is a message from Tuppence aboard the Coin Collector for all Frobishers and Cleavers,” I said. “You have both wasted my time and threatened my life.” And now the unscripted bit, “You therefore have one hour to abandon your colony rafts and watch stations. At the end of that hour I will destroy them all.” I paused while a knife of pain lanced through my skull, then faded as I selected the single particle cannon for the chore. The pain returned as I set a timer for firing, then continued with, “Perhaps, after this, those of you who might be innocent in this matter will carefully consider your choice of leadership. That is all.”

  “You are being merciful?” Harriet enquired.

  I stepped back from the controls, the pain redoubling in my skull, and slumped into an acceleration chair. I was aware that I had gone, if only a little, contrary to my orders, and now, somehow, I was punishing myself. Paralysed, I watched lights flashing and icons appearing on the screen indicating increasingly desperate attempts from both families to get in contact with me. Ever so slowly the pain faded—just a small punishment for a minor infringement, and not the agony that could leave me crippled in hell for days on end. The leeway around my orders enabled me to do such things, enabled me to do many things. I rested a hand on my thigh—the one containing the other gun.

  “Yes, maybe I’m getting old,” I finally managed to rasp in reply to Harriet.

  Realizing there would be no immediate action, Harriet paced around the room for a while, before coming back to stand beside my chair, her head dipping as she nodded off into one of her standing dozes.

  A quarter of an hour later I observed swamp cars, ATVs, heavy crawlers and people on foot, loaded down with belongings, abandoning both rafts. A further half hour passed, and as the end of the hour approached I heaved myself out of the chair, my head still throbbing with post punishment pain, and approached the controls. The last minutes counted down, the last seconds, and then the particle cannon fired—any effects here on the ship unfelt.

  The side view of the Frobisher’s raft showed a beam as wide as a tree trunk stabbing down, its inner core bright blue but shrouded in misty green. Molten metal and debris exploded out from the impact point then, when the beam cut right through the raft to the boggy ground below, the whole thing lifted on an explosion, its back breaking and the two halves heaving upwards on a cloud of fire and super-heated steam, before collapsing down as the beam cut out. Another screen showed those on the watching swamp car just gone—a smoking hollow where they had been, while the Cleaver’s raft was now just as much a mess as the Frobisher’s, though viewed from a different perspective. Harriet was at my side of course, watching with fascination, before turning away in disappointment.

  “Tank.” I turned now to face precisely such an object over the far side of the sanctum: a cylindrical tank much like one used for fuel oil or gas, but covered with an intricate maze of pipes and conduits. “Take us out of orbit and put us on course for the Graveyard.”

  “As you instruct,” replied a frigid voice.

  I immediately felt the vibration through my feet as the fusion engines fired up. The thing inside that tank, which might or might not have been the usual ganglion of a press-ganged prador first- or second-child, could take over.

  * * *

  Everything fell into stillness aboard the Coin Collector during U-space jumps. Without orders the thetics just became somnolent, without action and prey to hunt Harriet spent her time dozing or following me about like a lost puppy. On this occasion she was in lost puppy mode, easily keeping pace with my scooter as I drove through the ship, finally pulling up beside yet another massive diagonally slashed elliptical door that opened ponderously as I dismounted. Just outside this door I surveyed twenty thetics standing ready clad in impact armour with pulse-rifles shouldered. They were somnolent but at a word from me would wake and be ready. In two more U-jumps I would give that word as we tracked down yet another possible element of the farcaster. I bit down on my frustration. When would the Client finally give up and summon me back? When could I finally end this? I walked through the door.

  The cauldron was a pale pink glass sphere twenty feet across supported in a scaffold of gold metal extending from the floor to the ceiling fifty feet above. Across the back wall of the chamber were the doors to rows of chemical reactors. Catalytic cracking columns stood guard to one side while on the other squatted an object like a mass of stacked aluminium luggage woven together with tubes. Each case was a nano-factory in itself and the whole generated the smart-plasm being fed into the cauldron—the distillation of a billion processes. Gazing upon this set-up I felt it just did not seem sufficiently high-tech, but looked like something Jules Verne might have dreamed up in a moment of insanity.

  Next I lowered my gaze to the rows of moulds bracketing the catwalk leading to the cauldron itself. The ones to my right were closed, like sarcophagi, their contents incubating. To the left half of them were closed, a robot arm running on rails to inject plasm into each. The others were open to reveal polished interiors in the shape of humans, a thetic peeling itself up out of one of them assisted by two more of its kind, while thetics from the other open moulds stood in a group behind observing the whole procedure with blue eyes set in milk-white faces, mouths opening and closing as if miming the speech they were incapable of producing.

  “I wish we could extend their lives,” I said.

  “Why?” asked Harriet, completely baffled.

  “Four years and two days seems to be the point beyond which returns diminish,” I replied. “I wonder if that limitation is why the Polity scrapped the idea?”

  “The Polity?” wondered Harriet, her thinking even slower in these periods of inaction.

  The thetics had been an attempt by the Polity to produce large quantities of disposable soldiers—a project with which I felt sure the Client and I had been involved during the war. Or perhaps we weren’t? There had been other researchers, scientists and experts of every kind on that ship sent to that first meeting with the Client, so perhaps the thetics were the result of some research by one of them? Perhaps when the Client had run, just after the farcaster had been broken up, it had stolen data and equipment too? How else had it obtained the samples with which to rebuild all this here? I shook my head, frustrated by the confusion. Where the thetic technology had come from and what my involvement had been were questions that would probably remain unanswered—they probably lay in that portion of my mind taken away by the accident.

  Unfortunately, as well as the thetics’ life-span being limited, both the amount of programming they could take and the damage they could withstand was limited too. Smart-plasm was all very well for quick production of disposable hominids, but on receiving damage under fire such constructs tended to quickly revert to their original form, and crawl out of their uniforms like particularly nervous slime moulds.

  “Golem chasses,” I said as I walked on through the cauldron room towards the back corner.

  My own body was an amalgam of a Golem base frame, smart-plasm and an early form of syntheskin outer covering—as a whole a more rugged combination. I wasn’t entirely sure what human parts I had retained: perhaps my brain, perhaps only part of my brain, maybe just some crystal recording from that original flesh. I wondered if it had been a bioweapon that had taken away the rest of me, and wondered if it had been one I had designed.

  “Golem chasses,” Harriet repeated, with less intelligence than a parrot.

  I decided not to bother making a suggestion I had made before, of giving her prosthetic Golem hands to replace her unwieldy claws. She wasn’t interested when her mind was at a high point, and would be less interested now.

  A smaller door at one rear corner of this chamber took me into my private laboratory. Here I felt the tension begin to ebb. It wasn’t as if I could somehow be disobedient here, ignore the Client’s orders or cease my endless search for farcaster elements, but somehow its grip on my existence seemed less rigid in this place. Perhaps it was because here I occupied those parts of my mind not concerned with that search—those being the parts wholly focused on my original interests so long ago.

  Oddly, the effect here seemed the same for Harriet, though she had no alien entity controlling her mind. Her interest perked up as she surveyed all the complicated equipment, peered at nanoscope screens and clumsily tried to pick up objects made for human hands and not claws pained with shocking pink polish. I say oddly because elsewhere her interests didn’t often stray into the scientific.

  I checked on a brain worm first; version 1056 and now a long way away from the parasite that forced ants to climb to the top of stalks of grass when a sheep might be strolling by and thus pass itself on to said sheep. This particular beauty would make a prador, if it was aboard a space ship, suffer terminal claustrophobia. Not only would it want to get out of the ship, it would be completely unable to wear any kind of protective suit. Of course, prador could survive in vacuum for an appreciable time, but still the victim of this parasite would eventually die. I’d yet to test it out, and didn’t think I ever would.

  The next bug was one that caused a prador’s carapace to grow as soft as sponge, and the next was a fungus that dined on their nerve tissue. I only checked on them briefly before moving on to the latest version of my favourite fungus—perfect now in every detail and perhaps a precise copy of a fungus that the Client possessed. Thus I occupied my spare time pursuing my interests in parasites and biological weapons. Thus, by pursuing the lines of research I had followed with the Client I tried to restore some lost memory. Staring at the latest nanoscope images and latest computer models of the function of this last fungus, in all its different genetic settings, I tried to remember seeing them before, but there was nothing.

  “The gun?” queried Harriet.

  “One day,” I said.

  Really, it should be tested, but I needed some victim deserving of such an end. Perhaps, during this latest search, if all the data was correct, I would find such.

  * * *

  The Graveyard lay in the intersection point of two spheres of interstellar occupation, everything beyond its edge being called the Wasteland or the Reaches, or having no name at all. As the Coin Collector heaved out of U-space I knew we had arrived upon sensors picking up high amounts of space debris across many light years and upon gazing at a screen image of the devastated world called Molonor. This world possessed its own orbital ring of debris that had once been space stations and, also orbiting it, its small moon was half subsumed by a base that seemed a conglomerate mass of those same debris. I eyed the ships orbiting that moon, along with the various ground-based coil-gun emplacements then, after a short contemplation, focused in on one of those ships. Here was an in-system cargo hauler the shape of an ancient shouldered rifle bullet sitting in a U-space carrier shell like a hexagonal threaded nut. I pinged it and got a confirmation of identity: the Layden—one of Gad Straben’s haulers. Straben was my target now—the Client had made that abundantly clear during one of our frequent drops out of U-space to let the Coin Collector’s engines cool and realign.

  “Harriet,” I said, opening com. “Where are you?”

  “The Cauldron,” she replied.

  “I’ll be with you shortly.” I considered how like a dog being taken on a familiar walk she had rushed ahead, then I experienced a moment of puzzlement. Harriet didn’t often get this far ahead of me, usually stayed by my side, so she had to be very eager. I shook my head, dismissing the thought before inputting a course to take the Coin Collector down into close orbit, conveniently close to the Layden. With that done, I stood up and headed out of the captain’s sanctum, finally arriving at the door outside the Cauldron.

  “Gad Straben,” said Harriet, dancing from clawed foot to foot. “The gun!”

  I nodded solemnly, perhaps so. Gad Straben was evil enough.

  Through its various other contacts about the Graveyard the Client had learned that, after the disappearance of a black AI called Penny Royal, salvagers had finally plucked up the courage to venture to the AI’s original home base. This was a wanderer planetoid wormed through with numerous tunnels. As always they had gone there for technology and, before some event burned up everything inside that small world, it was rumoured that Gad Straben had managed to obtain some objects of value, things that might be an elements of some war time weapon, and he had begun to put out feelers, make enquiries … The Client wanted them. The Client hoped pieces of the farcaster could at last be obtained.

  “But scraping the barrel,” Harriet opined.

  I studied her carefully. It must be one of her good days because she was showing a lot more intelligence than usual.

  I nodded. After searching for so long it seemed increasingly unlikely we would ever find any part of the farcaster, or that it even existed at all. This item supposedly obtained by Gad Straben might even be our last shot and I might be recalled at last. My hand strayed down to my hip, fingers tapping there for a moment. I noted Harriet watching closely and quickly withdrew it.

  “Yes, we are,” I agreed. “The Client has less chance of finding what it wants now than before.” I paused for a second, then shuddered, feeling a little stab of the Client’s influence over my mind. It was time to start acting.

  Straben’s organisation was a criminal one, salvage being a mere sideline, and he was as paranoid as all who ran such concerns in the Graveyard had to be if they were to survive, so I had to both act fast, but take care. There were risks associated with getting too drastic in the Graveyard. It might be styled as a kind of anything-goes no-man’s-land but that wasn’t true. It was a volume of space in critical balance; a buffer zone between the Polity and the prador and both sides watched it intently.

  “Do we have enough for Hobbs’ Street?” Harriet asked.

  I nodded. “One hundred ready to go,” I surveyed the twenty thetics in the corridor, now no longer somnolent but not really showing any inadvertent movements associated with real life.

  “Have you spoken to John Hobbs yet?” she asked.

  I looked at her again. She had suddenly become a lot more coherent, a lot more intelligent, just like the Harriet I had used to know. She was asking the right questions now when all I had come to expect of her was child-like demands for her version of fun.

  The Molonor moon base, until thirty years ago, had been essentially lawless, but then one salvage hunter became much annoyed with protection costs and damage to his operation by the constant squabbles between the criminal elements there. After a particularly rich find he used his newly acquired wealth to hire in some hoopers to make the place more amenable to his operation. After a brief year of chaotic readjustment which resulted in many crime lords ending up being processed into fertilizer, John Hobbs became the ruler there. He allowed criminals to come and do business, spend their wealth there, establish their bases, but did not allow them to bring their fights with them.

  “He was surprisingly helpful.”

  She tilted her head slightly to one side, waiting for an explanation.

  “He could have been a problem, but for his hoopers and our old association,” I explained. “Hobbs tolerates a lot, but some of the criminals down there he doesn’t like at all. He’s only too willing to turn a blind eye to anything that might happen in Straben’s headquarters.”