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breather gear and wondered why—for, with the mycelium operating inside him, he did not need such cumbersome equipment.
     
    ‘We need to talk,’ said Thorn abruptly, as soon as he and Gant got close. ‘That includes you,’ he added to Scar, as the dracoman moved to follow his compatriots.
     
    Scar halted, bared his teeth, then gestured for them to follow him. He led the way between the bulbous walls of dracoman buildings, on pathways of the same woven composite, which rested on top of the rhizome mat. Eventually he brought them to his home: a flattened sphere ten metres across, with a simple circular door set half a metre off the ground. The door opened when he pushed against it—its hinges composed of a dry muscle that was contracted by an electric charge. The door, Mika knew, would not have opened for anyone else, other dracomen included.
     
    Just inside, a small antechamber provided low footbaths and various utensils—fashioned from local materials—for the purpose of preventing mud getting any further inside his residence. With meticulous care, Scar cleaned his clawed feet, then waited until Mika, Thorn and Gant had removed their footwear before he opened the inner door.
     
    Light permeated the structure from outside, complemented by bioluminescent strips inlaid in a grid across the ceiling and down the curving walls. Glass panels inset in the level floor gave glimpses of sealed terrariums and aquariums in which all sorts of curious creatures swam, hopped, slithered or just sat motionless. Mika knew about the creatures—some wild and some manufactured—but had yet to fathom how the dracomen made the fiat sheets of chainglass.
     
    Scar dropped himself onto one of the woven saddlelike arrangements that served dracomen as chairs. Mika and Gant sat on an oval couch that Mika thought might be used for sleeping on, though she had never seen a dracoman sleep. Thorn, meanwhile, paced the transparent floor.
     
    ‘What is it?’ Mika finally managed to force a question.
     
    After detaching the compressed-paper mask covering his mouth and nose, Thorn gave her a penetrating look. ‘Apis—his mycelium isn’t working properly any more. You need to come.’
     
    Mika chewed that one over, then groped to phrase another question. ‘How . . . what is the evidence?’
     
    ‘Eldene found him collapsed out by the spaceport. He’d fainted, and the doctor who tended him diagnosed oxygen starvation. He now has to use breather gear.’ He gestured to the pack on his own back. ‘It hasn’t happened to me, but I’m taking no chances.’ He glanced at Gant. ‘I don’t yet have any memplant to save me.’
     
    Mika nodded. Gant had died on Samarkand. What stood before them now was a memcording of the soldier, running in a Golem chassis. A debate was still running about whether such were genuinely alive.
     
    ‘Will you come?’ Thorn asked.
     
    ‘Yes,’ she said, looking pointedly at Scar. She then winced and ventured a further question: ‘Is there something else?’
     
    ‘Oh yeah,’ Gant said, rounding on the dracoman. ‘EC’s decision on Scar and his kind. It seems that no blame for Dragon’s actions will be attached to you and your people. You are free to do what you want, though I suspect that there will be pressure on you to join the Polity.’
     
    Mika felt a brief surge of joy at that—the EC decision had been hanging over them like a guillotine ever since the ships had arrived—but Thorn’s news tempered her happiness. What was happening with the mycelia? She had no idea how she might go about removing the alien technology, and acutely aware that it might change sufficiently to kill them or, perhaps worse, change them.
     
    * * * *
     
    From where he lay, underneath the wasp-eyed scanning head of the diagnosticer he had cobbled together to try to find out why his gridlink had spontaneously operated, Cormac gazed across the room. Above the counter cluttered with the pieces of dismembered autodoc, a