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screen flickered on, showing the belt of asteroids lit from one side by the glare of the sun. A small trisection transport appeared in one corner of the screen and, turning slowly, screwed its way across the view on three fusion flames. It was halfway to the belt itself when a black hawkish ship hurtled in behind it. The screen polarized over the glare that followed and, when it returned to full clarity, an asteroid in the belt ahead of the fleeing ship had disappeared.
     
    ‘A shot across the bows,’ Cormac guessed, as he watched the ship turn and head rapidly back towards Elysium. ‘Why are you showing me this, Jack?’
     
    ‘That was a real-time image,’ the AI replied.
     
    Cormac frowned, not liking what this implied. ‘Why not just grab him?’
     
    ‘No contact allowed with the barrier ships.’
     
    Cormac sighed and laid his head back. ‘And the weapon used? I don’t think I saw anything like that before.’
     
    ‘Combined CTD and gravity-imploder missile,’ the AI replied.
     
    ‘I see—the imploder to prevent the smallest fragment of debris being blasted away, so that the CTD burns everything down to an atomic level, if not below that.’
     
    ‘Correct.’
     
    ‘Right, so now you’ll tell me why ECS is chasing ships back to Elysium.’
     
    ‘Total quarantine of the Elysium system has just been reinstated. The Elysium AI has shut down the runcible. Debris has been detected on an asteroid, previously discounted because out of the range of blast scatter from the Occam Razor, and moving in an elliptical orbit that took it outside of the search area. Polity capital ships are returning to surround the system.’
     
    ‘You’ll be rejoining them?’ Cormac asked, sitting up and pushing away the scanning head.
     
    ‘EC has reapplied previous restrictions: no one who had any physical contact with Jain technology or any of its products is going anywhere. Because I have you aboard, I myself am now not one of the guards but the guarded.’
     
    ‘And this comes direct from Earth Central itself?’
     
    ‘It does.’
     
    ‘Tell me, has senility long been an AI problem?’
     
    ‘Amusing, but missing the point,’ said Jack. ‘EC knows it is impossible to suppress such a technological juggernaut, but this is a case of attempting to slow it down a little so we can move some people out of the way. Your associate Mika is, as you have told us, already obtaining substantial benefits from Jain tech, and no doubt scraps of it will be picked up all around this area. But consider what would happen if someone were to find, for example, one of those creatures Skellor used to attack you on Masada, and handed it over to some well-organized Separatist enclave.’
     
    ‘Yeah, okay, I’ve heard this spiel before. But we’re talking about one stray asteroid that we missed. I’ve been okayed as clean, as has most of Elysium.’
     
    ‘The order is not open to question—total interdiction.’
     
    Cormac remembered what that meant.
     
    He nodded and swung his legs from the surgical bench, noting as he did so the readout on the diagnosticer’s screen, informing him that his gridlink was still offline and impossible to use unless reinstated by a high-level AI. But speculation about that he put to the back of his mind—something was happening at last, and he had been bored out of his skull during that latter half of the quarantine period.
     
    ‘This asteroid, is it going to be obliterated like that one you just showed me, or do we take a look?’
     
    ‘We take a look.’
     
    ‘We ... as in you and me?’
     
    ‘Yes.’
     
    Cormac couldn’t help grinning as he felt the vibration of the Jack Ketch’s fusion drives igniting. Heading for the door to this long-unused surgical facility, he lost his footing outside as he stepped into a corridor in which the gravplates were not operating.
     
    ‘Sorry about that,’ said Jack, slowly powering the plates back up so that Cormac settled back down to the