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be a lengthy task.
     
    ‘Jack,’ he interrupted, just as the AI was telling him about slow-burn CTDs that could melt their way down to a planet’s core, ‘How much longer until she’s uploaded?’
     
    ‘I am not actually uploading her, but a copy. I cannot give a precise period because the process is dependent on what I have to filter. This is not something we can hurry—I for one have no wish to end up going the way of Occam.’
     
    That might sound like a philosophy, but in fact referred to the fact of the Occam Razor’s AIsuiciding rather than allow Skellor to control it.
     
    ‘Rough estimate, then.’
     
    ‘Three hours.’
     
    Cormac rubbed at his cheek and yawned. ‘Then I’m for bed. The moment she’s ready I want you to jump back to Elysium.’
     
    ‘You have always had EC’s authority,’ Jack noted.
     
    ‘You disapprove?’
     
    ‘Not of the carte blanche agents such as yourself have always possessed, but of allowing someone aboard me who contains active Jain technology inside them.’
     
    ‘Aphran—or Thorn and Mika?’
     
    ‘All of them.’
     
    ‘You surprise me.’
     
    ‘How would you feel about being the observer locked in a room with, for example, someone with a genetically proactive plague?’
     
    ‘I guess I wouldn’t be so happy.’
     
    ‘Me neither. I may be AI, but I do have feelings, you know.’
     
    Cormac grinned—he was beginning to like this AI. ‘Well, Aphran has told us Skellor hunts dragons. I want Asselis Mika with me because she’s the nearest thing we have to an expert in both dragon and Jain technology. Perhaps she might be able to give us some lead on where those two remaining Dragon spheres went. And I want Thorn simply because he deserves to be here.’
     
    ‘As you will.’
     
    After eight hours fiat out on his bed, Cormac returned to a bridge lit by the gloaming of underspace, and with two additions: a guillotine over to one side, to balance the gallows, and the illusory form of Aphran—the Separatist leader who had once employed Skellor and who had been killed by him. There was no time to interrogate the spectre, though, because within minutes the U-space grey was displaced by a close view of Elysium. Such questioning would have to wait for the next journey in the Jack Ketch, when it began its pursuit.
     
    * * * *
     
    The nerve shunt in his neck and the paralytic she had injected through the probes should have prevented the Outlinker from feeling anything, or even moving, but he was writhing, fighting against the clamps that secured him to the table so that they creaked alarmingly, and his face was clenched in agony. It had to be the mycelium—it was bypassing the shunt, and maybe even his nervous system, so as to control his body directly. Mika hoped that in this process it had not restored his consciousness. But as she directed the four grasping claws once again into his torso—into a ribcage opened out like the wings of a macabre butterfly and the clamped-open gut cavity—he opened his eyes and glared at her. There seemed no other option but to do it quickly now, and never mind how brutal she must now be. The claws closed on the writhing mass clinging to his spine, and through the telefactor gloves she wore she initiated the secondary incisions. With brutal efficiency, the autodoc cut through muscle and bone from the lower end of the main incision down each of his thighs, sealing veins, capillaries and arteries as it went.
     
    Usually operations conducted by a surgical robot were bloodless, but with something this major, bleeding was inevitable. Sucking heads hissed over exposed flesh, taking away blood, which rather than cleaning and reinjecting she was replacing with an artificial substitute. It seemed the safest course—his blood was probably loaded with Jain nanomachines. Now she directed incisions across the shoulders and down both his biceps, and also up into his neck. Into all of these secondary incisions she directed