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another strange facet of this AI. But he preferred that to Jack’s attraction to devices of execution. Stepping onto the drawing room rug Cormac decided this was a subject best dropped, and instead asked, ‘How long will it take us to get to this asteroid?’
     
    ‘It will be ten minutes.’ With a clinking ticking of gears and levers, Jack stood, turning to face Cormac. ‘This is a matter of some urgency, so I’m going to drop into U-space.’
     
    Cormac strolled across the rug, then out across the black glass floor leading towards the nose of the Jack Ketch. Here he gazed over the ersatz stone wall into vacuum. From below and to his right, the sun heated his face as if he had just peeked over a wall beyond which a bonfire burned. Its glare filtered, he was able to look directly at it, and there observed, flung up from its vast infernal plains, an arching lariat of fire that could have swallowed worlds. Curving up from his left, then ahead and up high, before being attenuated to nothing by distance, the asteroid belt seemed an artefact, having been shepherded into neat rings by the larger chunks remaining from whatever cataclysm had shattered the planets of this system. Then the VR feed blanked to infinite grey depth, and Cormac felt that shift into the ineffable as the ship dropped into underspace. He realized he was seeing a representation less real than the one before. No human could experience underspace unshielded.
     
    ‘Do you look directly into U-space?’ he asked Jack.
     
    ‘Yes, I do.’ The reply was close at his shoulder, though the hangman automaton still occupied the drawing room behind.
     
    ‘And you retain your sanity?’ Cormac shot a glance at the gallows.
     
    ‘Yes. AI has never been limited by the four-dimensional view of the universe. It is only by being able to see and comprehend more that we can operate runcibles and ships like this.’
     
    ‘But you are physically confined to that universe and subject to its constraints?’
     
    ‘For the present.’
     
    Cormac let that one go. No way was he going to get into a metaphysical discussion with an AI—he’d donethat before and, rather than gaining enlightenment, ended up with a headache.
     
    After a few minutes, the grey flickered away as the ship surfaced in realspace. The sun was not noticeably smaller, but the asteroid belt was now a wall of rocks beside them. The Jack Ketch eased itself into this wall, tilting and dipping, the drone of its fusion motors changing constantly as it negotiated its way through. Above, below and to the sides, Cormac observed mountain ranges swinging past as fast as fan blades, and saw flares of incandescent gas where proximity lasers hit smaller rocks.
     
    ‘This asteroid is actually within the belt then?’ he asked.
     
    ‘Its erratic orbit will take it out in fifteen hours, if it is not obliterated meantime. I have it on visual now.’
     
    A square red frame seemingly nickered into existence far ahead of the ship, singling out just one more undistinguished lump of rock.
     
    ‘You have to wonder if it is a coincidentally erratic orbit,’ suggested Cormac.
     
    ‘Almost certainly not.’
     
    ‘Will you be able to moor?’
     
    ‘No, the longest mooring time in any location on the surface here is eight minutes before some passing object would hit me. I am now taking out of storage a telefactor unit to send down to investigate.’
     
    ‘I want to go with it,’ Cormac said.
     
    ‘That is inadvisable. If there is active Jain technology down there, it might kill or sequester you. The telefactor can find out all we need to know, and it’s dispensable.’
     
    ‘Everything’s dispensable, and I’m tired of sitting on my hands. Presumably I’ve retained my authority as an ECS agent?’
     
    ‘You have, Ian Cormac—I merely advise against you placing yourself in unnecessary danger.’
     
    ‘Noted, but I’m still going down.’
     
    ‘Very well. You can ride down to the surface with the