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shoulder. ‘What about your other companion, the one who has said nothing?’
    Greg smiled – this was the opening he’d been waiting for.
    ‘He has plenty to say, Mr Silveira, but first would ye clarify something for me? Might it be possible that your superiors would offer us direct support, depending on what your report contains?’
    ‘That is a possibility,’ Silveira said guardedly.
    ‘If you discovered something of shattering importance, for instance?’
    ‘It would certainly have to have significant impact.’
    Greg half-turned and beckoned Kao Chih forward. ‘Reveal yourself, my friend, and tell these gentlemen who you are.’
    Greg saw the surprise in the others’ faces as Kao Chih discarded his cap and muffler and bowed politely to Vashutkin and Silveira in turn.
    ‘Greetings, gentlemen. My name is Kao Chih, son of Kao Hsien. I have travelled to this beautiful world from a star system near the furthest borders of the Hegemony, although my family previously lived on a world called Pyre. My great-great-great-grandfather was born there but his parents came from China, from Earth, aboard a ship called the Tenebrosa …’
    As Kao Chih began to relate Pyre’s tragic story Vashutkin was visibly moved while Silveira looked thunderstruck.
    If we can just get him on our side , Greg thought. Maybe the Pyre revelation will be enough, if it feeds into his motivations. We could fight against the Brolturans and this mechanoid factory, but without outside help we’ll lose. And if we lose, Dariens will end up as serfs for our Sendrukan masters, just another subservient cog in the mighty Hegemonic machine. We can’t let that happen.
    And he recalled his temporary but horrific enslavement by the Hegemony nanodust, and shuddered.
    I won’t let that happen again .

LEGION

    He was enslaved by pain. Drifting in space on the outer edge of a backwater system, he was a prisoner of his cyborg form’s worn-out components, while unable to deny the requirement of duty. His allegiance was an iron compulsion that sprang from that first premise, the initiating moments of his machine-life, the principles and purpose of convergence. Throughout his cross-reticulated physicality, damaged nerve endings sang a song of torment which after days then weeks the autorepair subsystem had dulled, though not yet enough to lessen the heat of his fury at enemies past and present and at the weakened, failing parts of his own body.
    There was a grim irony to it.
    The departure from Yndyesi Tetro, from that deep, watery sepulchre, had been triumphant. The surge of power unleashed from his reaction drive was an ecstatic roar across his senses as he boiled the sea and drove up into the sky on a column of plasma energy. Strengthened substructures had held firm, repaired hull plates maintained carapace integrity and the improvised sensor spicules had performed adequately. Even the transit to hyper-space had been smooth, the eyeblink succession of resonant fields boring perfectly through subspace to hyperspace and then dragging the Legion Knight in after them. The macroguidance subsystem was following course coordinates provided by one of his Scions and all had been proceeding well until ten hours in when his systems reported warnings from the hyperdrive power couplings. Before he could initiate a crash-shutdown, multiple subsystem failures tore across the receptors in his neural weave, and moments later he had dropped back into normal space, drifting without power, racked with pain.
    His few remaining autorepair remotes had scurried out to the damaged areas, beginning with the worst. And since his meagre external sensors were also incapacitated – apart from a small carapace lens – he was effectively blind and deaf. Thus encaged, his awareness spiralled inwards, exploring forgotten byways of memory, the vast