Line war

The Polity is under attack from melded Al entity controlling the lethal Jain technology, but the attack seems to have no coherence. When one of Erebus’s worships kills millions of innocent civilians on Klurhammon, high-tech agricultural world of no tactical significance, Cormac is sent to investigate while secretly struggling to control a new-found ability no human being should possess and even beginning to question the true motives of his Al masters.

Further attacks and seemingly indiscriminate slaughter serve only to draw some of the most dangerous individuals in the Polity into the war. Mr Crane, the indefatigable brass killing machine sets out for vengeance, and Orlandine, a vastly augmented haiman, is seeking a weapon of appalling power with the aid of some bizarre relics surviving from an ancient war.

Meanwhile the scientist Mika is again kidnapped by the massive alien entity called Dragon, and dragged into the heart of things in order to wake the creators of Jain technology from their five-million-year slumber.

Then it begins to emerge that the attacks by Erebus have not been as indiscriminate as they seemed, and could actually signify the beginning of the end for the entire Polity …