The substance was the invention of Algin Tenkian, and it made him filthy rich.' - Gridlinked: Asher, pg. Chainglass also lacks the brittleness of its namesake. Chainglass blades can be as hard as diamond and maintain an edge sharper than that of freshly sheared flint, whilst having a tensile strength somewhere above that of chrome steel. Depending on heat treatments and various doping techniques, this glass has a range of properties covering just about every material that has preceded it. Chainglass armor and cutting blades: 'A glass formed of silicon chain molecules.Autodoc: semi-intelligent machine with complete knowledge of human physiology, and sophisticated array of surgical tools.Golem: sophisticated androids, named in numbered series loaded with an AI mind or the mind of a human recovered from a dead person's 'memplant.'.Aug: A brain augmentation device, allowing gridlink-like access to local networks.Antiphoton Weapon: A proton beam weapon (APW).AGC: antigravity carrier anti-gravity vehicle.contra-terrene device or CTD: an anti-matter bomb.runcible: an interstellar teleporter, comparable to the Ramsbotham Jump in Robert A.AI: machine intelligence responsible for planetary management.Meanwhile, a brilliant Separatist biophysicist has apparently reactivated an extremely ancient relic of technology created by the Jain, an alien species that dropped out of the universe millions of years ago, and commanded forms of technology that the brightest AI minds of the Polity have difficulty comprehending.

To complicate matters, someone has attacked a low-grav Outlinker habitat with a nanomycelium which bears a striking resemblance to that used by Dragon on Samarkand in the previous novel Gridlinked. In this novel, Earth Central Security (ECS) agent Ian Cormac is placed at the center of a civil war on the planet Masada, where an elite Theocracy lives in cylindric habitats in orbit and violently rules over commoners enslaved to laborious agriculture jobs on the planet's surface. It is the second novel in the Gridlinked sequence. The Line of Polity is a 2003 science fiction novel by Neal Asher.

The line of polity