"In his armour of brass. Brother Pegrum came upon the valley and saw how Stenophalis had failed, but was undaunted."

The woman reckoned that, after seeing what had happened to Stenophalis, she herself would be daunted to the point of having to change her underwear. But of course Pegrum had not seen it happening, only the final result — which somewhat resembled a can of minced beef after being hit with a sledgehammer.

She continued with: "Coming astride the valley, with the sun gleaming on the polished brass of his armour, he demanded of the monster that skulked below, 'Come forth and face me! "

Brother Pegrum looked fine and strong. The woman shook her head, and read on — she suspected there might be some degree of repetition in these stories of the variously armoured brothers.

"The Hooded One came forth, and he smote it with hard light until its scutes glowed like the sun, and below it the river boiled away."

The red beams from the Brother's heavy QC laser spat into the shadowed cowl, but only seemed to make the eyes glow brighter. Deep in that cowl the woman saw things glittering and moving, and wondered how true to life this picture might be,

"But light availed him nought, and out of a great fog of steam rose the monster to drag him down into the Valley of Shadows and Whispers."

Brother Pegrum definitely did not want to go: he was kicking and he was screaming and he was clawing at the mountainsides. The picture reminded the woman of an ancient picture she had seen, long ago, of one of the damned being dragged down into Hell.

"And his armour parted like butter under the knife of the Hooded One."

The woman paused again. "Gross," she murmured.

The flash from the screen left shadows fleeing across his vision and, even though he was some distance from the explosion itself, Stanton's ears were still ringing. From the holocam he'd dropped on top of Dorth's command tent, he was now unsurprisingly getting no response, but he had seen enough.

All communications shut down, only seconds before all those guards he had seen around the landers dropped to the ground, so he was getting nothing from Lellan, Polas or even Jarvellis on what had been going on, but then he didn't need to. Through the holocam he'd watched that bastard Dorth walking out into the grasses with five others, and then those five tearing away their Dracocorp augs only seconds before the hit. It didn't really take much figuring to work out what had happened: some sort of subversion weapon operating through aug software, communications knocked out, high-powered laser hits obviously from outside of the atmosphere… so the one Cormac had warned them about had arrived and started throwing his weight around. But Stanton was not going to allow that to distract him. Barring the near-miss on Brom's barge on Cheyne III, this was the nearest he had got to Aberil Dorth in decades, and he was not now going to take his eye off the ball. The only problem was that he needed to cross about five kilometres of wilderness to get on Dorth's trail.

At present the aerofan was useless — its laminar batteries so drained they had not even an erg to spare to run the LCD displays on its console — so Stanton stepped over the side rail and dropped to the ground. He tried not to allow himself to think too deeply about the kind of creatures he had been seeing in quantity during his circuitous journey here, nor to wonder what the hell was stirring them up, but there seemed something odd about the atmosphere of the wilderness — something that felt, incongruously, both alien and familiar, and threatening too. He shook his head and swore. He'd been around too long and in too many shitty situations to get the jitters like this.

Checking the direction-indicator setting of his wristcom, he was annoyed to see it had been completely scrambled by the same viral attack that had knocked out communications. No matter, the line of incinerated landers stretched from horizon to horizon and, so long as he did not go too wildly off course, he would run into that line soon enough, and once there all he needed to do was find one undamaged laminar battery. Stomping straight into flute grasses, he drew his heavy pulse-gun and a laser torch.

"I am the meanest son of a bitch in the valley," he intoned, and tried to believe it when his words seemed to stir something huge in the darkness right behind the spot where he had brought down the aerofan. He went into a squat, and peered back in that direction but, with afterimages still plaguing his vision, all he could see was flute grass and the aerofan. Then there was the rearing of a huge shadow, and something nudged the aerofan aside as it slid past… and just kept on sliding.

I'm dead.

He knew exactly what it was: the other monstrous predators here walked only on two or four feet, not on a hundred paddle legs. And other predators he could handle mostly, but not this one. Stanton reversed his pulse-gun up underneath his chin, as the hissing roar moved up beside him and a head like a gigantic limpet shell reared up into the darkness — the shadowed hollow of it filled with the whickering of small sharp movement. Stanton prepared himself: if it came down over him he would pull the trigger — there was simply no other option. Unbelievably the thing slid on past, its segmented body forming a wall of armour beside him that he could have reached out and touched. Then it was gone.

With care Stanton withdrew the weapon from under his chin, releasing it into his other hand. He then straightened out the crackling tension from his fingers. The heat from the laser strike, he reasoned, must have confused it — as it was in the direction of that it was now going. To his knowledge, no one had ever got so close to a hooder and survived. This, he supposed, was another example of what Jarvellis called 'Stanton luck'. He hoped it would hold out, since he must now follow the hooder in towards the fires.

Inside the bridge pod, Skellor checked, with his human eyes, that all that remained of his command crew was ash and smoke. In the end, he realized, only those things that were utterly of his own creation could be trusted. His eyes now opaquing, he turned his attention outward once again.

The Theocracy army would reach the landers soon enough, but meanwhile there were other matters requiring his attention. Through huge magnification he gazed down on the northern ranges of the single continent.

Hitting the rebel communications centre had been a mistake, for there they had possessed only a secondary emitter, not the actual U-space transmitter, and now his chances of tracing it had become so much less. It was somewhere there in the mountains, but had since ceased transmission, though there was still a ghost of signature for him to work with. Because of this he was able to extend the fractal calculations that fined down its location in realspace as a function of its location in underspace. But even for him this was not easy, as such maths was normally the province of runcible AIs — specifically constructed for the purpose. What he really needed was some eyes on the ground — or at least close to it. The Theocracy army was out of the question, for if he turned them back towards the mountains, the rebels, still scuttling for their caves, would probably turn to counterattack and thus hinder any search. The Theocracy soldiers were rough tools now anyway — the cerebral burn he had used leaving them as little more than automatons — and most importantly, though he could control them, they were, like Aphran, not his own creation and therefore not to be trusted. Skellor had something else in mind.

All of the shuttles inside the Occam, from the smallest twelve-seaters to the huge delta-wing heavy lifters, were already bound up and pierced by the growth of Jain substructure, and in some cases with the larger architecture. Luckily he did not require an actual landing on the planet — just insertion into its atmosphere — and those grabships he had returned to their holds after the growth would be adequate to that task. Through the internal vision of the Jain structure which, like an infinity of fibre optics, could provide him with views anywhere it existed in the ship, he watched the continued growth of the calloraptor-hybrid eggs in their polyhedral framework, before deciding what changes should be made. The alterations to muscle and bone structures took an infinitesimal fraction of a second for him to calculate, but for longer than that he was annoyed that practical considerations had him dispensing with a large proportion of the weight and hence the strength of those structures. Briefly he considered the installation of some form of AG, but found the idea aesthetically displeasing. As soon as he finally reached a decision on what he must do, he did it: Jain filaments darkening the albumen of the eggs as they tore and rebuilt and polished to perfection.