"Standing always in the light of God, Brother Nebbish smote the monster with the radiance of God's justice, and the monster was blinded."

Nebbish could certainly shift, but he just didn't have quite so many legs as the thing that was coming after him.

"Standing always in the light of God, Brother Nebbish finally smote the monster with the thunder of God's truth, and the monster was cast down."

The woman had never before seen a realistic depiction of a man being peeled like a potato. She was also intrigued to watch the movement of muscle and sinew, as the skinless Brother Nebbish ran screaming on a conveyor belt of chitin, towards the deep shadow containing a glitter of horrid eyes,

"And what moral does this story have?" she wondered.

"Hooders have more fun?" the book suggested.

She dropped the book as if it had tried to bite her.

Stanton eased the aerofan down on a rocky outcrop and the machine made a crunching sound as it crushed the countless molluscs colonizing the surface. As the machine's fans wound down to stillness, he held out his hand to Apis, who handed over the binoculars he had been gazing through.

"Primitive, but effective enough in this light," the boy commented.

Stanton thought at first he was referring to the great mass of creatures ahead, then realized Apis meant the binoculars — being an Outlinker he had probably only come across such technology in a museum. Stanton then found himself amused, realizing the boy had only spoken thus to highlight the fact, to the girl, that he came from the superior Polity.

"You do tend to find that with some technologies," said Stanton, bringing the lenses up to his eyes. "They reach the limit of their development. I wouldn't call these a satisfactory limit though. I could do with autotracking lenses, shake compensators, and image enhancement." He paused to study the view ahead, continuing, "Then again, I doubt those would tell me anything different." He lowered the binoculars. "I haven't the faintest idea what those creatures are, but even in half-light they look like killers to me. We'll have to go round them to try for the ship."

Thorn kept his head well down and tried not to think beyond surviving the next few minutes. The pulse-cannon was only a few metres ahead of him. It was firing away at full power, its shots passing only a metre above his head, yet still the creatures were somehow getting past it — to fly straight into the fusillade coming up from the rebel soldiers who he saw were now retreating towards the armoured doors. To his left his aerofan lay on its side draped in pieces of smoking calloraptor remnants — the same unpleasant fallout that was presently snowing down on himself. The soldier Carl was tangled in the wreckage of the crashed fan. He was wasted, as not even these creatures could have survived what had happened to him. Further back, the war drones were down and out of it, their energy sources drained beyond any possibility of self-recharge. Somehow knowing this, the calloraptors had quickly lost interest in them and were going after more mobile prey.

The old cyborg, Fethan, had been flung much further along the cavern. By running like a madman, he had made it to the rebel line — only losing the skin off his back to one tenacious creature that would not let go until blasted to fragments. Thorn considered fleeing too, but the fractured bone sticking out of his shin told him he would not be running anywhere; just as the piece of fan blade imbedded in his forearm told him he would not be playing the violin for a while. That he had managed to retain his APW he considered a miracle, and he wondered for how many minutes it would extend his life, should he finally make some move.

Just back from the wreckage of the aerofan was a door he had seen one of the creatures tear open, perhaps hoping this would provide another route into the rebel stronghold. When the creature emerged from it shortly after, Thorn guessed some sort of maintenance room lay beyond the door. Perhaps a place for tools, even spares for the pulse-cannons. Maybe if he could just…

Suddenly the nearest pulse-cannon ceased firing, and immediately the creatures were swarming past it overhead. He turned back to see them landing by the armoured door, and tearing at it in mindless anger. Others turned their attention to Lellan's abandoned aerofan, ripping the grounded machine to pieces. But his simple turning motion betrayed him, and three of them dropped from the flock to come hissing towards him like gulls after a discarded fish. With his left hand he swung round his APW, and managed to incinerate two of them before the third was upon him. He smashed away with his weapon and tried to bring the barrel to bear. But the creature had closed its claws into his clothing and the flesh of his stomach, its wings wide open to steady it as its pink star of a mouth stabbed towards his face. Flinching back, he saw silver hands close round each shoulder of the creature's wings. With a new screaming, it tore apart before him, its double chest parting down its central channel. Then a figure stepped through, grabbed Thorn by his collar, and dragged him at speed to the maintenance room. There Thorn pulled himself up on one leg, and stared across at what was still recognizably Gant, as the Golem drop-kicked a pursuing calloraptor back amongst its fellows, then fired a shot that sent the lot of them tumbling backwards.

Through gritted teeth Thorn said, "Seems we've been in caves like this before, old man."

Gant glanced at him. "Tell me you've got a memplant," he said.

" 'Fraid not," Thorn replied.

"Best you survive then." The Golem then hauled closed the steel door, and braced his back against it.

In one bay Skellor found a shuttle that was not so interpenetrated with Jain substructures as to be almost unrecoverable. Those stems and branches that had penetrated its hull, he quickly withdrew, initiating the necessary repairs on their way out. Whilst transporting its egg from Medical through the strange organic spaces of the ship, he accelerated the growth of this one chosen from a new batch of calloraptors. Upon getting it to the bay, he paused only to retard its wing growth and then make swift surgical alterations so that when he stripped the egg case away the raptor tumbled out possessing only long bony arms ending in optic interface plugs. Skellor then wrapped the new creature in a Jain pseudopod, inserted it into the pilot's chair of the shuttle, tore away the manual controls, and connected it directly into the craft's main systems. Now he was ready: he had his way of bringing Cormac to the Occam. Skellor then opened the bay doors and ejected the craft and its raptor pilot into space — another of his experimental creatures wrenched painfully into the world.

Looking through the eyes of his other creatures on the surface, Skellor now felt a grinding boredom at the inevitability of it all. He had destroyed every spacecraft evident on the surface of the planet, and though there might be something hidden in the caverns, it could not get off the ground without detection. So really Cormac, as much as his two companions trapped in that store room, had nowhere to run. The agent might choose to take his own life rather than be captured, but Skellor's anxiety about that was leavened, for he knew he could rebuild and revive anyone who had been dead for up to ten hours. Skellor's greatest fear was that Cormac might select a form of suicide that could utterly destroy his brain — as Captain Tomalon had done — for not even Skellor could recreate something for which he possessed no pattern.

Though the remaining pulse-cannon was still destroying his creatures in great numbers, he knew it could kill no more than an eighth of their number before they finally broke through. Of the remaining raptors maybe half would be killed inside the cavern itself before the human population was slaughtered and Cormac finally taken. Their losses didn't matter very much, because Skellor did not intend to retrieve his raptors. Once Cormac was safely aboard the shuttle that was even now going into descent, Skellor could break this planet like he had broken the moonlet from which he had obtained materials for growth.