Cormac glanced at the empty Shuriken holster on his wrist and swore. It seemed to him that he suffered nothing but loss all the way down the line, and he was damned if he was going to lose any more. Gazing around the huge cavern in which he stood, anger and suppressed grief prevented him from feeling impressed. All he saw was another trap — and that was not where he wanted to be. Lellan was over conferring with her men, setting up heavy weapons for the moment the raptors broke through the door — as they most certainly would, any time now. She had said she would be back soon, but minutes dragged slow and leaden. Did she not realize how unimportant all the little battles down here really were? Abruptly, Cormac came to a decision. After a conversation held with Lellan, before they had come here to the mountains, he had learned that he needed exit cavern seventeen, which lay to the right of something called the Watergate. He gazed along the river's length winding past the pillartowns and the ponds, the crop fields and storage bunkers. It had to be there: one of those tunnel entrances beside where the river entered the huge cavern. There must be the Watergate.

Cormac walked away past a big antique rail-gun now being bolted to the stone floor, past soldiers setting up a barricade — something pretty futile considering their attackers could fly. He headed on down an alley leading between two large warehouses, to an open space where various military vehicles had been abandoned. As he walked along, he found it a relief to be breathing again without a mask over his face. Reaching the empty vehicles, he climbed into something that resembled the bastard offspring of a jeep and a golfer's cart, engaged the simple electric drive, and headed away. Someone shouted after him, but he ignored that. He would have readily shot anyone who attempted to stop him.

Now on the move again, he did have a little time to spare for his surroundings. Just as Blegg had informed him: the Underworld was bigger than the surface colonization, and from what he could see was well organized. Whether it was better in this respect than what he had briefly seen above he could not judge, as all he had seen up there was ruined by war, and the one city he had only glimpsed. Studying the fields and ponds down here he saw that the inhabitants had taken the same agricultural route as the Theocracy, and as so many other planetary populations: the usual cereal and vegetable crops, but also protein harvested from species of fast-growing crustaceans and chilopods that were not the product of natural evolution, but genetically spliced for this very purpose hundreds of years in the past. He wondered how the Theocracy, farming the same unnatural creatures, could square that with their rigid beliefs, but then recalled how religions had a long history of 'squaring things' so their senior echelons could live comfortably whilst the lower ones did the labour and suffering.

The stone track he drove along sat well above the ponds and fields stepping down in tiers towards the central river. He noticed the marks of cutting tools on stone and realized that every field and every pond had been excised out of rock. Looking round at the immensity of the cavern, with its gridded ceiling and pillar-towns, he wondered just how much had been excavated and how much was natural. But, then, over a couple of centuries it would have been possible to shift a lot of stone.

Eventually the track curved directly past the plascrete banks of the river, near where a couple of waterwheels, maybe fifty metres in diameter, were constantly churned round by the current. Cormac wondered if the river itself was the only source of energy here — generating the power to supply heating and lighting, while the plants growing under those lights provided the oxygen. Or if there was somewhere a hidden fusion plant or geothermal energy tap? He reckoned there must be something like those, for this place was not just some agrarian idyll. There had to be industries here for the building of the pillartowns and the manufacture of tools and weapons. This underground world was definitely not low-tech.

Beyond the waterwheels, lock gates reached halfway up the height of the cave mouth from which the river issued. Hinged on either side to the walls of the cavern, these were driven by huge hydraulic rams, and were presently open. Cormac could not discern the purpose of these gates until he drew closer and saw that, just back from the cave mouth, another tunnel led off to one side, opening just above the surface of the water. Closing the lock gates would force the water level to rise and be diverted into this alternative tunnel. Perhaps this was to provide further hydro-electric energy from a hidden generator, or maybe just a flood-prevention measure.

Behind the waterwheels, but before the lock, a level bridge stretched across the river. Cormac observed that tunnels had been bored into the wall on either side of the river's entrance. Lellan had told him earlier that exit seventeen lay to the right of the Watergate, and this was soon confirmed for him when he saw the large 17 etched into the rock above one tunnel right ahead of him. Soon he plunged into it, lights coming on automatically above him. The tunnel drifted left in a slow arc and eventually emerged into the natural cave cut by the river. For a while he motored along on a narrow track beside the thundering white water, then his route cut away from the river bank and began to rise. When he began to find himself gasping for breath, he had to flip his breather mask up, realizing that it wasn't the airlocks that retained the oxygen in the larger cavern. He guessed that it must be continually topped up, which confirmed his suspicion about there being other sources of energy, since greenery would not be able to do the job alone.

A few minutes after donning his mask, he came to an open area where a couple of vehicles were parked in front of a circular armoured door, with a smaller door set into it. Three soldiers stepped out of their vehicles, as he halted his own and got out. One, who was evidently an officer, approached him.

"We are to offer you all assistance," she said, her fingers resting against her coms helmet, while she listened to instructions delivered through the device.

Cormac studied her and then the two big men with her. He was frankly tired of seeing people around him die. "Just confirm for me how to get to Lyric II once I reach the surface."

"We'll take you there," the woman insisted, taking her fingers away from her helmet at last.

"No, just give me the directions," he repeated.

The woman gestured behind her. "There's only one route down the hill, which takes you directly to the river. You follow that downstream to the Cistern, and the ship rests on the largest beach. You won't see it though."

"I know all about the chameleonware," Cormac replied, heading for the smaller door. Then he paused and turned back. "Tell Lellan…" He paused, momentarily unable to go on. If he failed in his attempt, this whole planet would be denuded of human life. If he succeeded, however… he succeeded.

"Tell her the Polity will come."

The woman smiled at this, and he did not add that they might well be coming to inspect an ashpit over a charnel house.

The calloraptors' racket outside ceased once the pulse-cannon started up again. Gant had dragged over a heavy pedestal-mounted grinding machine, and jammed it against the warped and mutilated door of the workshop, before turning back to Thorn.

"We'll need to do something about that." The Golem pointed at Thorn's shattered leg.

"No, really?" said Thorn, groping in the bag of medical supplies he had earlier retrieved from the ATV. Finding what he wanted he slapped three drug patches on his knee, and a further one on his biceps. Gant moved off to scour the workshop and small storage room attached. Shortly he returned with rolls of insulating tape, a plascrete sprayer, and varying lengths of alloy tube that was probably used for water pipe.