Jarvellis glanced down. "Careful!"

Cormac lifted his foot off the interactive storybook he had just stepped on. He stared at it in some puzzlement, then at the other toys scattered across the floor. A small blond-haired boy charged out from wherever he had been playing, a toy dark-otter clutched in one hand. He hesitated for a moment, then with a delighted yell rushed over to Stanton, who picked him up.

"Ian Cormac, meet Cormac Stanton," said John Stanton, trying to hide his embarrassment. Jarvellis noted this, just as she noted the agent's expression turn from something cold and hard to something merely tired. She guessed that was to do with the ship, and what he wanted of it, and there being an innocent child aboard.

In Thorn's estimation a couple of thousand of the creatures had now swarmed into the main cavern. Judging by the receding roar of gunfire, the rebel fighters were being driven back. Beside him Gant stood up and offered him a hand, and Thorn rose up onto one foot, supporting himself against the Golem's unyielding strength.

"Well, frankly, I'm surprised to be alive," he said. "I gather, from something Cormac said earlier, that you've met these bastards before."

Gant shrugged. "A couple of kinds, yes. The normal predators on Callorum weren't too much of a problem, but then there was something Skellor created — and neither type had wings."

They moved out from behind the aerofan, Thorn glancing at what remained of the soldier Carl before he turned his attention to the other debris on the tunnel floor. Those creatures, it appeared, had to be scorched almost down to the bone, or completely blown into pieces, before they would actually die. The remains of such carnage lay everywhere in drifts upon the stone. Underfoot something white and glassy crunched and fragmented. He noticed one creature burnt down to bone yet still moving, some pinkish substance oozing out between its bones. It fixed him with gleaming dots of eyes set deep in dark pits, and even tried to open its mouth to hiss. This small action used up the last of its strength for then it shuddered, and the pinkish substance began turning the same white as the frangible layer on the floor.

"What the hell?" muttered Thorn.

"Jain tech," explained Gant.

"Nasty," said Thorn. "Now what do we do?"

Gant studied him. "How much oxygen do you have left?"

Thorn glanced at his bottle's readout. "About two hours — so there's only one direction for me to go." He pointed towards where the calloraptors had gone.

Gant abruptly turned and headed back to the aerofan, stooping over the body of Carl. First discarding a pulse-rifle which was bent and broken, he next came up with the man's breather pack and removed its oxygen bottle from the blood-soaked bag. Returning with this item he said, "Another hour from this, though not enough to get you anywhere far. But I don't think that matters now." He looked back the way they had originally come in.

"More of them?" Thorn was looking around for something to use as a weapon.

"No, dracomen," said Gant.

"How can they be here?" Thorn asked, puzzled.

"Oh, they can. I worked with Scar for quite some time, and he can run faster than the top speed on one of those things." Gant gestured to the aerofan.

"So what do they want here?"

"To kill calloraptors, I expect," said Gant. "It's something Scar took great pleasure in."

Thorn considered that. "I think we should move over to the side of the tunnel," he suggested.

In the seat beside Jarvellis, Cormac clipped his harness into place and watched her expert manipulation of Lyric II's controls. The ship responded with a deep thrumming, like a musical instrument being played by an expert hand. He watched her take hold of the joystick as the screen revealed the debris being blown about outside. Lyric II lifted and tilted, its legs and feet quickly retracting before the toes could stub themselves on surrounding rock.

Bringing the ship over wilted vegetation towards the river, Jarvellis glanced up as Stanton returned to the cockpit. "All done?" she asked, and Stanton nodded.

At least in cold-sleep the boy would feel no pain should their ship be destroyed, thought Cormac. But then he doubted that any of them would feel very much — it would be so very quick. The unexpected presence of the child left him feeling hollow inside, though no less resolute. In the end duty had to come first.

"How long?" he asked.

"Lyric?" Jarvellis prompted.

The AI replied, "We should achieve escape velocity in one half of an orbit — that's two hours nominally. One hour after that we will be able to submerge in underspace."

Cormac nodded to himself as the screen now showed them coming up out of the river valley and achieving enough height so that Jarvellis did not have to navigate the ship along the watercourse. Higher still, and the ion engines were now cycling up to a steady roar. Though the screen continued to show the forward view as they accelerated, he guessed that the ship was now beginning to tilt into their vector so that the engines could blast out directly behind. Air turbulence began to give the craft the occasional tentative shake as it accelerated. It maintained that more due to brute force than to aerodynamics — like most ships of the time, Lyric II was built to land and take off by using antigravity.

Cormac recalled a conversation he'd had with Jarvellis: "The 'ware effect doesn't hide AG, it merely blurs it over a number of kilometres," she had told him. "That was good enough for Theocracy detectors, but not to get us by a Polity dreadnought."

"What about the fusion engines on this?" he'd then asked her.

"Taking us straight up, the blast would flare visibly outside the range of the 'ware effect. Skellor would detect us that way too."

"I guessed so," said Cormac. "Can we slingshot around the planet on ion boosters? We'd leave a trail, but that's something we'll have to risk."

In response Jarvellis had opined that the trail would be one of wreckage — Lyric II not being built to withstand such forces. However, they had little choice.

"Approaching Mach one," she announced now. "Let's hope Skellor's got no one listening down there, because the 'ware only covers us for long-distance checking of air disturbance. They'd still hear the sonic boom."

"Let's hope that, indeed," said Cormac — and didn't really like to think beyond. It seemed to him that the processing power and technology Skellor had under his control meant the man was only limited by his own imagination. Probably Skellor was watching through the eyes of his calloraptors, but would it occur to him to listen also? No doubt, from where he hung geostationary, he could see in great detail much of what occurred on the planet, but what was his focus? He had certainly missed the journey Stanton and Cormac had made on that aerofan, probably because his attention was directed entirely towards his creatures' attack on the cavern. Had it occurred to him to set up listening posts? Did he have anything watching on the other side of the planet? Much depended on the detail: it wasn't good enough to have the power of a god without a god's universal vision.

A subscreen gave them a receding view of the Occam Razor, while another screen presented a view across the top of Lyric II whereby Cormac could see that they were now flying perpendicular to the ground so that the ion engines could operate most effectively. The ship had started to vibrate, and from somewhere there came a whistling scream, like a bombshell coming down but never hitting. Every now and again the craft gave a shudder as if something structural was about to break.

"Let's drop the Mach readings: we just passed five thousand kph," said Jarvellis.