It was the same man who had been sitting next to him, Apis realized, and only because of the skull beads and his injury. The man came out with his arms flailing weakly, propelled by the blood vaporizing from his stomach wound. His eyes were bulging, bloody vapour wreathed him, his mouth was open in a scream no one would hear. Apis caught hold of him for a moment, before sending him on his way, dead already, or in just a moment.

The other corpse was clinging inside the airlock, another man — it seemed that no women wore this uniform, which was another pointer to the primitive culture it had come from. This man was missing one arm, his other arm being linked round one of the bars, and perhaps his face had worn a look of terror before it was blown away from his skull to hang in frozen tatters around his head. Apis saw that he had a weapon and reached in to pull it from his holster, before studying the man. He possessed a laser, yet had not drawn it. Had he gone into the airlock willingly? Or had he been too badly injured to resist? Madness. Apis inspected the weapon then studied the primitive locking mechanisms inside the airlock. He too must join in this madness if he was to survive.

Quickly he pulled himself outside, grabbed the bloated suit containing his mother, and dragged her back inside. Once he had secured her, he pointed the weapon at the autosystems on the wall and pulled the trigger. In eerie silence each box melted, vaporized, fell apart. The outer lock, which had been slowly drawing closed, juddered to a halt. Apis pocketed the weapon and tried the manual control on the outer lock, finding it worked. He turned to the inner lock and inspected the manual controls there, but before he could do anything a glare of light shone in from outside, and gee force dragged him to one side of the lock — the ion engines had been started. Pulling himself back into position, he again eyed the controls, hardening himself against the horror of what he must now do.

Both sets of controls were hydraulically assisted, so it would not take brute force to open or close each lock. There were only a couple of vacuum sensors visible, which he studied for a moment before fusing them. The lack of safety devices did not surprise Apis — obviously these people had a low regard for human life. He pressed the pistol to a stick-pad on his belt, and began to turn the wheel that opened the inner lock… while the outer lock still lay open.

She heard a brittle rattling all around her, and was aware of soft earth against her face, before fragments of memory began to intrude into consciousness. Her body felt numb, and she suddenly remembered the agony of being hit by the stinger, of fighting for breath… Dent casually blown away while he lay on the ground… then Fethan walking towards Proctor Volus, being shot, attacking… Eldene just could not make those last images make sense, and felt a horrible sinking terror when she thought about what she must face when she opened her eyes: it would be the cage, or perfunctory execution.

Upon opening her eyes she only felt confusion at what she was seeing.

Before her, the ground was thick with cobbles of blister moss, the occasional empty tricone, and turgid circular pools reflecting Calypse, the gas giant, so they seemed a scattering of coins made from slices of opal. Raising her head slightly she saw now a stand of flute grass — and it was from this came the brittle rattling as the hollow white stems were disturbed by a breeze. At the foot of this stand the ground was heaving up, and she guessed that a live tricone must be near the surface, feeding on soil rich in organics. What the hell was she doing here? This looked like one of the wild areas she had only ever seen when sent in a work party on clearance duty. Then she felt a sudden dread: of course, as punishment Proctor Volus had dumped her out here where she would die without the supplements that kept her scole attached to her. No doubt the Proctor would manufacture some suitable story to transfer blame for her death from himself…

Metallic sounds, behind her.

For a moment Eldene dared not move, then she felt an anger and determination to survive building up inside herself, and slowly rolled over to see where the noise was coming from. Immediately her confusion returned. Fethan was squatting beside Volus's aerofan, with its control column in pieces while he worked on the complex tech inside. Fethan was alive, so that meant… no, it wasn't possible. All Eldene could assume was that the Proctor had missed, even at that range, and that Fethan had somehow retaliated with a concealed knife. Eldene sat up and the old man glanced at her.

"Feeling a bit more with it now, girl?" said Fethan.

"I've felt better," Eldene replied, her voice catching in her dry throat.

There was something odd about the old man, something out of place. Then Eldene saw that the top of Fethan's coverall did not bulge as it had previously done. His scole was gone! Eldene instantly realized that this was what she could see on the ground beside the pieces of control column. She stared at it in shock, trying to equate its presence there with Fethan's apparently easy breathing — but coming up only with puzzlement. Fethan should be dying. She stared at the old man, hoping for some explanation, but what happened next only increased her perplexity.

"They'll get tracking on this soon," said Fethan, waving at the aerofan with a cylindrical hand tool containing lines of red light. "I want it up in the air by then so that when the hit comes they'll think they got us." With that, the old man glanced at the tool he was holding, then reached down and pressed his finger against the side of his scole, whereupon the baggy insectile thing split and hinged open, revealing itself to be a cleverly camouflaged case. Fethan placed the tool inside and took up another to continue with his work.

"Why are you alive?" Eldene asked.

"Now there's a question that's puzzled philosophers for centuries," quipped Fethan. "Of course, in my case there's many would argue that I ain't."

Eldene contained her annoyance. "Volus shot you twice, and now you do not have a scole." Eldene glanced again at the open case, realizing that Fethan had never possessed a scole. She continued, "You killed him, with your hand… just killed him."

"Well, girl, you're gonna find this hard to take, but everything I told you is true: there is a Human Polity, there is an Underground, and there is hope," Fethan replied.

"That doesn't tell me why you are still alive," Eldene persisted.

"True." Fethan shrugged. "Thing is, I ain't completely human. I'm mostly machine, built long ago in that Polity. Right now I'm here to help you people with your revolution."

"Bullshit," said Eldene, which had often previously been her reply to some of Fethan's more outrageous stories.

Fethan stared at her for a long moment, then reached up to grip one of the steel rails of the aerofan. Still staring at Eldene, he twisted until one end of the rail snapped out of its post, and coiled the metal around his hand as if it were wet clay.

"Okay," the old man said, "I ain't mostly machine, but I'm a pretty tough old stick, so you'd better watch your mouth, girl."

Later, when Fethan used another tool from his kit to dig the two small iron slugs out of himself, Eldene became inclined to believe the old man's stories.

First, his mouth turned dry as a sun-baked tile, then it was as if the saliva the node leeched away had been returned to his mouth acidified. Automatically he tried to spit the thing out when the pain became too intense, but it swelled in his mouth and entirely filled it. Drawing deep painful breaths through his nose, he hammered his fist against the wall behind him. His eyes filled with tears. He couldn't scream, he could do nothing about the pain, just as he could do nothing about the horrible sensation that followed it as something oozed down his throat. Gagging now he fought not to vomit, for such a reaction would kill him now. Pain bloomed in his chest, just as it also started to bloom in his sinuses and in the back of his head.