The first of the explosives blew, ripping the side out of the barge, some distance from them. Thorn observed hot metal flung across the sea, then sinking in clouds of steam, next the orange glow of fires lighting the sky as all the lights on the ship went out. He pressed his hand to the deck and felt the vibration of its engines stutter to a halt. Glancing at Stanton, he nodded back at the tower they had just passed.

"Independent power supply — U-charger I think," Stanton explained, rising to his feet.

Some of the crew were now rushing towards the source of the explosion. Others were quite wisely not moving in that direction at all, but arming themselves. The two men broke into a trot to match this frenetic activity.

"Hey, you're—" one man managed, hesitating in his rush to join a group of his comrades. Thorn shot him in the face, then quickly dragged the corpse to a nearby dark hatch and shoved it down below.

Stanton was meanwhile twisting the timer on another explosive, while staring in the direction of the group the dead man had been about to join. He stooped and rolled the cylinder along the deck towards them, then gestured to the nearby long cabin. "We go through here."

Thorn was not sure that was such a good idea, but was not about to argue — his companion certainly seemed to know what he was doing.

Stanton explained anyway. "There's a camera down that side, and you can guarantee Brom'll be watching his screens right now." He kicked open the door, they stepped through. The door closed on explosions and screams from the deck behind them. Inside the cabin were a man at some sort of console, a woman screwing a power pack onto a pulse-rifle, a second man sitting on the side of a bunk, pulling on his boots. Both Stanton and Thorn hit the woman first — the greatest immediate danger — and she toppled back over a bench strewn with weaponry, leaving most of her head on the bench itself. The man at the console was groping for something just to his right when Stanton's shots blew him backwards, still in his swivel chair, then threw him jerking out of the chair, to sprawl beyond it. Thorn meanwhile shot the man on the bunk before he could get his other boot on.

"Back window," urged Stanton, as they ran down the length of the cabin.

To their right, crouching by some lockers, a man still in his underpants, unarmed. Stanton aimed at him, then changed his mind and stepped in, ready to knock the man out. Thorn shot the guy when he made a grab for something in the locker. He went over, clutching a heavy rail-gun, its attached cable and power pack falling on top of him as it fired, taking away half the ceiling and opening the cabin to the night.

"Shit," said Stanton flatly.

Thorn gave him a berating look.

Stanton shrugged. "In his underpants?" he said.

Four shots — not being sufficient to shatter the tough chainglass — blew the window out of its surrounding seal in one piece. Stanton, for such a heavily built man, went through in a graceful swan-dive, rolled, turned, and fired at something Thorn could not see as he stepped through the gap. Soon he spotted the two guards outside the door to Brom's cabin. One of them was down, but the other — boosted like Stanton — was trying to drag his rail-gun round on target, despite having lost his right arm. Stanton and Thorn fired together, repeatedly. The guard went backwards through the door, and the two men followed him through, stepping over what remained of their victim into Brom's so luxurious accommodation. Behind them came two further explosions, the light of which cast their shadows ahead of them as they entered.

"Leave it!" Thorn ordered.

Brom was sunk in his otter-hide armchair, a screen opened up from the pedestal table beside him. His feet were bare and Thorn was fascinated to note that his toenails were painted lavender. His hand was poised over the organic-looking weapon he had used earlier, which was now resting on the arm of the chair. He stared back at them with the intensity of a snake, and slowly moved his hand away from the weapon to his lap.

"Where's the Deacon?" Stanton snapped.

Brom shifted his gaze from Thorn and said not a word. Out of the corner of his eye, Thorn saw Stanton hold out his free hand and as if by magic, a dagger slapped into it. Again, Thorn felt some fascination — the dagger was a Tenkian, and Stanton had summoned it to his hand from somewhere else about his person.

"I won't ask so nicely, next time," said Stanton.

Brom blinked and smiled. "Well, I'm afraid you've missed the fellow. He's on his way home."

"Fuck," said Stanton. He stared at Brom. "When did he go, and by what route?"

Brom shrugged, a hint of a smile on his face as he grew more confident. "He went by AGC about four hours ago. Should be on the shuttle to Cereb even now, if he hasn't already shipped out."

Stanton seemed lost for words for a moment, then flung Thorn a glare of accusation. Thorn looked back from him to Brom, and noted that the Separatist had a slight tilt to his head and an abstracted expression.

"His aug," he said.

Stanton returned his attention to Brom and threw. The dagger entered the seated man below the chin. Brom's eyes grew wide as he choked, then he stood and groped at the dagger with fingers soon bloody. He managed a step before he went over.

Just to make sure, Thorn fired down once, excavating a cavity in the back of the man's head. "Let's get out of here," he then said.

Stanton nodded, held up his hand, and did something with the ring on one of his fingers. Brom's body jerked as the dagger pulled free, arced through the air, and slapped its handle into Stanton's hand. He stooped and wiped it on Brom's clothing. Now there came an explosion that rocked the entire barge.

"Seems like a good idea," Stanton opined, as he stood upright again.

Boy and woman bowed over the book as over a very complicated jigsaw puzzle. The text provided the bare bones of the story, but the picture filled out that story to such an extent it had to be studied for some minutes before moving on to the next.

"Presently, little Molly Redcap knocked on the door. 'Who is it? inquired a gruff voice. At first the voice frightened her, but thinking her grandma might be ill she replied, 'I bring you potato bread and wine from my mother. Softly the voice replied, 'Come in, come in, you are welcome to come in. When she entered, Father Siluroyne hid himself under the heat sheet. 'Put the bread and wine in a fridge and come sit on the bed with me. Molly took off her mask and bottle and skipped over to the bed where she was much surprised at the change in her grandma."

The woman leant back with her hand over her mouth for a moment — already she was beginning to recognize the change of tone. When the boy glanced round at her impatiently, she continued:

"Grandma, what big motion sensors you've got."

"All the better to follow you wherever you go."

"Grandma, what a lot of eyes you've got."

"All the better to see you my little morsel."

"Grandma, what big teeth you've got."

"The very same I used to chew up your friend with the axe."

"Oh, please don't eat me. I'm a God-loving child!"

The woman glanced at the child on her knee, who was staring at the picture of the thing in the bed in wide-eyed fascination.

"I'm beginning to see a pattern here," said the woman.

" 'Underground' is misleading in a number of ways," Fethan explained as they trudged on out of the stand of flute grass onto drier ground cloaked with mosses, wild rhubarb and black plantains. "It makes you think of a singular secret resistance organization, when in fact it's the aim of most people there merely to survive — not to overthrow the Theocracy. You could also be misled into thinking the word has nothing to do with 'ground' and 'under' when in reality it has everything to do with those words." Fethan stabbed a finger downwards. "Below us there's about ten metres of loose and highly organic soil — the creation of millions of years of tricone burrowing and feeding. Below that is a layer of chalk over fifty metres thick — created by tricone shells sinking through the soil and slowly conglomerating and compressing." Fethan stopped and pointed towards some current movement in the damp ground that was shaking the big purplish leaves of the rhubarb and causing disc molluscs to drop from their undersides like scatterings of silver coins. The ground humped up, and briefly the spiked end of a tricone broke the surface before retracting. "Industrious little soil makers those. The inhabitants here could make a fortune exporting tricones — and the concomitant ecology — to Polity-run terraforming projects. Of course that'll never happen with the Theocracy in control."