"Back against the wall," he ordered, as soon as they were all out. He was about to check the time again, but there was no need. From below, there came a hollow roar, then a sudden rushing sound. The blast wave came up out of the drop-shaft, carrying with it glittering metallic fragments and a smell like that from a forge.

"That was the CTD," he said. "Come on, the APW will go soon and we don't want to be here then."

They hurried through the maintenance area where various shuttle engines and other heavy equipment were awaiting repair. Halfway through they had to pull themselves along wall bars, where a huge thruster motor was dangerously drifting above negated grav-plates. Soon they reached the end of this area, then entered a tunnel that led to the shuttle bay. The tunnel was wide — for the transportation of engine parts — with sealed double doors at its end. Reaching these, Cormac thumped the palm lock, but nothing happened.

He glanced at Gant. "Vacuum?"

Gant stepped close to the edge of the doors and peered closely at where they met the jamb. After a moment, he stepped back shaking his head. "No, the seals aren't down." Then he turned and faced back the way they had come, and tilted his head to listen. "They're coming," he said. Just then, there was another explosion behind them as the APW dumped its load.

Cormac stepped back. "Scar, the door!"

With the others hurrying to get safely behind him, the dracoman moved back from the doors and fired. Purple flame ignited the air between his weapon and the obdurate surface. The explosion was deafening and blasted a hole perhaps a metre across. The second explosion took out a similar amount of material above this, blasting metallic smoke and fragments into the shuttle bay beyond.

Meanwhile, with cold precision, Cormac primed the second CTD and set the timer for five minutes. Then came further flashes and explosions as Gant fired back the way they had come. Cormac glanced in that direction as he propped the CTD above a console set into the wall. Back at the further edge of the maintenance bay a gleaming skeletal shape flew apart in proton fire — gleaming bones and a polished skull clanging across the floor plates — just as another one came swiftly in behind it. Himself firing in short bursts, Cormac glanced to the doors and saw that Mika and Apis were through them and that Scar was on his way.

"You go on through," said Gant, then abruptly fired up at the ceiling as one of the ship's Golem came scuttling across it like a spider. The explosion took out ceiling panels and caused sparking cables, insulation, and structural members to rain down. Half the lighting panels went out. Cormac did not hesitate — Gant could move a damned sight faster than he could, so it was logical he should come through last. Cormac was already running for the landing craft when to his horror he saw that blast doors were slowly drawing across the shimmer-shield maintained over the mouth of the bay.

"Move it, Gant!"

Behind him there were further explosions. He reached the craft just behind the others and looked back just as Gant dived through the doors, rolled, came upright and turned and fired at the ship's Golem following close behind him. Then Gant was running for the landing craft. Cormac went down on one knee and took careful aim at the doors — subliminally seeing Scar doing the same beside him. At his back he heard thrusters starting on the landing craft and felt a side-wash as the grav-plates underneath it disengaged. Two Golem came through the doors, both of them with pulse-rifles. Scar and Cormac's fire intersected on one and blew it to scrap. The second one fired at Gant, and had him stumbling with smoke exploding from his back. But Gant was Golem too and soon regained his balance and continued. Scar now hit the second Golem, while Cormac tracked other movement to his right. More Golem over there, and he felt a sinking in his stomach when he saw what they were carrying.

"Into the ship, now!" he bellowed, Gant being close enough.

They piled into the landing craft even as it began to lift and turn. Cormac glanced ahead, saw Apis at the controls, and thought it superfluous to urge him to get them out of there. He hurried forward, dropped into the seat beside the Outlinker, strapped himself in, and glanced down at the screen giving a rear view, as the craft tilted nose-down and headed for the shimmer-shield. But there were Golem back there, aiming APWs, so this was not fast enough. Purple flashes igniting the bay, the craft lurched as if a giant hand had slapped its back end.

"Use the ion drive," Cormac instructed — calm and cold.

Apis hit the control for ion drive but, obviously damaged, it blew out its grids and hot metal exploded back into the bay — straight into the faces of the Golem. There was some satisfaction in that, but now nothing but the thrusters operated, and it seemed to be taking forever to reach the shimmer-shield. Cormac noticed that the outer doors had ceased to close, it now being evident that they would not close in time to prevent the landing craft getting out of the bay. Behind, more Golem with APWs were gathering. Skellor did not want those doors now closed between themselves and the Golem. Purple flares again, and again the ship lurched, pieces of it blasting forward, away past the cockpit, in a glittering shower out into space. Then white light filled the bay behind them as the second CTD detonated, and the craft tumbled out through the shimmer-shield on a plume of fire.

"Perfect timing," opined Gant, as he grabbed Scar and pulled the dracoman down into a seat, before strapping himself in. Scar dropped his seat back as far as it would go, for only like this would it accommodate him, and he snarled as he too strapped himself in. Mika muttered something, turned pale, then grabbed up a sick-bag from the compartment on one side of her seat — with grav-plates being so common in Polity ships, there were not many who'd had the microsurgical alteration to their inner ear that prevented motion sickness. Apis, of course, was now in his element.

"Yeah," said Cormac, glancing back at Gant. "But Skellor got control of the doors, so how long before he gets control of the weapons systems?"

All of them gazed at the screens as the craft's thrusters propelled it with painful slowness from the vast ship, so that they rose almost like a drifting balloon from a metal plain. Cormac wondered how long it would take. Tomalon had said Skellor now controlled the Occam's engines, so he could trundle along behind them while he got the dreadnought's weapons online. In fact he probably wouldn't even need to move the Occam — they weren't exactly escaping at any great speed.

"Perhaps we should have stayed in there?" Gant suggested.

Difficult call: if they had stayed, the Golem would have killed them; escaping like this the Occam's weapons would kill them. With his emotions under a mental boot heel, Cormac realized he had lost, and that he and these people with him were soon to die.

Then something occluded their horizon: a moonlet of scaled flesh rolled down on them and engulfed them in wombish blackness. Momentarily they were slammed from side to side, and the landing craft groaned as if it might break. Then there was that familiar dislocation, that strange sideways pull into the ineffable, and Cormac knew they had entered U-space. He reached out to the console before Apis, and clicked down the button for external com.

"I thought you'd lost your ability for trans-stellar flight," he said.

"I lied," Dragon replied.

Enough of what it was to be human remained in him for the need to verbalize orders rather than assume complete control of their recipients. He gazed down at the Occam Razor's Captain and saw that the man had managed to crawl as far as the door since being dethroned, leaving a snail trail of blood and plasma.