Cormac found himself fighting for breath as the oxygenated air inside the craft poured away. A roaring in his ears soon drowned out the chaos of the crash. With his vision tunnelling, he saw that Apis had managed to close over the hood of his exoskeleton and the suit, detecting the lack of oxygen, had automatically raised the visor. Behind, Mika was fighting for breath, while Gant was undoing his safety straps. Then Cormac lost it — he blacked out completely.

Thorn could not help but be impressed by the set-up they had here. Studying his companions in the elevator, as it rapidly accelerated up into the building, he wondered what their story might be. The girl looked a little bewildered by events around her, but utterly determined to stick with the old Golem, Fethan. Lellan Stanton… now here was an intriguing woman. She had little of her brother's brutish appearance, but obviously a shitload of his innate intelligence. She and Jarvellis were of a kind — clever, forceful, and not to be crossed. Yes, Thorn rather liked her already.

"What was it?" John Stanton asked.

Lellan replied, "Some sort of explosion." She listened to her helmet's earphone. "I'm not getting much sense out of them up there — there's a lot of yelling."

Thorn reflected on their frantic journey across the floor of the cavern in the jury-rigged AGC. Something big was happening, and there might ensue some kind of reaction from those down here — this place was wound up tight and seemed ready to explode. He'd seen it in the faces of the soldiers and technicians, and he'd seen the armament they'd built up. Through the glass side of the elevator Thorn saw that they had now reached the ceiling of the cavern, but that they were not slowing. Up and through — dark stone speeding past lit eerily by the elevator's internal light.

"Could be something to do with that rock you dragged in with us?" he suggested.

Jarvellis shook her head. "That fragmented and burned up without their notice, but maybe we were detected. That might explain all the activity," she said, her expression worried.

"No, that," said Lellan, tapping the side of her helmet. "That was Polas I was listening to. As far as I can gather, there's been an explosion on or near EL-41, and the possibility of explosions at 40 and 39. They're putting up the big dish and refractor now." She paused, listening again, then: "Seems that was 38."

Finally the elevator drew to a halt and its doors slid open onto a chamber crammed with equipment. One side of this chamber was walled by a window of tinted chainglass giving a view of mountains and sky, so it seemed evident they were located inside some high peak.

As soon as Lellan stepped out of the elevator, a thin weasel of a man began to gesture to her frantically. He sat in a half-circle console with a number of screens jury-rigged before him. Other people throughout this chamber were operating other machines, babbling into microphones, or frantically tapping instructions into consoles of antiquated design. Removing her helmet, Lellan trotted over to the beckoning man. Thorn took his time following along behind, as he once again studied the set-up around him — they had obviously had to do the best they could with whatever they could lay their hands on, but this was as good an operations room as any. It surprised him to see that it even had an old military projection tank — a holojector showing the entire Masadan system. However, he doubted that it displayed real-time — that would have bespoken a sophistication they definitely did not possess here.

"It's gone," the man called Polas was saying. "It's fucking well just gone."

"Show me," said Lellan.

Polas gestured at the screens. One of these showed a radio picture of the black dots of stars on a white background, cut off to one side by the black arc of Calypse. Another showed an empty grid, while another showed just empty blue. On a ring of lower screens, mathematical symbols and graph representations clicked on and off, flickering and changing as if some primitive AI were trying to justify the impossible.

"What about the recording?" Lellan asked.

Polas grimaced. "The machine dumped it as being out of parameters — thought it had made a mistake." He shouted across to one of his fellows, "Dale, you managed to retrieve it yet?"

The woman Dale shook her head as she continued clattering away at her keypad — chasing down something on her screen.

"The rest?" asked Lellan. "Have they gone as well?"

"So the equipment tells us. There's also that." Polas pointed to the chainglass window. Outside in daylight sky, a smoky disc was dissipating — one edge of it silhouetted against Calypse.

"Okay, it's time to send up the probe," said Lellan.

"Might be software, glitched by whatever that was," Polas pointed out.

"Just do it."

"A probe?" Thorn turned to Jarvellis, who was standing beside him.

"We brought it for them on our last trip. They only have the one," she replied.

"Won't its launch be detected?"

"Dispensable probe, and a separate and dispensable site."

Polas swung a side console across his lap — one with touch-controls rather than the buttons and ball controls of most of the consoles here — and with his fingertips expertly traced out a sequence. The radio screen's view changed to the same one they were seeing through the chainglass window. This view then vibrated as somewhere a rocket probe blasted from its hidden silo and headed into the sky.

"I've got it!" Dale yelled, while they all watched this scene, and she came running over with a software disc. Polas snatched it from her, swung the touch-console back out of the way, and inserted the disc into a slot in one of the more primitive consoles. He quickly rattled over the buttons while gazing at the gridded screen, then triumphantly hit the last button with his forefinger, and sat back.

"About a minute beforehand," he explained.

The screen image changed to show the curved satellite laser array Thorn had earlier seen from Lyric II, except that this view was from below, and he could clearly see the reflective throats of laser tubes open before him. They watched this unchanging scene for slow drawn-out seconds, then abruptly Polas leant forwards and stabbed his finger at one of the smaller screens, showing a tangle of signal waves.

"That's what made it dump the recording. No way can we set this system to accept a U-space signature — it screws everything," he said.

"U-space?" Lellan repeated. "They don't jump this close… what is that?"

On the screen, something gigantic loomed behind the laser array. As they watched, it rolled closer — a vast and incomprehensible shape. From it, off to one side of the screen, a black fleck fell away, then the screen whited out for a second. When it came back on, the laser array was a spreading cloud of debris laced with fire, and the vast shape rolled on.

"What the fucking hell was that?" asked Lellan.

Polas wiped his hand down his face to cover his mouth. Almost as if he didn't want what he was going to say next to be heard, he muttered, "There was something about it. Something out at the cylinder worlds… Behemoth… just a name."

"There's no mystery," interrupted Thorn.

They all turned to look at him.

"That was Dragon," he told them. "And my guess is that things are just about to start getting very complicated — and very deadly."

The agony and the terror left him, sucked away through the growing Jain architecture inside the Occam Razor. Those of his command crew who still had enough of their humanity left to feel their own pain were sobbing, which meant there were only two of them, being Aphran and the man who controlled the U-space engines. Skellor silenced them with a thought and began to analyse what had happened. When he had discovered that, he glared at the corpse of Captain Tomalon and wished he'd not been so hasty in having the man killed. The trouble Tomalon had caused was worth as much punishment as that damned Cormac would receive when Skellor finally got hold of him.