Gant came to a halt with his APW cradled across his chest and nodded at the sky behind them. "You seen that?"

Cormac glanced round but could see nothing else of note, but then the flute grass stood in a tangle two metres tall there, so blocked out most of the starlit sky. He stood up, Mika and Apis also, and they all quickly saw to what Gant referred.

"I think this was what I missed on Samarkand, wasn't it?" said the Golem.

Cormac glanced at him, trying to read something in his expression. Yes, on Samarkand… Gant had never got to see this. He'd been ripped apart, underground, less than an hour before Dragon had appeared in the sky — as it had done here.

The latest 'moon' of Masada was a small reddish-grey penny in the dark sky, nowhere near as impressive as the descending giant Calypse, or the moon Amok that was following it down — that was until you tried to grasp the fact that this was a living creature.

"What, now, do you think?" said Gant.

"Indeed," Cormac replied.

Apis looked at the two of them, his expression showing stubborn anger. "You never tell me anything," he protested.

Cormac was pleased at such a reaction — it was better than the kind of dead efficiency the lad had heretofore displayed.

He explained, "Dragon has probably destroyed every laser array up there, but we think it unlikely it's now just going to meekly sail away into the sunset. That creature is a very large imponderable… so to speak."

"Perhaps it's going to die… like it said," Apis suggested.

"Or live," Gant added.

"Or do both," said Mika. They all turned to look at her, and she went on, "Well, it didn't seem able to make up its mind as to exactly what it was going to do."

"Quite," said Cormac, and was about to go on when suddenly Scar snarled, his eyes fixed on the sky. They all turned back to observe Dragon.

"It's moving," said Gant.

Cormac could not tell for sure, but then he did not have Gant's eyes. He glanced at Scar. "What's happening, Scar — or do I mean Cadmus? What's Dragon going to do next?"

"Dragon is coming," announced Scar.

They gazed back up at it and could now see clearly that it was moving. Dropping lower and lower, it grew larger and larger, clouds of vapour boiling around it, then flashes of orange fire, so that soon it looked like the open circular mouth of a furnace. Distantly, at first, there came to them a steady thunderous grumbling that grew in volume. Cormac gazed around, wondering where they could run for safety, but there was nowhere — if this gigantic sphere was coming down on where they stood then they had no chance at all of getting away. Once again, he resumed the view he had taken aboard the landing craft: if Dragon wanted to kill them, then there was little in these circumstances that they could do about it.

Lower now in the heavens it revealed the vast storm of fire behind it — a wake that continued to boil out in a wide V to cover half the sky.

"It'll come down about fifty kilometres away," said Gant. As a Golem, he possessed the ability to range the creature and work out its angle of descent and its relative velocity.

In the clouds behind and over the surface of the leviathan, forks of lightning flickered, and occasional gunshot discharges hit the ground. The grumbling had become a roar and the ground began to vibrate in sympathy.

"Suicide?" Cormac wondered.

"It's not coming down completely freefall — must be using AG," Gant replied.

At the last it almost seemed to dip, to slam down in the distance, and the fiery cloud of its wake rolled on, blasting up dark clouds and weird vortices of flame.

"On the ground," ordered Cormac.

They flung themselves down with their heads sheltered behind their packs — being the only barrier between themselves and what was coming. The ground shuddered and rocked, and it seemed the whole vast plain dropped a few metres before rising back into position. The roaring increased in volume, then the hurricane was upon them. The flute grass flattened before the blast, and for a short time the air above was filled with long stems and papery fragments, these skirling a hideous dirge as they hurtled past. Then came earth, smoke, and a further rippling of the ground. As this blast-wave passed, it tried to suck them into its wake. After a few minutes, it died and broke into random eddies and the occasional mini-tornado that played strange music with still unbroken stems of grass. In time, they were able to stand up and view the devastation of the flattened plain — and the distant funeral pyre. Scar, tilting his head to the sky, let out a long and mournful howl. Cormac wondered if this was for Dragon… or for something Dragon had done.

Soldiers were revving up the engines of the few machines that would be of use on the surface, and checking weapons that seemed in pristine condition. Thorn had slept, despite the cacophony that seemed only to grow since the destruction of the arrays. Then, upon waking to discover Stanton and Jarvellis gone with soldiers to unload Lyric II, he made his way to Lellan's control room where, after the guards finally let him through, he found further frenetic activity.

"You have to understand that we are just as unprepared for this as they are," said Lellan, during a brief pause when people weren't approaching her for orders, explanations, even comfort, as the military machine she had built reconfigured itself for these strange circumstances. "There's a few units of the Theocracy military on the surface, but mostly it's the proctors, and they only possess limited armament."

"The arrays," said Thorn. "What else would they have needed?"

"Exactly," said Lellan, nodding. "On the surface they only have hand weapons, aerofans, a few military carriers and armoured cars, and limited antipersonnel weapons. For more than a century they've had no need for heavy armour, missile launchers, or anything with more punch than a hand grenade. Why bother with anything else when in a minute you can summon a satellite laser strike accurate and powerful enough to take out anything bigger than an aerofan?"

Fethan, who had only then arrived, interjected, "About four of the arrays were accurate enough to target and take out single individuals, but the Theocracy never bothered — it meant using a huge amount of power, and when was there ever a single individual offering a sufficient threat to 'em?"

Thorn glanced at him, noticed the girl Eldene walking a pace behind him, the pulse-rifle hung from a strap over her shoulder, obviously an unfamiliar weight to her. To Lellan he said, "Surely that makes it all a lot easier for you?" He had already guessed the answers Lellan might give him, but wanted confirmation.

"Well," she said, "we never bothered building any armoured vehicles or any launchers that could not be carried by a man, for the same reasons — the arrays could just take them out. All our forces are kitted essentially for guerrilla warfare, and that kit is limited in quantity — we never expected to be in a position to take all our forces to the surface at once."

"Bastards woulda used the arrays at leisure," said Fethan.

"Can you take the surface with what you have?" Thorn asked.

"Yes, only to lose it again," Lellan replied. Thorn studied her queryingly. "Charity," she went on, "is just a great big training camp for the military. It's spun over to one gee, so the fifty thousand active troops there are training in gravity higher than we have down here. So there's them, and they can come down in landers at any time. With the big ships of the fleet down, they can unload launchers and tanks, and in the end, if all else fails, they can bombard us from orbit with atomics."

"Seems no-win," admitted Thorn.

"In the end it's down to Polity intervention, and we've always known that. The guy at the bottom of a well with a bag of rocks is always gonna lose to the guy at the top," said Fethan.