"It's a balancing act," said Lellan. "We want to capture the surface for long enough to get the ballot over eighty per cent, and then to ask for help from the Polity. We need to create enough disorder so that the Polity can justifiably intervene, but not so much that the Theocracy are forced to go nuclear."

"Never clear-cut, is it?" said Thorn.

"No," said Lellan, moving away with the latest group dressed in camouflage fatigues who had demanded her attention. "Always dirty, and infected."

Thorn now turned to Fethan and Eldene. "And probably deeper and dirtier than even she knows," he muttered, stepping past them to Polas, who had been listening in to their conversation whilst keeping half an eye on his consoles and screens. It seemed that most of the tasks required from him at present he was managing to automate.

"I want to see that recording again," Thorn said, resting a hand on the back of Polas's chair.

Polas glanced up from his instrumentation and eyed him dubiously. "They say you're ECS," he said. "Were you sent here to help us, or just make fruitless inquiries?"

"I wasn't sent. I ended up here by accident," Thorn replied.

Polas raised an eyebrow as he opened a box underneath the console and from it removed a computer disc, which he shoved into a slot in the console. Again, on one of the screens before him, the recent events that had occurred above played out.

"Stop it there," said Thorn, and Polas froze on the image of wreckage hurtling away from the dispersing explosion. "Can you move backwards slowly with this set-up?"

"We're not entirely primitive here," said Polas.

Flickering, the image jerked back in frames: wreckage reversed back into a brightening explosion as the laser array re-formed.

"There," said Thorn. "That came out of Dragon."

Polas squinted at the screen, and adjusted the image back, and they saw for certain an object spat from Dragon just before the creature's strike on the laser array. He now moved the image back and forth until the object was at its most visible. "We should be able to close in on that and clean it up a bit," he said. He opened his box of discs and sorted through them. Finally selecting one, he held down two buttons while removing the recording and replacing with the new disc he selected. The image remained in place and a grid flicked up to cover it. Using a ball control, he adjusted the grid to centre the object in one of the grid's squares. Pressing down the control, he called up a target cursor in the corner of the screen, and then zeroed it on that square.

"Here we go," he said, pressing down the control again to select.

The image broke apart, then the one from the selected co-ordinates began to re-form in small squares across the entire screen. After a moment, a blurred and vaguely rectangular shape became evident. With the computer chuntering away, and each of the squares breaking and re-forming into smaller pixels, the image became steadily clearer.

Before it had completely re-formed Polas said, "Military lander."

"Theocracy?" Thorn asked.

Polas nodded.

Thorn studied the image as it continued to clear. "Now what was Dragon doing with that?"

Polas shrugged and, as the computer finished its work, he used the ball control to pull up a menu and save the same image.

"Any idea where it came down?" Thorn asked.

"I might be able to find out," said Polas, gazing down at his open box of discs, "if it crossed any of our viewing stations. It'll take some time, though."

"Please do so — this might be important. I'm sure Lellan would be as interested to know who was in that craft as am I."

Even though it was quite likely Dragon could have snatched a Theocracy craft on the way here, perhaps to seek information, perhaps just for the hell of it, it seemed odd to Thorn that it had then released it in one piece — especially after seeing what Dragon did to the laser arrays.

At last, in a moment of calm, Carl paused while staring at the forward screen display, and tried to absorb the fact that a circumstance more unlikely than the most extreme he had trained for had now come about. This ground tank — like the other nineteen possessed by the Underground, part of an apocalyptic scheme thought up by Lellan's predecessor — had been retained only for use in the tunnels in the event of an underground attack. No one had even considered the possibility that it might be used on the surface, except perhaps that same predecessor. Carl remembered him as a strange little man who, after raising Lellan to the position she now occupied, had shuffled off to hang himself in Pillar-town Two. His scheme back then had apparently been a mass breakout to kidnap the Hierarch during one of his periodic visits, and he had only scrapped it because the said dignitary had ceased to visit the surface.

The tanks to either side of Carl — three in all, since the others had long since gone to other break-out caverns — were already belching steam from their exhausts as hydrogen turbines wound up to speed. On the surface these would cease to function in the oxygen-bereft atmosphere, but by then they would no longer need the huge torque output of the engines, and could go back onto battery drive.

Glancing back, Carl saw that the rest of his crew was ready: Beckle on the heavy pulse-cannon only recently installed; Targon on the medkit, replacement duty, and just about everything else; and Uris on logistics and navigation. After listening to the communication that came direct to his comlink, he announced to them, "Lellan says time to give them their wake-up call."

"I was hoping to put them to bed," said Beckle, fiddling with the adjustments inside his targeting visor.

Carl reached out and clicked over the switches that started the turbines and immediately they began to cycle their way up to speed — the tank vibrating and groaning like some waking monster. Ahead, the first tank turned towards their exit tunnel, its treads flaking up stone from the floor.

"We're still in tunnel seven?" he asked.

"Confirmed, tunnel seven," said Uris. "Gets us into the centre of the coming shit storm."

Gripping the control column, Carl engaged the turbine and eased the tank forwards, as he had earlier done during the infrequent practice sessions with this machine. It still seemed almost insane to him that they were heading for the surface. With the laser arrays functioning, there had always been small windows of opportunity they could use for a surface attack, outside of which their losses immediately soared above ninety per cent. Never, though, had there been a window large enough to drive a tank through, so to speak — it seemed almost unnatural.

"What's our target?" Beckle asked.

"Nothing from Lellan yet on that," Carl replied.

"It'll be either the Agatha or Cyprian compounds," said Uris. "They're the nearest ones with a military presence."

"Both have auto gun towers, and both have over three thousand troops in situ," said Beckle, probably wondering if the pulse-cannon was enough.

"Confirmed on Agatha compound," said Uris. "Full plan feeding across." He studied his readouts in silence for a moment before continuing with, "Four towers and, at last count, three thousand five hundred troops. We hit this tower at 0.33 from mark time."

Carl glanced at the map screen before him, as the coordinates came up. He then concentrated on where he was going — T-2, 3, and 4 ahead of him now motoring up into the darkness of tunnel seven.

Uris went on, "After we've taken down the tower, we're to hit anything that comes out by air until things get too hot, then head towards Cyprian to rendezvous with Group Two at second co-ordinates, and head north. Holman is even now mining the area underneath second co-ordinates, where it's projected the Theocracy ground troops from both bases will meet."