"Shit! Shit!" Thorn yelled as the ATV lurched, throwing both him and Eldene to the floor. As she grabbed for one of the wall handles to try and pull herself upright, she got a canted view through the front screen as Fethan drove the vehicle down into one of the ponds. Thorn was quickly up into the weapons control seat, the visor across, his left arm stiff at his side and blood trickling down from his torn biceps.

"Where the fuck did that come from?" he asked, whilst manipulating the controls of the weapons turrets, and turning his head from side to side — the visor throwing up views for him in whichever direction he looked. "Got it!" One of the turrets whined round above, and emitted a low thrumming as it emptied part of a magazine. "Fethan, take us up and out. They've just gone down into a pond."

"Sorry, trooper — got a burst tyre," said Fethan.

"Who attacked us?" Eldene asked.

Thorn unstuck the visor from his face and glanced at her, then to Fethan, who looked curious to know the answer as well.

"Small armoured car, bloody fast as well," he replied.

"Running?" suggested Fethan, studying the display that showed the tyre re-inflating.

"I'd guess so," replied Thorn, pressing the visor back into place. "Yep, definitely running — they're up and moving now."

Fethan wound up the power in the motor, and slowly eased the ATV out of the pond. With a horripilation, Eldene observed the hooked bouquets that were the mouths of squerms flashing up before the screen and brass segmented bodies whipping through the air and dropping away. The ATV still had a lean-down on the back left corner as that tyre, after auto-repair, slowly inflated. They came up out of the pond and turned, bringing into view a black armoured car running on front steering treads and rear balloon tyres. It had nearly reached the embankment when both turrets on the ATV stuttered and hissed. After a few seconds one of the turrets stopped firing, and from it came mechanical clonks and buzzings as it inserted another magazine. On the bodywork of the car flashes ignited and fragments of metal, from its armour and from ricochets, splashed into the surrounding ponds or flung up small explosions of earth. Then it was up the embankment, flattening the fence before it, then down and gone.

"Fuck," said Thorn succinctly, pulling the visor from his face. "That tyre ready to run yet?"

Fethan shook his head. "Two minutes at least."

"Your arm," said Eldene.

Thorn glanced at the wound, then reached down, pulled an evil-looking knife from his boot, and with practised ease split the material of his sleeve and peeled it back from his leaking flesh.

"Can I help?" Eldene ventured.

"Well, there should be a suitable wound dressing in here somewhere." He gestured with his knife to storage lockers at the back, on either side of the packaged autodoc. "Try in there."

Eldene opened one of the lockers and looked with bewilderment at the packages and equipment it contained. She tried to find bandages, cotton wool, antiseptic, but saw nothing she could identify as such.

"The blue one, there," said Thorn, who had moved up behind her.

She picked up a round flat packet and then tried to open it.

"No," Thorn told her, "just press the darker side against the wound."

She did as instructed, then snatched her hand away when the package seemed to move underneath it. In amazement, she watched the thing deform and spread on his biceps until joining in a ring around his arm.

"It reacts to the blood," said Thorn, raising his fist and opening and closing it.

Eldene stared — he seemed now to be in no way impaired by just the kind of wound that would have had a pond worker's arm in a sling for many days. She looked to Fethan, who was watching her calculatingly.

"Could have done with one of them when you lost your scole. It's Polity tech — available to all for less than the cost of a cup of coffee," the old cyborg explained.

Eldene then truly felt a deep anger at the Theocracy, even though she had no idea what a cup of coffee might be, or how much it might cost. That it came cheap she had no doubt — just like human life down here on the surface, and strangely it was not awareness of this second fact that made her angry, for she had been aware of that all her life. No, it was the growing awareness that such cheapening of human life was not necessary; that this was an economy the Theocracy rulers, for their own ends, must struggle to maintain.

The edge of the crater was a hill of debris: mounded flute grass and its rhizomes, black mud veined with green nematodes, and stranded tricones — some of which had been killed by the impact shock and were giving off a stink it was possible to detect even through a breathing mask. Following Gant and Scar, Cormac climbed the hillock to gaze down into the devastation the fall of Dragon had wrought.

The crater had a teardrop shape, and they stood upon one of its long, banked sides. At the rounded front of this indentation in the landscape, the debris was mounded even higher. Proceeding to the horizon, from the tail of it, was a wide lane of destruction that looked somehow unreal, so neatly had the plain been parted, and so regularly had the growths of flute grass been flattened on either side where the trail cut through stands of that vegetation. Cormac was studying this trail, when Scar hissed and pointed with one clawed finger.

"Yes, it's Dragon," said Cormac, looking again at what remained of the titanic creature.

"Comprehensively wasted, I would suggest," said Gant.

As Apis and Mika joined them on the hillock of debris, Cormac studied the slope down into the heart of the crater. Only a few tens of metres below where they stood, the slope consisted entirely of black mud — at least half a kilometre of it descending to a star-shaped explosion of white chalk that even now was being obliterated as the mud slid back down. What remained of Dragon was slowly being interred, and would perhaps, in a few months, be hidden from sight.

"What are our chances of getting down there without getting buried in mud?" he asked generally.

"Do we need to get down there?" Gant asked.

"We need to get down there," said Mika quickly. Cormac glanced at her avid expression as she studied black bones and broken flesh, the glitter of a million scales, and masses of pseudopods spilt like intestines, beyond real intestines spilt like nacre and brass castings in a broken framework of sickle blades and tangled bare spinal columns.

"Said without any bias at all, of course," he said. Mika glared at him as he turned back to Gant and Scar. "Nevertheless, we do need to get down there. I want to know for sure that this Dragon is dead," he continued.

Gant nodded, then gestured to their left where the mounded debris rose highest at the head of the crater. "Limestone further up the slope there — probably torn up by the impact. I think I can see a way down."

Cormac glanced at the greyish-white smear down the slope he indicated, then gestured for Gant to lead the way. As a group, they trudged round the lip of debris. Here, Cormac found, was the highest elevation they had reached since crashing the lander. And here, gazing round, he saw just how utterly they were isolated in the middle of a bland and boggy wilderness.

The stands of flute grass mostly stood high enough to conceal those areas between. There lay long valleys inhabited by blister mosses, low spreads of purple-leaved native rhubarb, and other growths with no Earthly comparison or name. Travelling them was easier than pushing through the grass stands but, since they had no maps of this wilderness, it was necessary to stick doggedly to a straight-line march so as not to be drawn off course by attempting easier routes. Those areas were also preferable to Cormac, for in them he occasionally got to see some of the native fauna: creatures both reptilian and bovine hurtling away in an odd gliding lope, ubiquitous tricones puncturing the surface and submerging again instantly, groups of creatures that appeared very like terrapins until their spiderish heads protruded and they contemplatively grated together their mandibles. Some of those same shelled creatures roamed the slope close by, and it was reassuring to see them bumbling along feeding on the broken vegetation rather than something more animate. In the distance Cormac could see creatures that he at first took to be wading birds, until he gave himself a reality check.