"Finish it on their lawns and throw their bodies into the flower borders."

Aloud, Tholis asked, "What are your orders, Hierarch?"

Loman turned and gazed steadily at him, then after a moment relented: it was understandable that the man wanted to hear a direct order witnessed by others.

"I want you to kill all of these Septarchy parasites on their wonderful lawns, and I want you to throw their bodies onto the borders, so that the flowers are fertilized by their blood. Is that clear enough for you?"

"It is clear, Hierarch," Tholis replied.

They first came in high over the inhabited lands: ion thrusters filling the sky with actinic white stars in rectilinear display, on wave after wave of bulky landing craft. Below each wave the flickering of orange lights ignited the sky beyond the edge of the crater, and soon the sound of a distant storm came grumbling down onto them.

"They're bombing something," observed Gant.

"Yes," said Cormac, "let's get our gear together and get out of here."

Out of sight the craft must have turned, because soon the first waves were coming in over their heads — now heading towards the inhabited area of the planet — and Cormac supposed it was too much to hope that the Theocracy would not come to inspect this site where the creature that had destroyed their arrays had come down. As the last line of craft rumbled over, one of them peeled away and descended on the eastern side of the crater.

"Mika, move it!" he shouted, as the Life-Coven woman once again turned on the inspection light she had secured to her temple with a skin-stick pad, and delayed to study some bizarre gory object and cut samples from it. She hurried to catch up, as he stood waiting with his boot resting on the bottom of the slab.

"We could hide here," she suggested half-heartedly, indicating the macabre architecture she had been studying, which now — in the semi-dark which was all of a night this place managed — seemed to be turning into an organo-Gothic monastery. It was a protest really — she just didn't want to leave this place of such reverential interest to her.

Trotting up behind her Gant said, "Not too clever an idea — only one way out, and they'll certainly be coming down here."

"There's so much more to learn — I've hardly scraped the surface," said Mika, looking back regretfully as she stepped onto the slab to follow Apis.

"I promise that when this is all over we'll let you come back here and dig it all up," said Cormac.

"A lot of digging," said Mika. "There is, by my calculation, only fifty per cent of Dragon visible here in this crater."

Cormac caught her arm. "What do you mean?"

She gestured to the slopes on either side. "The rest of it must be buried deeper under here, or it vaporized on impact," she said.

"Remember, a lot was already sheared away from the creature," he reminded her.

She shook off his arm and moved on up the sloping stone. "I have, of course, taken all that into account," she said haughtily.

"Oh damn," said Cormac, surveying the scene in the crater with infinite suspicion, before turning to Gant. "Where's Scar?"

Gant glanced up the slope to Apis and Mika, then quickly scanned all around. Abruptly his expression became puzzled, and he lifted his fingers to touch the side of his head. "He's not responding to his comlink," he announced.

And so it begins, thought Cormac, then instructed, "Go with the others and get them under cover. I'll catch up with you."

Gant looked set to protest, but Cormac didn't give him a chance, quickly turning away and heading back the way they had come. A glance behind showed Gant hesitate, then turn to bound easily up the slab after Mika and Apis.

Cormac quietly initiated Shuriken as he moved into the shadows of the Dragon corpse. Many years ago he had been present when the entirety of this creature had apparently suicided. He'd foolishly believed it then, so to say he was suspicious now would have been an understatement.

"Scar?"

The dracoman was crouched by a charnel hillock of black bone and broken flesh. At first Cormac thought Scar was staring at him, until he moved aside and realized the dracoman was gazing directly at the slope Gant had just climbed. Cormac moved to his side and squatted down next to him, peering in the same direction.

"What do you see?" he asked.

Scar hissed, exposing his teeth — bright white in the moonlight — then turned and just looked at Cormac.

"We have to get out of here," Cormac said.

"I stay," said the dracoman finally.

Cormac shook his head. "You're not stupid, Scar. Theocracy troops will be down here soon to investigate this place. They may find you here, and if they find you they'll certainly kill you."

Scar seemingly did not consider this worthy of a reply, and Cormac understood that perfectly. The dracoman used only such words as were necessary and never bothered formulating replies to the patently obvious. Cormac reached out to touch the dracoman's shoulder, but Scar's hand snapped up and caught Cormac's wrist — that hand was hot, febrile.

"What is happening, Scar?"

"I stay… it is soon." Scar released his wrist, then returned his attention to the slope.

Cormac stood up: he had no time to spare, and he knew he would be wasting time trying to get anything further out of the dracoman. He stepped over and picked up the denuded pack of oxygen bottles Scar had discarded.

"Take care," he said, turning to go. The dracoman bared his teeth in what might have been a grin.

The stars were now easing into visibility between ragged strips of cloud — cloud that also parted coyly to reveal the distant baroque and glassy sculpture of a nebula. Glancing at this, Cormac realized it was the same one as filled the sky of Callorum, only there he had seen it from the opposite side. As he scrambled down the sloping debris into the flute grass outside the crater, one of the moons sped across the face of the nebula like a searchlight flung by a catapult — its tumbling light occasionally stabbing through cloud gaps. Gant still waited for him at the edge of the flute grass, then led the way into a dense area where the stalks gathered in a protective wall all around.

"Scar's not coming," Cormac told him.

Gant nodded. "I knew one day it would happen. He's not human, and he's always seemed to me to be marking time — waiting for something."

"I'll let you explain that to Mika, then," said Cormac.

Gant grimaced.

Without an oxidizing atmosphere, the laser worked at almost twenty per cent above expected efficiency, and it took the team only a few hours to knock down a wide enough area of flute grass. Such a clearance was not entirely sufficient to the task at hand, which was why a second team went in — once the laser was shut down — to spread a powder of copper sulphate to poison all the plant roots in that same area. Had they laid the inflatable flooring direct onto still-living rhizomes, new growths of flute grass would have punched up through the tough plastic within a matter of hours. After observing all the outside activity for a while longer, Aberil turned his attention from the infrared screen to his own gathered staff.

"The loss of the Lee and the Portentous is an object lesson to us all: we must never underestimate the rebels, and we must show not the slightest hesitation, nor mercy, as we prosecute their destruction," he said.

Returning his attention to the screen he observed the troops, now disembarked from the landers, gathering into squads and preparing to move out. They had little in the way of armour or transport — the largest items being balloon-tyred cars on which could be mounted launchers and larger rail-guns, but which were mainly for the moving of supplies — but that was intentional. Though there was always comfort in having armoured vehicles to use, in this kind of war they never lasted very long. Lellan had employed her tanks for a swift assault, their main target being the rail-gun towers of the compounds, but now those tanks were all but obsolete, just as were large airborne carriers. When a single man could easily carry a high-penetration missile-launcher with intelligent tracking, large vehicles soon became more vulnerable than single individuals. In fact, Lellan had quite dramatically proven this point at the spaceport.