"True," said Gant.

How bloody must warfare become when most fighters carried weapons that could turn a human being into steak tartare in a second — and where there was nothing but flat swampy ground and nothing to hide behind? It seemed to him that the fighting Gant had earlier referred to must have been bloody indeed. He glanced aside at the Golem, then back towards the spot where Apis and Mika were concealed. The four of them possessed APWs, so could wreak havoc in this clearing, but it seemed unlikely that they would live long enough to board one of the landers and lift it off. Even Gant with his Golem Twenty-seven chassis would eventually be destroyed by enough rail-gun hits. He caught the trooper's eye and nodded back the way they had come. They crawled back into deep shadow beyond the range of the lights before standing up and returning to join Apis and Mika.

"What do you suggest. Agent?" Gant asked.

"I suggest we find somewhere to bed down for the night, and reassess things in the morning. Maybe they'll send an investigation party down into the crater, and an opportunity may present when there's a few less of them about the lander."

"Scar's still in the crater," said Mika, falling back on her usual technique of not asking the question she really wanted to ask.

"Yes, well spotted," retorted Cormac and, ignoring her pique, turned back to Gant. "Maybe we could get ourselves one or two of their uniforms — reach one of the landers that way?"

Hesitantly Apis asked, "Where would you then take the lander? Hundreds came down between here and where you want to go, and if you steal one, that will soon be broadcast."

Cormac glanced at him and nodded. "I know that. I'm just thinking about our immediate future." He rattled a forefinger against his oxygen bottle. "Anyway, we could fly out and round, and put down in the mountains."

"If not shot down first," said Apis.

Cormac grimaced. "We've gone from an AI dreadnought to creeping around in the undergrowth, so I wouldn't be surprised."

"And there I was thinking you an optimist," said Gant.

"You still haven't—" began Mika, but just then grenades went off to their right.

"Lead!" Cormac shouted to Gant, then he, Mika and Apis hurried after the Golem as he moved swiftly into the flute grass.

"How did they…?" Apis did not manage to finish the question, but Cormac answered it anyway.

"They must have put up an infrared detector. We were a bit too close," he said.

More explosions to their right, followed by the distinctive vicious cracking of rail-gun fire. Gant slowed to a halt and held up his hand. Mika swore aloud after stumbling into his back, then fell silent when he glared at her. He made a downward gesture and they quickly squatted low.

"They're not firing at us," he said. "There's something else out there."

They listened as the firing drew further to the right of them, and something moved through the vegetation with a sound like a leaking compressor.

"What the hell is that?" wondered Cormac aloud.

"Big bastard of a hooder," said a voice none of them recognized.

Cormac observed with surprise the old man who stepped into view. He was short, gnarled, had a large ginger beard and a distinct lack of teeth, but most importantly he had managed to get this close to them without being detected by the hearing of a Golem Twenty-seven. Gant himself was gaping in amazement at the oldster, and Cormac grinned to himself — it was well for one such as Gant to be reminded he was not omnipotent.

Casually, Cormac pointed the thin-gun he had drawn at the old man's chest. "And you are?" he asked.

The stranger surveyed the four of them in turn, studying with great curiosity the exoskeleton that Apis wore, before returning his attention to Cormac.

"You came down in the lander — from Dragon," he observed.

"You didn't answer my question," said Cormac, tilting his head to pick up further sounds of rail-gun fire, and the racket of seven or eight grenades going off one after another.

The old man grinned, and spoke over the noise. "You didn't ask the right one. What you meant to ask was, which side am I on?"

"And?" Cormac asked.

The old man lowered his voice to a whisper. "Yours, Agent. Now shall we get the hell out of here? I just led a nightmare over to visit our Theocracy friends, and I don't want to be leading it back again."

Cormac considered for all of half a second, then reholstered his weapon before gesturing to the old man to lead on. He received looks from both Gant and Mika that suggested they were on the edge of questioning his judgement, when suddenly there was a huge crash from far behind them, followed by continuous rail-gun fire and grenade explosion after explosion. Looking back, they saw wreckage fountaining up through the arc lights, then hurtling through the night above them went the engine of one of the landers.

"Fucking hell," Gant suggested.

The lights suddenly went out, but the firing and explosions did not quickly cease — nor did the screams. Something reared up into the night, and there came a sound as of a hundred glass scythes sharpening themselves against each other. Cormac saw something glittering, as of red light reflected from spilt mercury — etched against a background of something wide and black.

"Yeah, hell's about right," said the old man, quickly leading them away.

"That was a hooder," said Mika — again a statement.

"Observant, ain't she?" said the stranger.

A hundred metres further along, where the tall grasses petered out into purplish darknesses of deep rhubarb, Gant caught hold of the old man's arm and halted him.

"Who's that ahead of us?" the Golem asked calmly.

"He's all right, he's just waiting for me," explained the other.

Gant was having none of that — he'd been caught out once that night, and it was enough. He ducked into the dank vegetation, to approach whoever was ahead of them. Behind, there now came only sporadic gunfire, the occasional explosion, but the screaming remained almost constant.

"What the hell is it doing back there?" Cormac asked.

"That's mostly terror you can hear. The screams from the ones it catches would get more muffled."

The three of them stared at him with morbid curiosity.

He shrugged. "They normally eat grazers that have toxic structures layered in their skin, bones and flesh, so of necessity they eat slowly and meticulously. I'm told it takes them a while, so a human victim will die some time after being stripped down to the bone."

"Muffled?" asked Apis, clearly fascinated.

The old man brought a cupped hand down on the palm of his other hand. "By its hood — that's what it traps you under."

It didn't require the superb senses Gant possessed for him to realize there was something decidedly odd about that old man. Even so, Gant reckoned on the stranger not meaning them any immediate harm, else why had he revealed himself? Also, whatever the old man was, it involved some high-level Polity tech — little to do with the hostile Theocracy here. Probably the man who was lurking just on the other side of this small, perfectly circular, mossy clearing offered no immediate harm either. But Gant had heard something, felt something…

Was instinct, intuition — or any other of those intangibles humans believed in — recordable? For Gant this was not some rhetorical question to stimulate interesting debate — it was a question that lay at the core of everything he was. If these intangibles did truly exist, then perhaps others like ego, self, soul… In the end Gant had to wonder if he was really Gant, and to find the answer to that he needs must pursue things neither solid nor easily denned.

The unseen man was good, very good for a human: he was so still that all Gant could detect was the very slow and easy cyclic breathing, and the even beat of his heart — its rate attesting that though the man knew Gant was present nearby, he wasn't allowing himself to get over-excited about it. Before the others could catch up, Gant stepped out into the clearing.