"I see," she said, then read on.

Three of them came over in the first pass, and turned the entire area occupied by the rebel tents into a brief morass of fire and flying dirt. Lellan guessed that this was just a probing attack, however. The pulse-cannon, on the one remaining tank, spat up from its place of concealment close beside the embankment. One of the fighters — a wedge-shaped, one-man craft with swing wings, and enough weapons pods to give it the appearance of a tern with a very bad fungal infection — flared briefly and then became a line of white-hot fragments tumbling across the sky. Another of the fighters bucked as if an invisible hand had slapped its back end, then overcorrected and nosed straight into the ground — the following explosion sleeting mud even as far as where she and her brother were dug into the embankment.

"I'd get out of there, Carl. They'll have you spotted now," said Lellan.

Stanton lowered the intensifier and glanced round at his sister, as he listened in on the man's reply.

"It'll be the carrier they hit next," Carl replied. "We'll take a second shot at them, then leave the pulse-cannon on automatic."

Stanton nodded to her his agreement with Carl — the Theocracy fighters would take out preselected targets to begin with, before raining down the real shitstorm.

In the second pass came five of the fighters, low this time — then turning away from the swarm of missiles released. The carrier leapt out of its pond on the first scattering of explosions, and came apart on the next. Only small fragments reached the ground, as was the similar fate of another of the fighters.

"Now we get our heads down," advised Lellan.

The fighters came in low again, flying directly along the embankment this time, high-powered rail-cannons opening up to create a long swarm of explosions that wiped out every weapon the rebels had mounted there. Still more fighters came hurtling in low over the flute grass, into the face of pulse-cannon fire from Carl's tank. A row of explosions stepped through the grasses towards the tank, and on the final explosion it ceased to fire. Lellan hoped the pulse-cannon had been on automatic — hoped that Carl was still alive.

"Polas, speak to me," she said.

"Main body is coming in right now with the big bastards behind — three of them," came the reply.

"Remember, everybody." Lellan addressed her troops scattered through the flute grass. "When I give the order, you cease firing and let our friends deal with the bombers."

A full wave of attack aircraft came in only shortly after she spoke, and their numbers darkened the sky.

"Kill them," she hissed.

All through the long grasses, troops cast aside the flak blankets they had been lying under, shouldered their hand-helds, and began firing. Soon there was more light in the sky than the predawn sun had managed, and a constant rain of wreckage. Stanton led the way out of their foxhole, brought his hand-held to his shoulder, and just held its trigger down. There were enough targets for each of his five missiles to find one. Amid the grasses there came explosion after explosion, as cluster shells dropped, and even though a counter in the corner of her visor was ticking up just how many of her people were dying, she knew it could be a whole lot worse. On the big bombers following, there would be daisy-cutters — wide-area antipersonnel weapons — and probably enough of them to kill off most of her little army.

"Ram and Rom, are you ready?" she asked.

"We were created ready," came the ironic reply.

Gazing at the chaos filling the sky, the wreckage and burning fighters falling to earth, Lellan decided that now was the time.

"Cease firing and go for cover," she ordered her troops, knowing that the only cover they had out there was under the Kevlar-filled blankets. She continued, "Drones, the sky is now yours."

The two cylindrical war drones burst from where they had buried themselves in the soft ground far to the right flank of Lellan's army. Immediately they performed a strange ballet around each other as they hurtled up into the sky. Then suddenly lines of violet fire began spewing from one end of each drone, so that they seemed tumbling torches. Unseen through this, their missiles speared out with horrifying accuracy, and all across the sky the fighters were disintegrating. Lellan observed some fighters turning to attack the two rising cylinders, but they were nowhere near as manoeuvrable as the drones, which simply slid aside and obliterated their assailants as they went past. It wasn't all one-sided though; the two drones were jerked about by the occasional hits they suffered, then one of them lost its APW in a brief flare. But they continued to rise, their course coming to intersect perfectly that of the first bomber. The lumbering giant did not stand a chance, and the explosion that cut the sky was twinned by the flare of sunrise, which heralded the sudden attack of the Theocracy infantry.

Suddenly their ATV was full of people, and Eldene felt angry at her space being invaded — then suddenly confused about why she felt thus.

"Slow and easy," Thorn advised her. "Take us round the other side of the crater."

"Did it work?" she asked, almost too shy to look round at the intruders as she spun up the vehicle's turbine.

"Spectacularly," said Thorn, but she could tell he was angry about something. She watched him as he turned to the four newcomers. "Let me introduce some old comrades," he said to her. "Ian, Mika, and my old friend Gant — who is dead."

Eldene was busy wondering about the yellow-faced boy in the big suit, before Thorn's final words impacted. She did not react, however, merely turned her attention back to the screen and set the vehicle in motion. That she felt confused again came as no surprise to her — she'd been in a state of confusion right from the moment she had seen Fethan ram his hand into Proctor Volus. As Thorn returned to the back of the ATV, the strange boy moved up beside her and studied the controls she was operating. She gave him a tentative smile and he returned it tiredly, as he took hold of one of the support handles fixed above the screen. She could sense he felt more comfortable here.

"Dead or not, he looks mighty well to me," commented Fethan in reply to Thorn's brief acerbic introduction.

With the vehicle getting up speed, they all either grabbed handholds or quickly folded down seats, as the inclination took them.

"You angry because you forgot about my memplant?" asked Gant.

Thorn grimaced. "I don't know myself why I'm angry." Still showing some irritation, he sat down by the weapons console and swung the targeting visor across his face, probably to hide his expression.

"Angry or otherwise, I need you getting me up to speed concerning what's going on here," said the one called Cormac, and Eldene felt her spine crawl at the sound of his voice. She glanced round at him and took in eyes as unforgiving as lead shot, but then he smiled at her and suddenly the coldness was gone. All she could do was turn away and concentrate once again on her driving.

"Oh, I can tell you all that, Agent," said Fethan.

"Please do," said Cormac. "Beginning with why you keep on calling me 'Agent'."

"Last I heard you was an agent — didn't think you'd retired," said Fethan.

"You know me?"

"Know of you, who don't? You're Ian Cormac — not what I'd call a secret agent."

"I've never been considered that," Cormac replied. "I'm a… facilitator, and it is sometimes useful that I'm recognized. Polity secret agents wear a different face every day and often they are Golem… or something else." He eyed Fethan.

"The name's Fethan," said the old cyborg. "I'm a facilitator too."

"Well, facilitate away and tell me what the hell's going on down here."