"You bastards!"

Beckle fired the mortar and its shell slammed into a half-seen ground car on which a heavy rail-gun had been mounted. The explosion flung the vehicle out of view, and someone ran screaming to one side — his Theocracy uniform burning, then blazing white in an oxygen fire as his air bottle ruptured. The recoil of the mortar saved Beckle's life, as it sprawled him on his back below a fusillade that cut down the cover he had been fleeing towards. Carl drew his fire across, the glowing shots from his rifle acting like tracer fire as he brought it to bear on the soldier who had been shooting at Beckle, and cut him in half.

"This is not good!" bellowed Uris, dragging Beckle to his feet.

"We're outnumbered and outgunned," Beckle spat, as the three of them dived for cover in a small crater lying behind a mound of tangled roots and earth obviously hinged up from it by a recent explosion.

"Well, you know we can't win down here, so we just have to prolong it," growled Carl.

"Be nice to come close, though," said Beckle.

"Shut up, Beckle," said Uris, then grabbed Carl's shoulder and directed his comrade's attention to the other occupant of the crater. The woman sitting there was clearly an ex-pond worker, for she still had a scole attached to her body. That she was now cradling most of the contents of that body did not seem to affect the scole at all — it was still looking healthy as it drew on what remained of her blood. Keeping his head well down, Carl crawled over to her, and felt for a pulse at the side of her severely burnt neck. After a moment he shook his head and slid back to join his companions.

"Fucking things," said Beckle and, drawing his cut-down rifle, put two shots through the creature. Smoking, it pushed itself up on its legs, as if trying to retract its head, then it sagged with red oxygenated blood pouring out of it.

"It probably finished her off," observed Carl, for a moment staring beyond her with the thought that her blood had sprayed a very long way — before realizing that what he was seeing was red gallish nodules breaking out on the grass stalks, and recognizing how utterly irrelevant human drama was to the indefatigable grind of the seasonal engine. Then, peering out of the crater in the opposite direction, he ducked as a burst of fire sprayed them with fragments of the same budding growth.

"They'll put a grenade in here any moment now," warned Beckle.

"We keep running, and hold at the mountains," said Carl, relaying the orders he had just received.

"I agree with the running bit," muttered Beckle.

"Lellan?" Uris asked — he had lost his helmet earlier and did not have Carl's coms access.

"Yes," Carl replied.

"Great, she's got a plan," said Beckle as they piled over the edge of the crater and ran for the next scrap of cover.

In such horror and chaos Carl felt it necessary to believe that someone, somewhere, knew what they were doing. To think otherwise would be to give in to despair.

When consciousness eventually returned it did so with disorientating abruptness. One moment Apis felt he was waking again from the cold-coffin in the lander, then as memory caught up he assumed he was waking on the floor of the ATV. Both scenarios turned out to be incorrect as he lifted his head and looked around. He was in a lander, sure, but not the one in which he had arrived upon this planet. This particular one had its cockpit sealed off with a heavy door, some sort of fibrous matting on the floor, and cold blue lights set in the ceiling. With a grunt of effort, Apis sat up and heaved himself to a position with his back resting against the cold wall. Eldene, sitting with her arms wrapped around her shins and her chin resting on her knees, observed him silently for a moment before saying, "You haven't noticed, have you?"

Apis wondered if she was referring to the bloody dressing on her head. He reached up, with an arm that seemed wrapped in lead, and felt the back of his own head — where it had slammed against the wall of the ATV after the Theocracy soldier had… pushed him. He lowered his arm and stared at it, then lowered his hand to his chest and probed it with the fingers of his other hand.

"I warned them that to remove it would kill you," Eldene added.

They'd shot him, but the exoskeleton had prevented the bullet penetrating, which would not now be the case for he no longer wore it. He continued probing his chest, his stomach, his biceps, his thighs. His body felt utterly wrong to him; instead of feeling just bone and gristle under his skin he found a layer of flesh, the shapes of muscles clinging to his bones like parasitic growths — in fact, utterly unaccustomed bulk. Whenever he moved, these muscles moved with him — it did not seem quite real to him that the muscles were doing the moving, and were actually part of him.

"Why aren't you dead?" Eldene asked.

Apis considered the complicated — and to his mind incredibly dangerous — procedures involved in standing up, and rejected them for the moment.

"The mycelium working inside me — it's rebuilt me as a normal-gravity human. Mika said that the exo was taking less and less of the strain, but I wasn't sure what she meant by that."

Mika?

"Where is Mika?" he asked, not sure he wanted to hear the answer.

"Dead," said Eldene flatly. "They shot her, then just threw her outside like a sack of deaders."

Apis stared at Eldene, but somehow just could not find the energy to feel sorry. He'd lost his own people, he'd lost his mother, and Mika he had not even known for very long. He just did not have the grief to spare for her.

"Where are we now?" Apis asked, wanting to know more than just their location.

"On the way here, I saw hundreds of landing craft, and a great tent-like building erected between some of them. We're in one of those craft by the edge of the tent. We're prisoners of the Theocracy."

"What will they do with us?" he persisted.

Eldene stared at him for a long moment, then shrugged. "Probably torture us to death. There aren't any jails down here."

"They are… insane," began Apis. But Eldene's attention had slid over to the light beside the airlock, as it faded down from red, through orange, to yellow. Apis felt a rush of adrenalin and used it to push himself to his feet. Every movement, it seemed to him, was fraught with peril; he felt his weight as a hugely unstable load, and wondered what bones might snap in trying to support it; he felt his muscles sliding under his skin, and expected agony as they tore free from their anchor points; the clicking of his joints and the buzzing pins-and-needles in his feet terrified him, but somehow, without mishap, he stood.

The soldier who stepped through was the very same one who had burst into the ATV and shot him. Naked as he was, Apis felt incredibly vulnerable when the man negligently levelled the same weapon at his chest.

"You're standing, I see, which means that you" — he looked at Eldene — "are a liar."

Apis immediately felt affronted, was about to argue her case, but she caught his eye as she stood up too, and gave him a slight shake of her head. Only as she did that did he truly begin to understand their situation, and only then did something very adult and very callous — probably born in that moment when he had opened the airlock on twenty-three of these people, and nurtured by all that had subsequently ensued — rear its head inside him and look around. He kept his mouth closed and wondered how much he could depend on his body in this gravity; and also wondered if he would get an opportunity to use it.

Receiving no verbal reaction to his words, and perhaps expecting none, the man threw something compressed in his left hand at Apis, then stood aside to allow another guard to enter the cell. Apis caught the balled-up material, let it fall open, and saw that he had been given a set of overalls.