"Put them on," ordered the soldier.

Apis pulled on the overalls, his every measured movement carried through with the utmost care. As he finished, struggling to do up the primitive buttons down the front of the garment, he felt exhausted. When the soldier waved them both towards the door, where more guards waited with plastic ties for their wrists and hobbles for their legs, Apis felt their chances of escape fading.

Now, with the advance of the Masadan month, Calypse was being overtaken by the sun in their erratic race across mackerel skies, and had half its vast bulk sinking into misty oblivion behind the horizon as the sun set off to one side, throwing it into brown and lead silhouette. For a brief time the gas giant seemed fused to the body of the planet itself, and with its slow descent any watcher might expect the earth to tremble with this shift.

"What happened?" Fethan asked, looking intently at Thorn.

"We could as well ask what happened to you," said Cormac, studying the old cyborg's ripped clothing, and ripped skin, and noting the exposed hard white ceramals and carbon materials of his internal workings.

Thorn said, "The other two were in the ATV when it was taken by Theocracy soldiers. We are following them now." Then, gesturing to Mika, "We've got a trace on the boy's exoskeleton."

Fethan nodded, for a moment observed the blood on Mika's clothing, shot Cormac an inquiring look, then turned his attention to Gant. "Can you move fast, Golem?" he asked.

There was too much intensity in his question for Gant to ridicule it, and he merely nodded an affirmative. Cormac glanced from Fethan to Gant, then back again.

"Trouble?" he asked.

Fethan grimaced. "We've got a hooder only two hundred metres off in that direction." He gestured beyond tall shadowed stands of flute grass, then stabbed a finger at Gant. "Me and him are gonna have to be live bait to lead it away." He turned to Thorn, Cormac and Mika. "You three have to keep going — as fast as you dare. Stay out of the flute grass as much as you can, and keep an eye up for heroynes." He stabbed a finger to the darkening sky.

"We could just kill it," suggested Gant, holding up his APW.

"Nah, you couldn't," said Fethan, eyeing the weapon. "That'd only piss it off."

Knowing that the gun Gant held was capable of destroying other Golem and blowing holes through steel walls, Cormac wondered if Fethan knew what he was talking about. Before he could comment on this the cyborg went on.

"That's one big fucker out there," he said. "You might manage to blow enough segments to kill it, but more likely you'd just burn it a bit, before it ripped you apart… Look, we gotta go."

Gant glanced at Cormac for confirmation. When Cormac nodded, Gant followed the old cyborg out into the falling twilight. Turning back to the others, Cormac said, "Let's keep moving." Then, noticing how Thorn was staring after the two rapidly departing figures he said, "They're machines, Thorn. You'd never be able to move as fast, so you'd soon get exhausted."

"Machines," Thorn repeated, then, "you know, he never told me he'd had a memplant. He lay spread in pieces on the floor of that cavern on Samarkand, and I didn't know… A recovery team must have come along later."

Cormac reached out and slapped his arm. "Come on."

Thorn shook himself and did as bid.

They travelled, where possible, down plantained and mossy channels, or across areas where the grass had been grazed down to its roots; and, where that was not possible, they progressed cautiously and with weapons to hand through areas of thick flute grass. All the time they were aware of the drama being enacted elsewhere by Fethan and Gant. Distantly they heard rushing sounds, as of a maglev train or a sudden burst of wind through dry foliage. At one point the reddish arc-welder flash of Gant's APW ignited the twilight, and Cormac had to wonder if the Golem had disobeyed instructions or perhaps used it just as a distraction.

"What did he mean blow enough segments to kill it?" asked Cormac as they rested briefly.

Mika was busy checking her laptop to once again locate where they should be going — roughly adapted software using the increase or decrease in signal strength from Apis's exoskeleton as its direction finder. "I only read a little about hooders, and then only out of morbid curiosity, rather than because I expected to ever encounter one," she said, hooking her screen back on her belt and turning to look at Cormac. "As I understand it they have some of the physical attributes of earthworms, with their brain not just contained in the head but spread down the length of their bodies. It would be difficult to kill a creature like that hitting it in only one place."

"What else can you tell me about them?" asked Cormac, firmly believing that once horror had been named and described, it ceased to be quite as horrifying.

"I can tell you a little," said Thorn.

Cormac nodded for him to continue.

Thorn went on, "Stanton told me that nothing less than an APW or missile-launcher could kill them. Apparently their shells are something like a carbon composite, and they're mainly made up of that and fibrous muscle. Both disperse the heat from lasers, and small arms just make a lot of holes. Apparently one of them once grabbed a proctor and his aerofan, which was a hundred metres up in the air."

Cormac lowered his mask and took a sip from his water bottle — his mouth now feeling a little dry. "How fast?" he pressed.

"Stanton claims they can move as fast as Terran predators. I checked that with the Lyric II AI. They can move even faster of course, at about a hundred kph, over this sort of terrain."

"Great," said Cormac, his previous theory about describing horror now in pieces around his feet. "Shall we keep moving?"

Nodding to herself the woman read on, "First into the mountains came Brother Stenophalis and high and low he searched for this enemy of the faithful, and at last found him in the Valley of Shadows and Whispers."

The picture displayed the Brother as some huge godlike incarnation astride the valley in his gleaming armour — a rail-gun of unlikely proportions clasped in his gauntlets, its ribbed power cable attaching to a lumpish power pack on his belt. Below him in the valley was something shadowy and insectile, and just looking at this made the hairs stand up on the back of the woman's neck.

She read: "Standing over the valley with the sun gleaming on his polished armour, he demanded of the monster, 'Come forth and face me! "

Abruptly the woman realized what was giving her the creeps: the picture had taken on depth — a 3-D effect. She pressed her finger against the page and it felt cold.

"The Hooded One came forth, and Stenophalis smote it with good iron, until the valley rang and echoed with the sound of their conflict, and avalanches of rock thundered from the heights."

The Hooded One coming forth was horrible: it was a hood of chitin containing shadow and just a hint of eyes. Brother Stenophalis turned and his rail-gun spat lines of black that just dissolved into this shadow.

"But iron availed him nought against this monster, and in the end it dragged him down into the Valley of Shadows and Whispers, and his armour parted like butter under the knife of the Hooded One."

The woman stared at the scene displayed, and decided she had been right to check out this story before letting her son… experience it.

Hierarch Epthirieth Loman Dorth stood in his favoured viewing room in the Tower of Faith and considered what he had wrought. The Council, in their terror of him, had voted him more and ever more powers, and had thus all but destroyed their own effectiveness in office. But this was how it had always been: when Amoloran had become Hierarch, the Council had done the same thing and, over the forty years of his rule, they had their powers restored by simple delegation because, in the end, no one man could effectively control the entire Theocracy. Knowing this, Loman smiled to think of those bureaucrats who had attempted to load him with endless detail in order to expedite this natural process. Even now he could see what remained of them floating beyond the arc of the Up Mirror. What none of them seemed to realize was that, with the higher channels now available to him, now controlled by him, the option to take the place Behemoth had prepared for itself was now also available to him.