"What happened?" Horza said, looking at Dorolow. He looked around the storage area. The rest were all there, taking cover where they could, apart from Yalson.

"Yalson went-" Dorolow began; then Yalson's voice cut in:

"I came through the hole in the wall and got shot at. I'm lying on the ground. I'm OK, but I'd like to know if it's all right to fire back. I won't damage anything, will I?"

"Fire!" Horza yelled, as another fan of glowing tracks spattered a line of burning craters over the inside wall of the store room. "Fire back!"

"Thanks," Yalson said. Horza heard the woman's gun snap, then the dopplered echo of sound produced by superheated air. Explosions crashed from down the tunnel. "Hmm," Yalson said.

"Think that's got-" Neisin said from the far side of the storage area. His voice cut off as more fire slammed into the wall behind him. The wall was pockmarked with dark, bubbling holes.

"Bastard!" Yalson said. She fired back, in short, rapid bursts.

"Keep his head down," Horza told her. "I'm coming forward to the wall. Dorolow, stay here with Balveda." He got up and ran to the edge of the hole in the plastic boards. Smoking holes in the material showed how little protection it afforded, but he knelt there in its cover anyway. He could see Yalson's feet a few metres out into the tunnel, spread on the smooth fused floor. He listened to her gun firing, then said, "Right. Stop long enough to let me see where it's coming from, then hit it again."

"OK." Yalson stopped firing. Horza stuck his head out, feeling incredibly vulnerable, saw a couple of tiny sparks far down the tunnel and off to one side. He brought the gun up and fired continually; Yalson's started again as well. His suit chirped; a screen lit up by his cheek, showing he'd been hit on the thigh. He couldn't feel anything. The side of the tunnel, far down at the elevator shafts, pulsated with a thousand sparks of light.

Neisin appeared at the other side of the gap in the boards, kneeling like Horza and firing his projectile rifle. The side of the tunnel detonated with flashes and smoke; shock waves blew up the tunnel, shaking the plastic boarding and ringing in Horza's ears.

"Enough!" he shouted. He stopped firing. Yalson stopped. Neisin put in one final burst, then stopped, too. Horza ran out through the gap, across the dark rock floor of the tunnel outside and over to the side wall. He flattened himself there, getting some cover from the slight protrusion of a blast door's edge further down the tunnel.

Where their target had been, there was a scatter of dull red shards lying on the tunnel floor, cooling from the yellow heat of the laser fire which had torn them from the wall. On the helmet nightsight, Horza could see a series of rippling waves of warm smoke and gas flowing silently under the roof of the tunnel from the damaged area.

"Yalson, get over here," he said. Yalson rolled over and over until she bumped into the wall just behind him. She got quickly to her feet and flattened out beside him. "I think we got it," Horza broadcasted. Neisin, still kneeling at the gap in the boarding, looked out, the rapidfire micro-projectile rifle waving to and fro as though its owner expected a further attack from out of the tunnel walls.

Horza started forward, keeping his back to the wall. He got to the edge of the blast door. Most of its metre-thick bulk was stowed in its recess in the wall, but about half a metre protruded. Horza looked down the tunnel again. The wreckage was still glowing, like hot coals scattered on the tunnel floor. The wave of hot black smoke passed overhead, wafting slowly up the tunnel. Horza looked to his other side. Yalson had followed him. "Stay here," he said.

He walked down the side of the wall to the first of the elevator shafts. They had been firing at the third and last one, judging by the grouping of the craters and scars all around its open, buckled doors. Horza saw a half-melted laser carbine lying in the middle of the tunnel floor. He poked his head out from the wall, frowning.

Right on the very lip of the elevator shaft, between the scarred and holed doors, surrounded by a sea of dull, red-glowing wreckage, he was sure he could see a pair of hands — gloved, stubby-fingered, injured (one finger was missing from the glove nearer him), but hands without a doubt. It looked like somebody was hanging inside the shaft by the tips of their fingers. He focused the tight beam of his communicator, aiming in the direction he was looking at. "Hello?" he said in Idiran. "Medjel? Medjel in the elevator shaft? Do you hear me? Report at once."

The hands didn't move. He edged closer.

"What was it?" Wubslin's voice came through the speakers.

"Just a moment," Horza said. He went closer, rifle ready. One of the hands moved slightly, as though trying to get a better grip on the lip of the tunnel floor. Horza's heart thudded. He went towards the tall open doors, his feet crunching on the warm debris. He saw semi-suited arms as he went closer, then the top of a long, laser-scarred helmet-

With a rasping noise he had heard medjel make when they charged during a battle, another third hand — he knew it was a foot, but it looked like a hand and it was holding a small pistol — flashed up from the elevator shaft at the same time as the medjel's head looked up and out, straight at him. He started to duck. The pistol cracked, its plasma bolt missing him by only a few centimetres.

Horza shot quickly, ducking and going to one side. Fire blew out all around the lip of the elevator, smashing into the gloves. With a scream the gloved hands vanished. Light flickered briefly in the circular shaft. Horza ran forward, stuck his head between the doors and looked down.

The dim shape of the falling medjel was lit by the guttering fire still burning on its suit gloves. Somehow it still held the plasma pistol; as it fell, screaming, it fired the small weapon, the cracks of its shots and the flashes from the bolts drawing further away as the creature holding it, firing it, whirled, its six limbs flailing, down into the darkness.

"Horza!" Yalson shouted. "Are you all right? What the fuck was that?"

"I'm fine," he said. The medjel was a tiny, wriggling shape, deep in the shaft's tunnel of vertical night. Its screams still echoed, the microscopic sparks of its burning hands and the firing plasma pistol still flaring. Horza looked away. A few small thuds recorded the hapless creature's contact with the sides of the shaft as it dropped.

"What's that noise?" Dorolow said.

"The medjel was still alive. It shot at me, but I got it," Horza told them, walking away from the open elevator doors. "It fell — it's still falling — down the elevator shaft."

"Shit!" breathed Neisin, still listening to the faint, fading, echoing screams. "How deep is that?"

"Ten kilometres, if none of the blast doors are shut," Horza said. He looked at the external controls for the other two lifts and the transit capsule entrance. They had escaped more or less undamaged. The doors leading to the transit tubes were open. They had been closed when Horza inspected the area earlier.

Yalson shouldered her gun and walked down the tunnel towards Horza. "Well," she said, "let's get this op on the road."

"Yeah," Neisin said. "What the hell! These guys aren't so tough after all. That's one down already."

"Yeah, deep down," Yalson said.

Horza inspected the damage to his suit while the others came down the tunnel. There was a burn on the right thigh, a millimetre deep and a couple of finger-breadths wide. Save for the unlikely chance of another shot falling on the same place, it hadn't harmed the suit.

"A fine start, if you ask me," the drone muttered as it started down the tunnels with the others.

Horza went back to the tall, buckled, pitted doors of the lift shaft and looked down. With the magnifier up full he could just make out a tiny sparkling, deep, deep below. The helmet's external mikes picked up a noise, but from so far away and so full of echoes, it sounded like nothing more than the wind starting to moan through a fence.