There was no reply, but it was noticeable that the pilot did not use HO jets while landing the ship nearby, in the process crushing down masses of the tangled, snakish briars. Stalek smiled at the choice of landing site. He had not expected them to put the ship down there. With its hard, sharp leaves giving it both the appearance and the potential to hurt of green razor wire, it was never a good idea to get too close to the Huma incendiary briar. But obviously the crew did not know that. A section of curved hull then folded down and hinged open, making a ramp and walkway over to the clear area where Stalek and Falco waited.

Two heavily armed figures left the ship and came down the ramp. After scanning the area—though why, Stalek could not fathom, as they must have already done that from above—one of them spoke into the comunit integral to his helmet.

‘Clear. Bring it out.’

How very strange, thought Stalek. Perhaps a definition of ‘clear’ he had yet to learn.

A third member of the crew came down the ramp leading a coffin-sized cylinder floating on AG a metre off the ramp. The item. Stalek rubbed his hands together even though he could feel little through the insulated gloves.

‘Do you have payment?’ asked the heavy who had spoken before.

Stalek peered at the man. This was where things got a little problematic. He indicated a box by his own feet. ‘Half a million in etched sapphires, and two ten-kilotonne-yield CTDs. I’m afraid that will have to be it. I couldn’t lay my hands on any APWs at this short notice.’

The man grunted, obviously satisfied with that. Stalek wasn’t surprised. They were probably glad to get anything at all for this item it had taken them so much effort and such loss of life to acquire—this thing that had turned out to be useless to them.

The cylinder arrived with the third man. Stalek wandered over and peered inside as the top half section of it split and hinged open. The Golem Twenty-five lay there utterly motionless, catatonic—as it had been since talking to itself non-stop for two days, then apparently trying to smash its way out of its prison with its head. The Jovians had assumed that their EM pulse had wrecked its mind. Stalek knew better. Something odd must have happened to it at the programming stage and, as unlikely as it seemed, Cybercorp had produced a dud.

‘Let’s see the money,’ said the one who had brought the cylinder down the ramp.

A woman, Stalek saw, and attractive. Shame. He turned his attention to the box he had brought, waved a hand at it. ‘It’s all there.’ He pointedly did not look towards the ship, having just glimpsed the black shape hopping up onto the ramp and scuttling inside it.

The woman squatted down, turned the simple lock on the case and flipped back the lid. She gazed in puzzlement at what seemed to be a coil of ribbed oxygen pipe.

‘Joden? Joden!’

The screaming from inside the ship was abrupt and harsh—agonized. From the box, the pipe uncoiled, whip-fast, opening gleaming pincers at its end which it snapped closed on the woman’s throat. She gargled and thrashed, blood bubbling out of her punctured suit. Meanwhile, Stalek had calmly removed two small spheres from his suit pocket. He tossed them towards the two men as one of them brought his weapon to bear, while the other did not seem to know what to do: open fire or help the woman. The spheres shot forwards, turned briefly incandescent, punched through two environment suits. Stalek stepped back as pulse-gun fire slammed into the front of his own suit, but the laminated armour made nothing of the ionized gas hits, and an inlaid superconducting mesh took away the heat. The spheres did precisely what they were supposed to do: exploding and flinging needles of pure potassium through the two men’s bodies, the metal igniting and burning fiercely in contact with moisture.

Their suits, Stalek noted, were quite good quality, for while the men boiled and burned inside, the only sign was a jet of oily steam from each of the holes the spheres had made upon entry—that and the way the two thrashed about and screamed a lot. When it was finally over, Stalek looked pointedly at Falco, who was studying the pulse-gun scars on the front of his suit, ahem’d and pointed to the still floating cylinder. Falco walked over and closed it up, then, grabbing the towing handle, pulled it after his boss. Stalek paused once to look back. He would come out to check there was nothing more of value inside this ship before he sold it on to his contact up in Port Lock. When the fires started, later in the season, they would incinerate all other evidence—not that anyone would be looking. Shaking his head, Stalek felt a degree of bewilderment. How ever had such amateurs managed to steal a Golem Twenty-five from right outside Cybercorp?

The Sand Towers, the wind-carved buttes exposing their layers of coloured sands recounting the ages of Cull, extended as far as he could see to his left and right, and tens of kilometres beyond towards the plains. Raising his family monocular to his eyes, Anderson Endrik now inspected the Overcity of Golgoth, spread across its great steel platform high up on the Towers, then the lower city crouching in the foothills. The entire city was a product of metallier industry, and the centre of the closer, lower section bore the appearance of giant iron lichen holding the spheres and ellipses of its denizens’ metal houses. Sprawled all around it were long low steel mills and factories interspersed with chimneys belching smoke. Anderson had heard much about this place: that old technologies were being resurrected in pursuit of the dream of re-establishing the downed communication link with Earth, of interstellar travel, and of rejoining the human empire. Anderson raised his monocular to the sky to observe Ogygian—the ship that had brought his own ancestors here—a sphere connected by a narrow body to the triple nacelles of the U-space engines, glinting like green quicksilver in the turquoise firmament. Then he lowered his monocular to let it hang by its strap and, tapping his goad against the back of its sensory head, urged his sand hog mount into motion.

‘Are all the rumours true, or just bullshit?’ wondered Tergal.

Anderson glanced aside at his young companion.

Tergal was skinny and tall, his head topped by the wide-brimmed hat of a gully trader, with long dark hair spilling from under it down his back. He wore a leather jerkin, canvas trousers and sandals, and armed himself only with a punch axe and heavy crossbow. The boy’s sand hog, Stone, was also young, perhaps only the age of one human lifetime, for it still bore the red flush of youth and, as Anderson had noticed when the hog had first folded out its feeding head from underneath itself, it still possessed all its blunt white teeth. Seated in the saddle glued to the creature’s long teardrop-shaped carapace, Tergal was a metre lower than Anderson. The rough ride the young hog gave him also threw him continually from side to side.

Anderson’s own hog, Bonehead, was mature, and twice the bulk of Stone. The ears on its sensory head Anderson had trimmed back to stubs, and it was missing a few teeth. Its gait, however, up on its two powerful hind legs, was smooth. He remembered searching old records about why their mounts were so named. One reference to ‘hog’ had its meaning as something greedy, which certainly applied to Bonehead. When he discovered that hog also meant pig, he realized the true reason for the naming. When the creatures’ sensory and feeding heads were meshed, the composite head which resulted looked very much like that of a domestic pig portrayed in a very old picture. The carapace body, when viewed from the side, was also comparable, as was the pinkish coloration of sand hogs. Of course the similarity fell apart when these creatures rose up on their muscular hind limbs, or parted their composite heads on separate necks.