Thorn nodded, and himself stepped through.

After a pause Cormac asked the runcible AI, ‘Are you reset?’

‘Destination Viridian now open,’ it replied.

Stepping onto the dais, Cormac asked Gant, ‘What was all that about?’

They approached the shimmering wall of energy, its light playfully batting their shadows about behind them.

‘Feeling his mortality,’ Gant replied.

‘That’s a first.’ Cormac stepped through.

The ash was five hundred metres thick in places, accumulated on this volcanically active planet’s single small tectonic plate, which slid around its surface like an ancient stone ship. There were no artefacts preserved in the ash, nor in the underlying stone, rather the artefact was the cause of both, requiring nothing to preserve it even here. Having resilience greater than any other material on the planet, it had neither melted nor broken, and the stone had accreted around it and the ash built up on top of it over the aeons.

Cento considered how, for many years, researchers had come to study what they considered a natural phenomenon: a large layer of thermocrystal carbon within this small tectonic plate. Only recently had a scientist noted that the dense structure of this substance, which was similar to diamond, also bore a molecular resemblance to memory crystal. The woman, Shayden, then tried an optic interface, and was astounded by the reams of code feeding back. Some of it looked like genetic data, but most of it was scrambled and as yet indecipherable. Polity AIs were now studying the download from the fragment of crystal Shayden had used, in the hope of determining whether it was memory storage of the Jain or perhaps of some other ancient race. Cento was here for the more prosaic purpose of ensuring that Shayden, who now waited back at her ship with her research assistant Hourne, had not falsified her results.

‘We should see the layer further down,’ said Ulriss.

Cento turned away from peering over the edge of the plate, and glanced to where Ulriss indicated. The dip, further down, would indeed bring them closer to the layer of thermocrystal carbon, just as it would bring them closer to the river of magma boiling through the crevasse beside them.

‘Then let’s hurry,’ he said, checking the timepiece set in the wrist of his suit, not because he needed to check the time but because he wanted Ulriss to remain aware of how little of it they had left.

‘We should get some out-gassing before it blows.’ Ulriss gestured to the hellish plain beyond the river of molten rock, where a perfectly curved cliff, almost like a hydroelectric dam, occasionally became visible through the pall of smoke. This was just one edge of a massive caldera which, every five hours for the last twenty years, had blown out a few million tonnes of rock—molten and solid—and ash, and a cornucopia of poison gases to contribute to the volatile and lethal atmosphere.

‘We will be gone before then, whether I obtain a sample or not,’ Cento replied.

They trudged on down the slope, eventually reaching the position indicated. Cento unshouldered his bolt gun and looked around. Noting an area clear of ash, he walked over, pressed the device down and triggered it, firing a fixing bolt into stone. Discarding the bolt gun, he then unreeled, by its end-ring, the monofilament line from the abseil motor on his belt. Stooping to click the ring into place on the bolt, he heard Ulriss begin yelling over com.

‘What! No! Stop! No!’

Cento stood and whirled to see the poor man suspended off the ground, held there by his biceps in the grip of a hugely tall humanoid, who was walking him back to the crevasse edge. Cento reached down to detach the ring, but suddenly became aware of another humanoid. This one was standing beside him, clad head to foot in some sort of biotech suit. How he had not detected the approach of this one, Cento could only put down to the use of sophisticated chameleonware. In less than a second he had assessed the situation: the likely source of the tech meant these two must be somehow connected with events on the planets Cheyne III and Masada, and therefore with how things would now proceed. Ignoring the smaller individual and leaving the ring attached, he accelerated towards the big one, who was now holding Ulriss out over the white-hot river. That the larger humanoid intended to drop the man, Cento had no doubt. The abseil motor screaming as it wound out monofilament, Cento leapt, just as the figure did drop Ulriss. He should have been able to grab him a couple of metres down from the edge… Before he even went over a big hand slammed into his chest and stopped him dead. The big humanoid… Golem… To move that fast…

‘Oh God! No! Nooo!’

Cento stabbed his hand towards the big Golem’s chest just as he heard Ulriss’s gasp of shock as he hit the magma. There would still be time—the man’s hotsuit would take a minute to give out. But the second hand clamped around Cento’s wrist. The big Golem pulled and turned, easily spinning Cento over and slamming him down on his back. The monofilament was now caught up under Cento’s armpit and biting through his suit. Cento tried to turn as the other Golem wrenched him to his feet and the filament cut deeper. He felt the arm disconnect—sheared clean away at the shoulder — then a backhanded blow deposited him at the edge.

‘No! Oh fuck nooo!’

Cento rolled over in time to see Ulriss fighting to stay on the surface of the magma, his suit splitting and beginning to belch flame. His final scream truncated as his suit blew away and he burned incandescently. Something black and skeletal skittered like a spider on a hot plate. Briefly, a cloud of black oily smoke occluded the view and when it cleared only the silvery remains of the man’s hotsuit floated on the magma.

‘Not fast enough, Cento.’ It was the one in the bio tech suit who spoke.

Cento rolled as he came upright, so the monofilament was no longer twined around his chest. Perhaps he could pull it across the big Golem’s legs… He glanced at the speaker. ‘Who are you, and what do you want here?’

‘Your arm.’ The man pointed to the severed limb.

‘Why should you want my arm?’ said Cento as he moved sideways, dragging the filament across with him.

‘Because it’s his.’

His?

Cento gazed back at the big Golem, noting that his arms were not evenly matched. His own severed arm, lying on the ground still wearing the sleeve of his suit, was a brass-coated metalskin limb—both a replacement and a trophy from a battle fought years ago on a planet called Viridian.

Mr Crane?

How could this be Mr Crane? Cento clearly remembered their fight. Crane nearly destroyed him once, and it had needed both himself and his companion Golem Aiden to finish the monster. They tore him apart, destroyed his crystal matrix mind. Yet now the same Golem was back, and it seemed much stronger and faster than before. That made no sense.

Abruptly Cento leapt to one side intending to pull the monofilament across Crane’s legs, but the big Golem leaped nimbly and accelerated. Cento braced himself, but Crane outweighed him three to one, and easily knocked him back over the edge. Scrabbling for grip with his remaining three limbs, Cento slid down a slope angled thirty degrees to the vertical. Stone just broke away from his grasp, but when the abseil motor started whining, he managed to reach down and initiate its brake. The line jerked him to a halt only a metre above the magma.

‘That was close.’

Cento looked up and saw both of them gazing down at him.

‘I wonder what happens if I do this?’

Cento fell, hit the slope and slid further down, jamming his hand deep into a crevice to halt that slide. Monofilament fell about him like spindrift. With the spectrum of senses he possessed, he did not need to look down to know that he was up to his thighs in magma. His hotsuit gave out as quickly as Ulriss’s, fire and smoke gusting around him as syntheskin and the other combustible components of his legs burnt away. Now glancing down he saw metallic traces mirroring the surface of the molten rock. When the magma flow finally pulled his lower legs away, it was something of a relief, as now it no longer threatened to drag him down. Glancing up again, he saw that this respite would not last. With slow but inexorable care, Mr Crane was climbing down towards him.