She glanced back, down to the end of the train and beyond. A line of dust a kilometre or so away was Miz in the All-Terrain. She looked back to the hatch; a larger gun appeared, and a face; the gun sparkled.

The ridge of karst Sharrow had been crouched behind earlier dissolved in an erupting cloud of dust and a rasping bellow of noise as a thousand tiny explosions tore through the brittle, eroded stone. Sharrow was too close to do anything but curl up and try to shield herself from the shrapnel slivers of stone whirling away from the devastation. Debris pattered against her back; a couple of the impacts stung like needles. She tried to roll further away, then when the noise stopped but she could hear rifle shots, leapt up, firing.

Bullets sparked round the empty hatch; the hatch cover itself clanged and jerked and swayed as Zefla’s fire hit and pierced it from the other side.

There was a percussive thump from the hatch; something flashed into the ground and exploded. The air was filled by a crackling noise and the ground under the hatch leapt and danced with tiny explosions, all raising dust about the initial impact site; there was an impression of blurring, buzzing, furious movement in the air.

Sharrow ducked down, cursing. She pulled a small flare from her satchel, lit it and lobbed it to one side of the spreading ripple of explosions.

They’d fired a flea-cluster round. The individual microgrenades each had twelve random, explosive bounces to find the heat signature of a human being nearby, then they would blow up anyway. Properly used they were devastating, but the canister was designed to be lobbed, not fired straight down into the ground; she guessed less than half the micro-grenades had survived the initial shock.

Sharrow kept down, waiting for one of the deadly little pebbles to land at her feet, doubting that any of them would be distracted by the burning flare. Then a stuttered ripple of noise announced the tiny grenades had self-destructed. She peeked up, gun ready.

A head appeared looking down from the hatchway. She shot it. The man’s head jerked once, as though nodding at something; then it hung there, and a limp arm flopped out of the hatch. Blood started to fall towards the dark cape lying on the karst. The arm and head were pulled away inside. She fired the rest of the magazine, watching most of the bullets spark and ricochet off the train’s underside.

“Fuck this,” Sharrow said. She kept the rifle trained on the hatch one-handed, reloaded it, then pulled the HandCannon out of her pocket, put it to her mouth and sprang the magazine, catching it in her teeth; she turned it round with the hand holding the pistol, pushing the magazine home again. She tight-beamed to where she thought Zefla was. “Zef?”

Nothing.

“Zef?” she broadcast.

“Morning,” Zefla drawled, almost lazily.

“Cover.”

“Okay.”

Zefla started firing at the hatch door again. Sharrow fired too, then scrambled out of the karst trench and ran, leaping over the corrugations, towards the small crater where the flea-cluster round had landed. She got almost underneath the hatch; Zefla stopped firing. Sharrow aimed the rifle at the underbelly of the train carriage just in front of the hatch, then fired a dozen rounds into the metal. Some ricocheted; one whined past her left shoulder. She took out the HandCannon and fired into the same area, the recoil punching back into her hand and shaking her whole arm as the gun bellowed; the A-P rounds left neat little holes in the carriage skin.

Something moved in the hatchway she loosed the rest of the pistol’s rounds into the hatchway itself, the noise changing from the sharp crack of the Armour-Piercing shells to the whine of the flechette rounds. Then she ran, back and to one side, out from under the train. She rolled into cover, crying out as a sharp edge of karst sliced through her jacket and cut her shoulder. She sat up, quickly rubbed her shoulder, then reloaded while Miz pulled up the All-Terrain directly under the train’s last carriage.

From here she could see the top of the train and the monorail itself. Dloan and Cenuij had disappeared; there was a hint of an opened section on the roof of the last carriage.

Suddenly the Huhsz carriage shook; its windows shattered and burst, spraying out. There was a sharp, manic buzz of noise she recognised, and a series of popping, crackling noises; a couple of the flea-rounds jumped out of the shattered carriage and leapt around like tiny firecrackers on the karst surface for a few seconds, then they detonated. The wrecked Huhsz carriage stayed silent; grey smoke drifted from it.

“What the fuck was that?” Miz broadcast from the All-Terrain.

“Flea-cluster,” Sharrow said. “Cenuij? Dloan?” she called urgently.

“Here,” Cenuij sighed.

“You guys all right?” Zefla’s voice said.

“Both fine; they tried to roll a flea-cluster at us. Our large friend rolled it straight back in at them and closed the door. He’s just gone in for a look round.”

“Yeah, Dloan!” Zefla whooped.

“This might be them,” Dloan said. Sharrow saw him at one of the blown-out windows in the Huhsz carriage; he was fiddling with something.

“What are you doing now?” Sharrow said, puzzled.

“Tying a bit of string to this briefcase,” Dloan said, as though it should be obvious. “Nobody underneath this carriage?”

“All clear,” Sharrow told him. Dloan threw the large briefcase out of the smashed window; it jerked open as the string tied inside the carriage came taut; there was a crack and the whine of flechettes; the briefcase bounced into the air on a cloud of smoke, then fell back, swaying on the end of the string; a series of what looked like large, black books tumbled out of it and thumped dustily to the karst.

“Ah-ha,” said Sharrow.

She stood on top of the waste silo; a dusty yellow mound on the side of a dusty yellow hill with the karst desert behind them, a field of pale, frozen flames in the fierce glare of the afternoon sun. Miz sat in the All-Terrain, talking on the transceiver. The silo’s valve-heads were protected by a small blockhouse covered in ancient, fading radiation symbols and death-heads. Dloan attached a thermal charge to the door’s lock; the charge burned brighter than the noon sun and Dloan kicked the door open.

The interior of the blockhouse was black after the glare of the burning charge and the blinding sunlight; it was roastingly hot, too. Sharrow held the five Passports. They were solid and heavy, even though they were fashioned largely from titanium and woven carbon fibre. The external text, addressed to officials and responsible individuals everywhere, commanding their complete cooperation under the laws of the World Court, and threatening untold punishments for anybody who tried to destroy the Passports, was engraved on thin, flat sheets of diamond secured to the covers. The matricial holes were blue carbuncles embedded in one corner of each of the solid documents; a sequence of recessed buttons along their spines controlled the Passports’ circuitry, which could produce a hologram of the World Court judges and a recording of their voices, also commanding complete cooperation from all and sundry before going into the details of their pan-political authority and legal provenance.

Cenuij swung the metre-long, bullet-shaped slug away from the top of the silo’s access shaft. The radiation monitor cuff on his wrist whined quietly.

Cenuij and Dloan together heaved the shaft lock open; the massive shutter made a protesting, creaking noise and the radiation cuff sirened louder. Sharrow approached the dark well of the shaft.

“Well,” Cenuij said to her, “don’t stand there admiring the damn things; chuck them down before we all get fried.”

Sharrow dropped the Passports into the shaft. They made a vanishing, dunking noise. She helped Cenuij hold the shutter; Dloan primed the bundle of explosive, thermal charge and assorted ammunition rounds, sealed them inside the inspection slug and then manoeuvred the bullet-shaped slug into place above the shaft while Cenuij’s radiation monitor warbled away.