"I think I can probably guess."

"Maybe you can, but it's in the detail. They eat them alive."

"So they died, which would have happened if you had moved them. At least they weren't in any…"

Dax shook his head. "No, mother—they took the nerve blockers off first, then they ate the worst cases and spent a number of days with the remainder. They're as technically advanced as us, so they know how to keep someone alive."

"That's… horrible."

Again the shrug. He held out his glass for more whisky. "After that things were moving too fast for us to set up the big portable hospitals. Mostly field work. I've seen just about every injury you can possibly imagine." He drank, shook his head. "Tough bastards, some of those regulars. When you see a guy walk up to you carrying his own severed arm, the stump cauterized by laser, and when he tells you he wants it reattached quickly so he can get back to his unit…" He paused. "Are you sure you want to hear this?"

"I want to hear. I want to know that he faced nothing trivial."

Dax drew on another self-igniting cigarette. "It's day after day after day of it. You think you're getting used to it, then find you aren't. Me and three of the other guys were sent to one location where we found two soldiers hanging from a snake tree. They'd been skinned alive, fitted with drips feeding them antishock drugs and fluids, and were still alive. Two friends climbed that tree to cut them down. Booby-trap. A thermal grenade went off and fried all four up there. I wake up hearing them screaming, and I can't go anywhere now where pork or bacon is being cooked."

Mother looked sick. She took off her sunglasses to expose raw eyes. This was affecting her badly, Cormac guessed, his spine crawling. He wished he'd left his room light on.

"Then there's the Olston Peninsular," Dax continued relentlessly. "About a hundred troops waiting for transport back to camp. They got picked up and no one really noticed there was something odd about them. They came into the camp where I was waiting to tend any injuries. They just left their transports and started opening up with their weapons. Killed four hundred before they were all themselves killed. I watched an autopsy on one of them. Cored and thralled."

"What?" his mother asked.

"Humans taken captive… I don't know the full story, there's something about an alien virus in them that makes them more durable. Part of the spinal cord and the brain removed—a metal Prador thrall unit sitting in their place."

"I don't know what to say to you, Dax."

"There's nothing to say. I'll get all I need in Tritonia."

"Editing?"

"Damned right. There's people I work with who know how to deal with all sorts of stuff they can never remember having dealt with before. I'll get the bad memories cut away, cauterised out."

Dax stood, a little unsteadily, and stretched. He turned and walked directly towards Cormac's point of view and gazed straight into the p-top screen. "And I think you've heard enough now," he said, and closed the screen down.

The moment he entered the old city, Cormac knew he was being watched by someone other than the one tailing him, for this place was known to be scattered with pin-cams. With the street map at the forefront of his mind, he scanned the row of ramshackle shops to his right, and chose a clothing shop in about the correct position. He walked over to the plastic-draped racks of streetwear, raised some of the clear film as if to inspect a suit, then abruptly turned to look behind, but his tail was good, already turning away to select some food from a vendor's display. Cormac grimaced, then entered the shop where the young girl in charge immediately approached him.

"Hi," he said cheerfully. "I need a fog robe and mask."

"We have a wonderful selection of…" She began guiding him to the racks on the left, but he stepped to the right where packs of the cheapest exchange garments lay, and selected a robe and mask—necessities here if you didn't possess an envirosuit, since acidic fogs frequently descended in the evening. She reluctantly followed him over when he held up an octagonal ten-shilling piece, then placed it down on a counter beside him. He quickly tore open the pack and donned the baggy protective robe and the mask.

"I want to get out through the back of this place," he said.

She eyed the coin, which was about five times the value of his purchase. "I don't want to be involved in anything illegal." It was a rote protest and a test to see if she could push up the price. He didn't have time for this, for the one following him would shortly be in here.

"You won't be involved in anything illegal if you let me through, though if Shelah's husband comes in here after me, things could turn nasty."

"Shelah's husband?"

"I haven't the time."

Coming swiftly to a decision she snatched up the coin. "This way."

She led him to a back room stacked with plasmel and cardboard boxes—the former bearing some burns which attested to their provenance before the end of the war. The rear door was a heavy pseudo-wood affair with numerous bolts, which she slid back. Cormac had no doubt that "Shelah's husband" would also be conducted through this same door, just as quickly, and for the same price. Afterwards the girl would slide the bolts back into place, dust off her hands, and be quite happy with her profits for the day.

An alley led along the back of the row of shops, with ruins along the other side, some of which were gradually being rebuilt into homes while others were being used as dumping grounds. Cormac dodged behind a crumbled wall, the foamstone of its upper surface had been fused glassy by the intense heat of some weapon, probably a Prador particle cannon. He slipped a small hand-held scanner from his pocket and ran it over himself from head to foot. One of the bugs—a device the size of a pinhead—lay in the collar of his envirosuit. He discarded it in the rubble heap behind him. The other bug was microscopic and bonded to the skin of his forearm so, employing another function of the scanner, he used a burst of EMR to disable it. Then he clicked over a switch on the scanner and tossed it away; a simple ECS grunt out for a stroll should have no need of such a thing. The confection of plastics, of which the device comprised, smoked then burst into flame, incinerating fingerprints and trace DNA along with itself. Now, from his sabretache, he removed a small pepperpot stun gun, and waited with his back against the war-scarred wall.

The bolts clonking in the door gave him plenty of warning. He placed the fog mask against his face and felt the skin-stick bond, then pulled up the hood of his robe and just listened. The one who had been dogging his footsteps moved with hardly a sound, just the occasional unavoidable crunch of grit. It occurred to Cormac how simplistic was his trap, how obvious to anyone sufficiently trained. What would he do? What would he do if he had been trained properly?

Cormac quickly stepped out into the alley, but whoever had come through the back of the shop after him was not visible. Moving as swiftly and as silently as he could, he returned to that back door, scanned around, and noted a way through the ruins to his left. Yes, had it been him he would have taken a circuitous route to where he had detected the bug. Cormac moved down that way, checking all possible ambush points as he went, then there: the shadow of one wall on the ground before him with something moving along it. He dropped into a crouch, aimed upwards and fired at a half-seen shape.

Just clipped by the blast of neurotoxin pellets, the figure fell, swearing, and landed in an unsteady squat while groping for something under his coat. Cormac fired at the wall beside the figure, not wanting to take the neurotoxin dose up to lethal levels. As the pellets fragmented, their contents turning into a choking gas, he charged forwards to slam a thrust-kick into the man's chest. The man hit the wall behind and bounced back, whereupon Cormac side-fisted his temple and he went down like a sack of sand.