Holding her fingers to her ear as if listening to something, when in reality the radio signal was directly entering her artificial brain, Olkennon said, "There'll be a transport along for us shortly. Fifty of us are on special assignment out in the sticks."

The air was breathable but left an acidic taste in the mouth and it smelt of burning hair. Cormac breathed through his mouth and took frequent sips from the water spigot of his envirosuit to wash the taste from his palate. Peering intently through the mist, he tried to discern his surroundings. Over in one direction he was sure he could see trees and in another direction he was sure lay the sea, either that or the expanse of plasticrete extended to the horizon.

Some of the troops who had come down with them peeled off in disciplined groups to join the departing column. Some Sparkind moved off with them, while others were picked up by a small open-topped transport. The two Cormac guessed were ECS agents, opened a crate that had been deposited, amongst many, from the lifter's belly hold. Eventually they dragged out a grav-scooter, unfolded it and prepared it for use, then mounted one behind the other and shot off into the sky. Cormac wondered who they were off to assassinate.

Finally two train-carriage transports landed for them and they boarded. Their journey took an hour, and gazing down through one window Cormac saw that they were approaching the impact site they had spied earlier. After the transports departed leaving fifty of them on the peak of a spoil hill, Cormac gazed around. Through slowly clearing mist he could see the edge of that radial pattern and now knew it consisted of skarch trees, millions of acres of them, all flattened and pointing in the direction of the blast wave. The spoil hill they stood upon had been thrown up by the impact, and was one of a whole range of them. Below this range, the scalloped inner slope of the crater delved down to something massive, brassy coloured, and still smoking.

"I have given your unit leaders the positions for each unit and the area to be covered by each," said someone.

Cormac turned to see some grizzled veteran standing balanced on a couple of packs. He glanced at Carl who rolled his eyes—it had been a dictum in the regulars that so long as your commander never felt the urge to make speeches, your chances of survival were higher. However, more closely studying the one addressing them, he realised that individual was Golem. In reality, he realised, all the new human recruits here were being nurse-maided.

"I cannot over-stress the importance of what we are doing here. There are those who would like to gain access to what lies below us, and having gained access might obtain weapons whose destructive power we have seen the effect of in orbit and on the surface of this world. Now I'm not going to ramble on—I'm not one for speeches. Your unit leaders will take you to your areas of responsibility." The Golem grinned and stepped down.

"What did I tell you?" said Carl. "Guard duty."

"Yeah, but we're guarding something pretty important," said Yallow.

They'd been given a screen display aboard the troop transport—almost a documentary. It had taken a swarm of Polity attack ships and drones to drive the Prador dreadnought down into atmosphere. The linear accelerator that had finally done for its engines had been sited down the length of a deep mineshaft in the ground. That mineshaft had become a crater itself shortly afterwards. The dreadnought, suddenly gaining the aerodynamics of a million-ton brick, had dropped, attempted AG planing, then ploughed into the ground below where Cormac stood.

"Comunits on," said Olkennon. "Let's go."

"This is to give us an authentic taste of soldiering," commented Carl, as he gazed out through his monocular into the darkness.

Cormac squelched his feet in the mud in the bottom of their foxhole and surmised, from his reading, that an authentic experience should include leaky boots. Carl's cynicism could be wearing at times. He raised his own monocular and peered from his side of the foxhole. The infrared image he saw showed him leggy things with bodies about the size of a human head crawling about on the slopes below. They'd been given no warnings about anything dangerous… then again, maybe that was part of the learning process, maybe they had been supposed to find this out for themselves.

"Are you seeing these beasties?" he asked.

"Scavengers," Carl replied. "Called cludder beetles. They'll eat anything organic."

"I thought the inland ecology was Terran."

"Imports—the eggs probably came in on the bottom of someone's boot."

That accounted for Carl knowing about these things, for to Cormac's knowledge he certainly hadn't done any research on this place.

They kept watching into the long hours of the night. The stars here had a reddish tint and there were no recognisable constellations. About three hours into their watch a group of four asteroids tumbled up over the horizon, flashing reflected sunlight then falling into shadow as their course took them overhead. When he began to feel weary, Cormac took out a packet of stimulant patches and pressed one against his wrist. In moments his bleariness cleared and he abruptly realised one of the cludders was only a few yards downslope from him. He pointed his monocular at it and brought it into focus.

"Fancy a swap round?" he suggested to Carl.

"I'm fine where I am," his companion replied.

The cludder looked horribly like a human skull without eye-sockets and with eight arthropod legs sprouting from where its jawbone should have been. He could hear it making sucking slobbering sounds as it drew a skarch twig into some unseen mouth.

"About these cludders—" Cormac began.

A flashing, like someone striking an arc with a welding rod, lit up their surrounding, and this was immediately followed by the stuttering of pulse-rifles, then the clatter of some automatic projectile weapon. Cormac turned and located the source as lying behind a mound to his right, possibly down in the crater itself. His comunit earplug chirped, and obviously addressing both himself and Carl, Olkennon said, "Have you had a nice sleep there, boys?"

Since Carl outranked Cormac by a couple of points, it was his prerogative to reply. "We have not been asleep, Commander."

"Then perhaps your monoculars have malfunctioned or maybe even your eyes?"

When Olkennon got sarcastic, this usually meant someone had seriously fucked up.

"If you could explain, Commander," said Carl primly.

"Well, it seems a commando unit of six rebels just tried to get into the Prador dreadnought. Luckily they were running a small gravsled—probably to haul away a small warhead on—and one of our satellites picked that up on a gravity map. I'm looking at that map now and previous recordings. They came in right past you."

"Were they caught?" asked Carl.

After a long delay, Olkennon replied, "Hold your positions and stay alert. Four of them were taken down but the other two are heading back your way. If they arrive before I get there, try for leg shots or try to pin them down, but don't hesitate to kill if necessary. Out."

"How the hell did we miss them?" wondered Carl, bringing his monocular back up to his eyes.

"Some sort of chameleonware?" said Cormac, doing the same.

He scanned the nearby slopes then concentrated in the direction of the crater. As far as he understood it the only portable camouflage available for a soldier was chameleoncloth fatigues—the same cloth the outer layer of his envirosuit was made from and which turned it to the colour of the mud he was lying in. But such cloth did not conceal one from someone looking through a monocular set to infrared, which was why they had dug in—that, and the possibility of gunfire.