'You should have let me kill them,' said Lord Caturix.

'Maybe,' agreed Zeth, 'but I have a feeling you'll get another chance.'

'You think they'll be back?'

'I know they will, Lord Caturix, but next time they won't be so arrogant,' said Zeth. 'I have to send word of this to Maximal and Kane. Kelbor-Hal might come for them next, and I need to petition Legio Tempestus once more. I have a feeling we'll be needing some larger engines to defend the Magma City in the days ahead.'

'The support of Tempestus would be most welcome,' agreed Caturix. 'In the meantime, we will continue to stand with you. What would you have us do?'

Zeth watched the blue-hot glow of the departing flyer's engines.

'Prepare for battle,' she said.

The mag-lev speared into the tunnel and Dalia cried out in terror as the blackness swallowed them. She clung close to Caxton as the compartment lights flickered on and he put his arms around her, shrugging in puzzlement at her fright. Sickly fluorescence bathed the compartment, but the glass window was an unchanging black mirror. Dalia recoiled from its impenetrable depths, pushing away in terror from the wall with her sandaled feet.

Her breaths came in short panicked hikes and her muscles cramped painfully. She felt her flesh become cold and clammy as sweat filmed her skin. She could hear her heartbeat like the thunder of an industrial hammer and tears pricked at the corners of her eyes.

'Dalia?' asked Caxton. 'Dalia, what's the matter?'

'It's the darkness,' she gasped, burying her face in his shoulder. 'Its all around me!'

'Dalia? What? I don't understand!'

'What's the matter with her?' cried Severine.

'I don't know,' said Caxton, helpless as Dalia sobbed into his robes, her struggles becoming more and more hysterical.

'She's having a panic attack,' said Rho-mu 31, moving from the door of their compartment to stand in front of Dalia. 'I've seen it before in new arrivals to Mars. The red planet is so different, it sparks all kinds of reactions.'

'So what do we do?'

'There's nothing you can do,' replied Rho-mu 31. 'But I've dealt with this before.'

The Protector knelt on the floor between the seats and placed a hand on Dalia's shoulder, prising her away from Caxton and holding her twitching limbs. Her face was pale and streaked with tears.

'The darkness,' wept Dalia. 'I don't want to go into the darkness again. Not again!'

'What's she talking about?' said Severine. 'Make her stop!'

'Shut up!' hissed Zouche. 'Let the man work!'

'Dalia,' said Rho-mu 31, looking directly into her eyes. 'You are having a panic attack, but there's nothing to worry about, we're perfectly safe. I know you don't feel like that right now, but trust me, it's true.'

Dalia looked up at him and shook her head. 'No! No, we're not. I can't face it anymore. Please don't make me go back in there.'

'We'll be out of the tunnel soon enough, Dalia,' said Rho-mu 31, keeping his voice even and steady. She could feel his biometrics linking with hers, using his rigidly controlled metabolic mechanisms to try and stabilise hers.

'Breathe slowly,' advised Rho-mu 31. 'You're taking in too much oxygen and you don't want to do that, do you?'

She shook her head and forced herself to take longer, slower breaths. With the help of Rho-mu 31's bodily control she felt her heart begin to slow and the flow of blood to her muscles lessen.

Rho-mu 31 read her calming internal functions and nodded. 'Very good,' he said. 'These are all just physical symptoms of anxiety. They're not dangerous. It's an evolutionary reaction from ancient times, when humans needed all their wits about them for a fight or flight reaction. Your body has tripped that reaction, but it's a false alarm, Dalia. Do you understand that?'

'Of course I do,' said Dalia, between breaths and tears. 'I'm not stupid, but I can't help it!'

'Yes you can,' promised Rho-mu 31, and he knelt with her until the panic had passed, holding her hands and talking in low, soothing tones. He reminded her that she was travelling on a Mechanicum mag-lev, one of the safest means of transport on Mars, and that she was surrounded by her friends.

Eventually, his words and his gentle easing down of her metabolism calmed her to the point where her breathing rate was normalised and her heart rate, while still elevated, was less like the rattle of an automated nail gun.

'Thank you,' said Dalia, wiping her eyes on the sleeves of her robe. 'I feel so stupid; I mean we're only going through a tunnel. I've never felt claustrophobic or scared of the dark before.'

'Only since the accident in Zeth's inner forge,' said Zouche.

'Yes, I suppose since then,' agreed Dalia.

'Maybe you're feeling its fear,' said Severine, and they all turned towards her.

'Feeling whose fear?' asked Caxton.

'Whatever it is that's buried beneath the Noctis Labyrinthus,' said Severine, suddenly awkward with the attention. 'Look, she said she felt she linked with its mind, didn't she? I don't know about you, but if I'd been buried underground for that length of time and I got a brief glimpse of the world above, I wouldn't want to go back into the darkness either.'

'You may have something there, Severine,' said Caxton. 'What do you think, Dalia?'

Dalia nodded, unwilling to confront such thoughts head on after her panic attack. 'Maybe.'

'No, no, I really think Severine's onto something here,' said Caxton. 'I mean if—'

'Enough!' said Rho-mu 31. 'Save it until we're out of the tunnel. Zouche, how long until we reach the other side?'

Zouche hurriedly reconnected with the mag-lev's onboard cogitator and streams of data light cascaded behind his eyes.

Rho-mu 31 turned his attention back to Dalia and she smiled at him. 'Thank you,' she said.

He bowed his head, and though she couldn't see his face, she knew he was smiling back at her.

'Well?' asked Dalia in as relaxed a manner as she could muster. 'How long until we're clear of the tunnel, Zouche?'

Zouche frowned and moved his hands in the air, haptically shifting through holographic data plates only he could see.

'I'm not sure,' he said. 'According to the onboard driver-servitor we're slowing down.'

'Slowing down? Why?' demanded Rho-mu 31, and Dalia felt his threat auspex light up.

'Here, look for yourself,' replied Zouche, projecting the view of the tunnel from the hull-mounted picter onto the window once more. 'There's something ahead of us.'

They looked, and there was.

Rumbling along the floor of the tunnel towards the decelerating mag-lev was what looked like a tall robot of roughly spherical proportions mounted on a heavy gauge track unit. A pair of heavy arms were held vertically at its sides and a set of malleable weapon-dendrites flexed in the air above its shoulder guards.

Three glowing yellow orbs shone like baleful eyes in the centre of its mass, and, as they watched, its main arms locked into the upright position. As the mag-lev stopped, no one in the compartment failed to notice that each arm was equipped with an enormous weapon.

Even through the poor quality of the picter's image, Dalia could feel the strangeness and uniqueness of this machine's electrical field. Opening herself to the part of her mind that Zeth had called her innate connection to the aether, she reached out towards the machine, reading the heat of its internal reactor and the sticky web of dark, malicious sentience at its core.

Kaban… that was its name.

In the fleeting moment of connection, she read the memory of its creation and the killing of its former friend, an adept named Pallas Ravachol. With that death, the machine's murderous nature had been unleashed, and the primordial evil with which its masters had tainted its artificial intelligence now consumed it with dreadful, killing lust.