‘What has the memory given you?’ Blegg, standing at his shoulder.

Without turning, Cormac replied, ‘I don’t really know. I now look around this cave and it seems to me all this rock is as insubstantial as mist, yet I know that if I try to step through it the most probable result will be concussion.’ Now he turned to face Blegg fully. ‘I am not the same person I was then. Jerusalem needed to subsequently rebuild much of my body and my mind, since I was neither whole nor, I think, entirely sane.’

‘Perhaps… in a moment of extremity…’

‘Perhaps.’

Cormac now observed the flesh-stripped Golem crouching over the badly burnt soldier. The Golem removed the autodoc, took some thumb-sized bloody object from one of its manipulators and put it to one side, then pressed some control so that the autodoc folded away all its surgical gear. He then returned it to its case.

‘They wouldn’t have been able to get him safely through the fissure,’ Blegg explained. ‘And he remained lucid enough to make his wishes known… via his aug.’

‘He chose to die?’ Cormac asked.

‘He was memplanted.’ Hence the bloody object just extracted.

‘Oh that’s all right then.’ Cormac felt a surge of anger return, then immediately stamped on it because again he realized its source. The wounded soldier would have been an encumbrance they could ill afford. And in a horrible way he felt grateful that the sheer lethality of the weapons used against them had left so few wounded, yet also horrified about how many they had killed. Including Thorn. He turned towards the survivors, seeing they only awaited his instructions. ‘Okay, we go now. No point waiting here until the enemy start coming through the walls. You Golem run the lead lines down and the rest of us will follow. Arach’—he turned to locate the drone, which came scuttling from a side cave—‘I take it you don’t need a line?’

‘Nah, these extra legs have their compensation,’ the drone grated.

Cormac nodded. ‘Myself and Blegg will go down last on the lines. I want you to remain here until we’ve reached the bottom. I want you to detach any lines up here that don’t auto-detach, then follow us down.’

‘Sure thing, boss,’ the spider-drone replied.

Cormac eyed Arach, then headed over to the fissure. As he approached, the leading Golem pulled end-rings from the cable winders on their belts, unreeling monofilament cables apparently as thick as climbing ropes as the winders sprayed them with orange cladding—providing both easier grip and to protect the unwary from filament thin enough to slice through flesh. The Golem then attached the rings to the spikes driven into the stone lip before abseiling down. The rest followed, attaching their belt winders as they went. Scar followed his dracomen down, then Cormac waved Blegg ahead of him. The old Oriental nodded and almost reluctantly joined the descent.

‘Arach, what are you going to do?’ Cormac asked as the spider-drone stepped delicately up beside him. ‘You can’t follow us all the way once down below.’

‘Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.’

It seemed to Cormac the drone danced a little, almost gleefully. He knew it relished the prospect of battle, but did it want to die?

‘I could always stay with you,’ Cormac suggested, and wondered where the hell that had come from.

Just then the rock about them shuddered and stalactites within the cavern crashed to the floor, shattering like porcelain.

‘I thought they were hours away from us,’ Cormac said.

‘That was nothing to do with the burrowers,’ Arach replied. ‘I just detected a gravitic anomaly.’

Cormac felt heartened by this. The ECS Centurions contained gravtech weapons, and the brief quake he had just felt indicated they might be using them.

‘Time we were on our way?’ Arach pointed down into the fissure with one sharp leg.

Cormac walked over, then turned to scan all around inside the cave before lowering himself down. He clipped the line into its slot in his belt winder, which governed its friction setting to how fast he moved. At first he abseiled down the slope, but when its angle altered to make this impossible, he had to walk backwards down it. Away from the lights up in the main cavern, he turned on his envirosuit light. Time dragged by without the others yet coming in sight, and he thought that those below him must be moving faster, so he accelerated. The slope began to level out further when Scar and Blegg became visible to him. He could see them ducking as the fissure began to close up. By the time he reached them, the cave floor had levelled and the party stood grouped together.

‘Time to detach those lines,’ he suggested.

Crouching its way past, a Golem moved to the rear and sent up the signal to open the connector rings. With a high whine the monofilament wound in to belt winders, stripped-off cladding showering the floor like orange-coloured chipping from an auto-plane. Only a few yards behind the open rings at the ends of the returning lines came Arach.

Scar moved up beside Cormac. ‘We will soon have to crawl through a very narrow section.’ The dracoman gestured at the drone. ‘The drone’s body is ten inches too thick.’

Arach gave a wide spiderish shrug. ‘Guess I’ll have to leave it for our friends then.’ Abruptly the drone jumped, flipping over, the tips of its legs finding purchase in ceiling crevices. There came a low-pitched grating sound and from between the spider drone’s body and the ceiling, a talc of rock dust showered down. Then came a couple of clonks and a hydraulic hiss, as Arach eased forwards and dropped from his abdomen, spinning round to land on his legs again. After a moment the abdomen, remaining attached to the ceiling, opened its hatches and lowered the two gatling cannons.

‘Neat trick,’ Cormac commented.

‘One of my favourites,’ Arach replied. ‘Though my power reserve is much smaller now.’

Cormac eyed the drone: it looked somehow even more sinister now it appeared to be all legs. ‘Will it survive the CTD blast?’ He pointed up.

‘So long as the roof doesn’t collapse, and maybe even then,’ Arach replied.

Cormac nodded. ‘Let’s keep moving, shall we?’

They crawled through crevices where sometimes Cormac found it necessary to turn his head sideways to manage to worm through. It was exhausting work, and during the first few hours Cormac stayed thoroughly aware of time passing. Reaching an area in which it again became possible to stand almost upright, he called a halt and they broke out supplies. He eyed the dracomen, who opened packets of what looked like raw meat and gobbled it down. He, Blegg, and the human Sparkind enjoyed more standard fare, and Cormac never knew coffee to taste so good.

‘Time is passing,’ Blegg noted.

‘It is,’ Cormac replied. ‘At our present rate of travel we should reach the pool Scar’s people detected—not long before the estimated breakthrough time of our friends above. We definitely need to be underwater by the time that autogun runs out.’

‘Yes, we certainly do.’

Cormac glanced at him. ‘Not feeling so fatalistic now?’

Blegg started to say something, then decided against it. ‘We should be moving on,’ he finally replied.

Cormac was worming through another particularly cramped stretch when he heard the distant sound of the autogun firing. Checking, it surprised him to see how much time had passed, and realized Blegg’s estimate not to have been far off—it took their attackers ten hours and fifteen minutes to break through. Cormac’s estimate of their own progress had not been so good. Even the dracomen were growing weary, and the pools not yet in sight.

‘Thirty yards to go,’ came Arach’s call from ahead.

‘Move!’ Cormac bellowed. ‘We need to get through here fast!’

Here, as soon as the CTD blew, they would be fried—the heat and energy of its blast funnelled down to them through the fissure. They all began moving a lot faster and with less regard for minor injuries. Cormac listened to the whoosh and chatter of the gun — waiting for that moment when it ceased. Abruptly Scar and Blegg, just ahead of him, were rising up onto hands and knees and progressing faster. He heard a splash, and yet another splash. As he too rose up from his belly into a crouch, Scar passed the ring end of a line back to him. He attached it to his winder—too easy to get lost under water that might quickly turn murky. Through his gridlink he raised the helmet and closed the visor of his envirosuit, and followed the others down into water lanced through with their envirosuit light beams.