The gondola's airlock was open: another crewperson was waiting to receive Dorcas and Sibyl. The airship's engines swivelled on their mountings, the deltoid gasbag turning with the ponderousness of a cloud. Gribelin looked dumbstruck. He was hurrying back to the truck, kicking dust with his heels. He paused to scoop up the piton-gun, shaking the dirt from its workings. Sunday and Jitendra started after him.

But she couldn't not look at the golem. The hammerhead was on it now, rearing above the crashed rover. It swung back its head, angling it as far as the hinge allowed, then swung the hammer down, putting its entire body into the movement so that it looked, for an instant, as if the robot were no more than a whip being cracked. The hammer drove down onto the rover. The head angled back, swung again. The rover was being crushed and pulverised. Sunday thought of the golem inside, what must now be left of it. She hoped it had come alone.

They had reached the truck. The hammerhead had smashed the other vehicle six or seven times now. Bits of it had broken off, and now the Evolvarium machine was employing its cilia-like legs to pick through the debris. There was something obscene and avaricious about the haste with which it went about the task of recycling the broken machine, shovelling the prime cuts into a ring-shaped aperture just under its hinge-point. A horror of counterrotating teeth spun at high speed inside the maw, grinding and slicing.

Gribelin hauled himself onto the side of his truck. He looked back, still holding the piton-gun, and then switched his attention to the hammerhead. Sunday looked at it as well. It was still next to the wreck, but it had interrupted its feeding. The *head' was swivelling slowly around, like a battleship turret moving onto its next target.

*It knows we're here,' Gribelin said.

*Then we'd better do what Dorcas just said,' Sunday answered. *Get the fuck out of here.'

*Lucas couldn't outrun it, could he?' Jitendra asked, fear breaking his voice. *What hope have we got?'

*Maybe Dorcas can scare it away,' Sunday said. Instead of heading towards the hammerhead, however, the airship was moving in the opposite direction.

*And maybe I trust Dorcas about as far as I can piss, right now,' Gribelin said. Through his visor, the set of his face was grim and calculating. He glanced at the hammerhead again, then his truck, then Sunday and Jitendra.

*Run,' he said.

Sunday frowned. *What do you mean-'

*Run,' he repeated, lowering the muzzle of the piton-gun in her direction to dispel any remaining doubt. *Run, sweet cheeks, and keep running. Hammerheads lock on to the biggest target they can find, and they're smart enough to go after a machine rather than a person in a suit. Until the machine escapes, or they catch it. Whichever happens first.'

Sunday wasn't processing. All she was seeing was a man pointing a non-weapon at her, blocking her access to the one thing that stood even a remote chance of outrunning the Evolvarium creature. *Please,' she said. *Let us in.'

From his position on the truck's side, Gribelin kicked hard. His boot caught her in the middle of her chest. She crashed back, falling against Jitendra, who stumbled and flailed before finding his balance. *Gribelin!' he called. *You can't do this!'

*Run,' Gribelin said again. He was in the truck now, venting its cabin air in a single explosive gasp so that he didn't have to go through the airlock cycle. Still on her back, Sunday watched him settle into the control position and work the levers. The stabilising legs spidered away. The wheels churned, found their grip.

*He's abandoning us,' Jitendra said.

*I'm not so sure,' Sunday replied as the truck backed away and turned. She rolled onto her side and forced herself up. She remembered what Gribelin had told her, that they should do exactly what he said if the shit came down. This predicament, she decided, adequately satisfied the requirements. *But I do think we should run.'

So they ran, as fast as the suits allowed, which was nowhere near as fast as she would have liked, and maybe a fifth of the speed of Gribelin's rover, now scudding away from them with a huge peacock's tail of dust behind it.

*It's taking the bait,' Jitendra said, between ragged breaths. Sunday barely had breath herself. They were pushing the suits to their limit, their own lungs and muscles doing at least as much work as the suits' servos.

*Keep moving,' she said.

But she couldn't resist a look back. The hammerhead had abandoned its first kill. Now it was going after Gribelin, but not with any sense of urgency. Conserving its energy, knowing that it could catch him up in patient increments, over kilometres. She forced herself to keep running, or to maintain what was now little more than an exhausted shambling jog. She was starting to feel light-headed, with stars spangling the edges of her vision. The faceplate readouts were all in the red, warning her that she was pushing the suit beyond its recommended performance envelope.

Never mind the suit, she thought. This is pretty far outside my own performance envelope.

There'd been no stated intention, no agreement between them that they should run in a certain direction, other than away from the truck. But that had been sufficient shared volition, Sunday realised now, to send them towards the golem's wreck. It had looked awfully far away, but distances on Mars were deceptive. She crested a shallow ridge, and with a dreamlike lurch of contracting perspectives it was suddenly much closer.

It looked bad, too. She'd never had any real expectation that the attack had been survivable, but any hopes she might have entertained were now obliterated. The rover was in pieces. It had been ripped apart and pounded into mangled and flattened shapes, now barely recognisable as the vehicle parts they had once been. She thought of Dali again: of sagging watches draped over leafless branches. The Evolvarium creature had turned the rover into art.

The suit's warning alerts were now more than she could endure, and her own heart felt like a piece of machinery about to burst from her chest. Her lungs felt as if the sun had been poured into them. She could not keep running.

Lucas's proxy lay on the ground.

The golem had no need of a surface suit, and was dressed as it had been in the Red Menace. For an instant her eyes tricked her, telling her that half of it must be buried under dust, until she realised that half of it was missing. The golem consisted of a head, an upper torso, one left arm. Lucas's proxy body had been severed in a diagonal line from the upper-right shoulder to the left hip. Sunday could not see the rest of it. Perhaps the other parts were in the remains of the rover, or scattered, or had already been digested by the Evolvarium creature.

It was the first time she'd seen the inner workings of a golem. There were glutinous layers, sheaths of active polymer, a skeletal structure of translucent white plastic, fibrous bundles of nerves and power-transmission circuits. A blue-grey blubber of artificial muscles, precisely veined with fluid ducting. Not much metal, and very little in the way of hard mechanisms. Purple ichor, some kind of lubrication or coolant medium, had spilt out of it and was already freezing on the Tharsis ground. The right side of its face was mashed in, the ear and scalp missing. An eyeball lolled out of its socket, trailing a rope of greasy fibre optics. The golem's intelligence, in so far as it had any, was distributed throughout its entire anatomy. But the eyes were still its primary visual acquisition system.

She stood next to it, hands on knees, waiting for the fog of exhaustion to clear from her vision.

The golem looked at her. The good eyeball tracked her in its socket, the other one twitching like a fish on land. The mouth moved, clicking open and shut in the manner of a ventriloquist's dummy, as if operated by a crude mechanism. For the moment, there was no animation in the face. It was like a limp rubber mask with no person wearing it, sagging in the wrong places. Then Lucas seemed to push through, his personality inhabiting the golem. The face tautened, filled out, and the mouth formed a smile.

*I'm in trouble,' Sunday said over the suit's general comm channel. *I can't reach the aug, and aside from my brother and some people I don't trust any more, no one knows I'm here. That leaves you, Lucas. And I don't even know if you're hearing this, or if you still have a ching bind back to Earth.'

The golem spoke. She heard it in her head. *I think we're both in trouble, Sunday.'

*When was the last time you received an update from Lucas?'

*I've been autonomous for hours now. I'm afraid it's highly unlikely that there'll be any re-establishment of contact, at least not before I become inoperable.'

*Is Lucas aware of my whereabouts?'

*Lucas knows that I followed you into the Evolvarium, and that your probable target was Eunice's landing site. However, he didn't know that for a fact.'

Sunday looked around. Gribelin and the hammerhead were a long way off now: from this distance, she couldn't see much more than the rover's dust plume. She hoped Gribelin was still maintaining his lead.

Jitendra staggered to a halt, bracing his hands on his hips. He saw the golem, shuddered instinctively. It was a natural reaction. It looked so plausible, so lifelike.

*It should never have come to this, cousin,' Sunday said, with genuine sorrow.

The golem's one good eye twinkled with bitter-sweet amusement. *I was always prepared to put the family before my personal advancement. It's just a shame you didn't feel the same way. What have you gained, though? They took the item. You came all this way for nothing.' The face smiled. Purple ichor drooled from its lips. *You wasted everything, Sunday.'

*I wouldn't say that.' She planted a foot on the golem's skull. *There are always compensations.'

She felt the plastic crack wetly under her weight, like some large, brittle, yolk-filled egg. The pettiness of the gesture sickened her to the marrow. There was spite in her that she had never once suspected.

But at the same time she did not regret it at all.

Jitendra had been digging through the wreckage of the rover, the parts that hadn't been completely pancaked, for many hours now. He was looking for something, anything, that might enable them to send a distress signal. Sunday had helped, at first, but then the futility of the exercise had burst over her in a wave of bleak despair. He would not find anything of use, nor would they succeed in contacting anyone who could help. If they tried to walk, they'd still be inside the Evolvarium when night returned, and their suits would certainly not keep them alive for more than a couple of days. It was already long past noon and the sun was hurtling back down towards the horizon with indecent haste.

*I don't think we should stay here,' she said, for the third or fourth time. *If the hammerhead comes back to take another look at the wreck . . .'

On the other hand, by remaining close to the wreckage of the rover they might be less conspicuous than two figures out in the landscape, far from any other manufactured thing. Did the machines hunt by heat or sound, primarily? And was there sense in staying close to the drill site, in the faint hope that the golem had managed to report home? She might have spurned the family, but they wouldn't let her die out here. Not knowingly, she hoped.

Gribelin was dead. She was certain of this now. Almost at the point when the dust plume faded into the pink haze of distance above the horizon, there had been a bright and soundless explosion. She had felt the report of it seconds later, rumbling through the ground like elephant talk. She imagined him allowing the hammerhead to come as close to the rover as he dared, before triggering something aboard the vehicle: a cache of explosives, some illegal weapon. Whether it had been enough to destroy the hammerhead, or merely to exclude the possibility of its catching Gribelin alive, there was no way of telling. A bonsai mushroom cloud had curled up, a brain rising swollen and cerebral from its own spinal cord, and there had been no sign of the hammerhead after that.

But the hammerhead was not even an apex predator.

*I want Eunice,' Sunday said. *She'd know what to do. She always knew what to do.'

Jitendra kicked aside a buckled metal plate. *There's nothing here we can use. And I'm not even sure it's a good idea to keep communicating like this. Maybe we should go into radio silence from now on.' He paused, his breath ragged from the exertion of searching the wreck. That was Jitendra's way of coping, Sunday thought: keep busy, until even he had no option but to admit the futility of it. *So, which direction do we walk? The winds haven't been too bad since we came in. If our air recyclers hold out we can probably follow the vehicle tracks all the way back to Vishniac, even if we lose suit nav.'

If they lost suit nav, Sunday thought, getting lost would be the least of their worries. It would mean the suits were dying on them, and that life support would be among the failing systems. *Maybe another Overfloater will take pity on us.'

*Yes. They do appear to be the kind and considerate sort, based on Dorcas's example.'

*I'm just saying. When you're out of options, you cling to the unrealistic.' But Sunday had been searching the sky for hours. There were no other airships up there. *I could kill her. Better than that. I will kill her, if I ever get the chance.'

Which I won't, a quiet voice added.

*I don't think she meant us to die. On the other hand, I don't think she thought things through particularly well.'

*Do me a favour,' Sunday said. *Can you a just for once a stop trying to look on the bright side all the fucking time? And stop trying to always see the good in everyone, because sometimes it just isn't there. Sometimes people are just arseholes. Evil fucking arseholes.'

Jitendra dragged a piece of rover panelling next to Sunday and jammed it into the ground like a windbreak. *We're going to be the hottest things for miles around. The more thermal screening we can arrange, the better our chances.'

*Our chances are zero, Jitendra. But if it makes you feel better . . .' She blinked hard. Her eyes stung with tears, but there was nothing she could do about that now.

*It would make me feel better if you helped a bit,' he said. *Some of these pieces are too big for me to manage on my own.'

Anything to please Jitendra. And he was right. Better to be doing something. Better to be doing something, no matter how stupid and pointless, than nothing at all.

While the universe surveyed their ramshackle plans and laughed.

They made a crude shelter, open to the skies but offering some cover from anything approaching on or near the ground. Sunday doubted that it would make much difference a their heat was going to bleed out whatever they did a but if it made them slightly less visible then she supposed the effort was not entirely wasted. They had depleted some more of their suits' power and oxygen, but they had not surrendered. And when the work was done, the shelter fashioned to the best of their abilities and the sun lower still, they sat next to each other, shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand, maintaining tactile contact so they could talk.

*I'm sorry,' Sunday said finally.

*Sorry for being tricked and cheated?'

*Sorry for what I got you into. Sorry for what I got Gribelin into.'

*I'm sorry for him as well. But he was an old man, in a dangerous line of work. You didn't kill him; his job did.'

*Maybe we'd have been better staying together.'

*We're still alive,' Jitendra said. He tightened his hand around hers in emphasis. *He isn't. That has to be the better outcome, doesn't it?'

*I don't know,' Sunday said, and the words surprised her because they seemed to come unbidden.

*I do,' Jitendra said. *And while there's a second more of living to be had, I'll always choose life over death. Because anything at all could happen in that second.'

*Since when did you start believing in miracles?' Sunday asked.

*I don't,' he answered. *But I do believe in . . .' Jitendra fell silent, long enough that she began to wonder if the tactile link had stopped working. She followed his line of sight, out through the narrow vertical gap where two of the wreck's pieces didn't quite meet.

*Jitendra?'

*I haven't moved since we sat down,' he said. *My line of sight's still the same. And I definitely couldn't see that hill an hour ago.'

Sunday adjusted her position and saw what he meant. She'd have seen it herself, had she been sitting a little to her left. It was no hill, she knew. The topography here was clear: other than the volcanoes and some ancient craters, there were no sharp protrusions in the terrain.

More than that, Jitendra was right. The hill hadn't been there while they made the shelter.

*The Aggregate,' Sunday said, and when Jitendra didn't answer, she knew it was because he had nothing better to offer.

And the Aggregate was coming closer.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT.

Geoffrey checked his restraints. The Quaynor was burning fuel again, continuing with orbital insertion and approach/rendezvous with the Winter Palace. Up in the forward command blister a the nearest thing the ship had to a bridge a Jumai and Mira Gilbert were tethered either side of him, secured within a messy cat's cradle of bungee cords and buckle-on harnesses. The command blister was a metal-framed cupola set with impact-resistant glass and furnished with quaintly old-fashioned controls and readouts.

*Your family are still ahead of us,' Gilbert said, confirming the news that Geoffrey had been half-expecting. *We had some delta-vee in reserve. Unfortunately, so did the Kinyeti.' She tapped at a fold-down instrument panel, muttering some dark aquatic oath. Reaction motors popped and stuttered, finessing the Quaynor's course. *Going to be a nail-biter, I'm afraid. We'll meet them on the same orbit. Unfortunately it looks like they'll make dock before we do.'

*How many docking slots?' Jumai asked.

*Close-ups show one at either pole. Anyone's guess as to whether both are serviceable.'

*Been a long while since there was any need for two ships to be docked at the same time,' Geoffrey said. *If ever.'

The Quaynor wasn't new a Geoffrey could tell that much just from the rank mustiness of his living quarters a but he doubted that it dated from much before the turn of the century. Rather it had been tailored to Pan ideological specifications, which dictated a strict minimum of aug-generated contrivances. Glass windows, so that the universe might be apprehended photon by photon, on its own blazing terms, rather than through layers of distorting mediation. Control and navigation systems that required physical interaction, so that a person had to be present, in body as well as mind. Decision-making abdicated to fallible, slow-witted human pilots, rather than suites of swift and tireless expert systems.

*What are Hector and Lucas hoping to gain here?' Jumai asked.

Geoffrey scratched a nugget of crystal-hard dust from his eye. The period of unconsciousness in the rocket hadn't done anything to take the edge off his exhaustion.

*The cousins couldn't give two shits about what's inside the Winter Palace. Not for themselves, anyway. They just don't want me finding anything that might hurt Eunice's reputation or endanger the business.' He adjusted one of the restraints where it was starting to chafe. *They'll be planning to scuttle it, one way or another. They already have the paperwork in place.'

Jumai asked, *Reckon they brought bombs with them?'

*Plenty of stuff in a ship that can be used to make a bang,' Gilbert said. *That's before we even get to the fact that there's a whole other ship stuck inside the Winter Palace.'

Geoffrey tensed at the arrival of a ching request. It was Hector, and the ching coordinates placed him near the Moon.

*I don't think we have much to say to each other,' he said, opting to keep the conversation strictly voice-only.

*You took the call,' Hector said, his reply bouncing back from the Kinyeti almost immediately, *which suggests you think there's something worth discussing.'

*Is it just you, or did Lucas come along for the ride?'

*Only room for one of us, Geoffrey a I came up in a cargo shot, not the crewed capsule. Stress wouldn't have been good for Lucas, not after what he did to his leg.' He emitted a brief, humourless laugh. *It was quite a trip. You should try it sometime.'

*I did it once,' Geoffrey said.

*Not this way, with no cushioning and the safety margins dialled to zero. The kick when I hit the bend at the base of the mountain . . . that was something. The view, though . . . once the pusher lasers had me and I was sailing into orbit. Glorious.'