The launcher had not been built with comfort in mind. When the rockets cut out half a minute later, Ty twisted around to see the dirty-grey and black exterior of the Freehold starship fast expanding towards them. He could also make out a faint blue shimmer around the frigate's drive spines. More split-second bursts decelerated the launcher yet further, and soon the yawning mouth of a forward bay swallowed them up.

The bay doors slid shut over their heads and grappling arms reached out from the deck, locking on to the launcher and drawing it down into a cradle. Ty started to unstrap himself.

A deep thrumming sound rapidly resolved itself into a rush of air, but Ty waited until his suit gave him the signal before he pulled his helmet off, tasting welded metal and sweat as he sucked in a breath. He wanted nothing more in that moment than to get out of his suit. As he kicked away from the launcher and grabbed a handhold on the wall of the bay, he glanced across at Nancy, also with her helmet off, her face drenched in sweat.

'I'm sorry about Cesar,' was all he could say to her.

She shrugged, staring away across the bay. 'If it wasn't for him, we'd never have got that thing into the launcher.' She met his eyes. 'But if that thing's body isn't as valuable as you seem to think it is, he might have died for nothing. Can you live with that thought?'

He returned her gaze. 'Whatever it is the swarm's after, it's inside that Atn,' he replied. 'I promise you.'

Chapter Eleven.

Several days after Dakota's encounter with Trader, the Magi ship that had resurrected her delivered her to the world known to humans as Derinkuyu, a major Skelite colony twenty-three light-years beyond the Consortium's borders.

The Skelites carved entire cities out of the deep bedrock of their worlds, creating warrens that extended far below the surface. Before the departure of the Shoal, the complex in which Dakota now found herself had been home to a small population of a few thousand human beings plus a smattering of Bandati and even, to her surprise, one or two Rafters drifting in their pressurized tanks. With the arrival of coreship refugees, the population had quadrupled overnight, spreading out to take up every last available inch of spare room in what Dakota suspected would be a claustrophobe's worst nightmare.

She wandered through a long, echoing concourse, its high arched ceiling supported by fluted stone pillars also carved directly out of the rock. Somewhere in the maze of shanty dwellings here was the Magi navigator who had agreed to act as her liaison.

Most of the dwellings she pa.s.sed were constructed from sc.r.a.ps of plastic and metal, and even rough slabs of precariously balanced stone that looked like all they needed was a good hard push to send them tumbling onto their occupants with deadly results. Light came from a combination of glow-globes and what she suspected was a bioluminescent fungus spread in dense patches across the ceiling and upper parts of the towering pillars. Her nose was tickled by the varied smells from the dozens of cooking fires that splashed pale flickering light across the lower reaches of the pillars, carrying the scent of spices and blackened meat. She wondered if any of the people sleeping and talking and eating all around her really believed that the rescue they were almost certainly hoping for would ever come.

'Miss Merrick?'

She turned to see a figure looming out of the darkness, and knew immediately this was the man she was looking for. The figure resolved into an impossibly tall black man in his late twenties, with the ubiquitous shaved skull of a machine-head.

'Miss Merrick,' he repeated, now taking her hand with a smile. 'Leroy Rivers. It's wonderful to meet you at last.'

'I should be thanking you you,' she replied. 'I wasn't sure I'd be able to find my way around this place without help.'

'n.o.body else knows you're here?' There was a precision in the way he spoke, each word and syllable meticulously phrased.

She shook her head. 'You're the only one I've told.'

Rivers bent down towards her a little, and dropped his voice. 'We should not delay. It's not safe to stay around here one second longer than we need to. I have transport nearby, and I managed to acquire one of the items you asked for at very short notice.'

She nodded, and he led her towards a small open car with tractor wheels, parked close to a pillar. 'You're part of the relief operation?' she asked.

He laughed. 'That is the idea, but it's like using a teaspoon to bail out a sinking ship. All we've managed to bring here so far are a few emergency fabricators, and yet there are people dying of diseases that are supposed to be extinct.'

'I see.'

'There is not enough room for all the refugees,' he continued, climbing into the driver's seat. 'We really need to expand into newer tunnels, but that means further negotiations with the Skelites, which is proving difficult, I'm afraid. There's been a lot of clashes between the original settlers and the refugees, but the Skelites refuse to open up more s.p.a.ce.'

'Why not?'

'They want star-drives seeded from the Tierra cache,' he explained. 'That's their basic condition before they'll enter into any kind of negotiation.'

Dakota nodded. 'Right. I understand. They lost the coreship network along with us and the Bandati, so of course they don't want to have to rely on the Fleet or anyone else.'

She climbed into the pa.s.senger's seat, beside Rivers. He turned to look at her with an earnest expression. 'I will be straight with you, Miss Merrick. When you told me you wanted to come here, helping you find someone I've never heard of was not my first priority. But your influence at Ocean's Deep is enormous, and if the Skelites here were to think they might get their star drive, it could take a lot of the pressure off. At present it doesn't take much to start a riot here, and before you know it there's another dozen dead bodies. People generally need to know things are going to get better.'

It took an effort of will for Dakota to meet Rivers's hopeful gaze. Things, she wanted to tell him, were just as bad everywhere. There were a thousand Leroy Rivers scattered over an area of s.p.a.ce so vast it was difficult even to contemplate, all of them desperate to ward off a coming catastrophe.

She smiled in what she hoped was a convincing manner. 'I can't make any promises, Mr Rivers, because things are bad all over. But I'll see what I can do when I get back to Ocean's Deep.'

Rivers nodded and exhaled noisily, like a man who had just been unburdened of a heavy load. He turned to her again and smiled gently. 'Thank you for telling me that.' He reached down and activated a switch, and the car's treads ground noisily.

She studied him. 'You didn't believe a word of what I just said, did you?'

'No,' he said, with a broad grin. 'Not a word. But I still had to ask.'

Dakota looked away, biting her lip in shame.

'Something for you,' he said, pulling a plastic bag, filled with something that clanked noisily, out from under the dashboard.

He pa.s.sed it over one-handed. Inside she found two short metallic tubes and something that looked like the grip of a gun.

'The weapon is modular,' Rivers explained. 'All you need to do is snap the components together. The locals call these things "ratcatchers". A small, high-capacity fusion battery housed in the grip powers the plasma bolts. Like I said, it's the best I could get hold of at short notice. But you're going to have to be careful about how you use it. They have a nasty habit of going wrong if they get overheated.'

She gave him a doubtful look. 'Wrong, how?'

'The battery is a fabricator hack job that bypa.s.ses the programmed safety limits. If it gets too hot, it blows up.'

She stared at him. 'And this is seriously the best you could get?'

'Weapons of any any kind are in very short supply here. The second-stage Skelites themselves aren't exactly lacking in armaments, but they're less than keen on supplying them to us intruders.' kind are in very short supply here. The second-stage Skelites themselves aren't exactly lacking in armaments, but they're less than keen on supplying them to us intruders.'

'So they're all home-made efforts like this?' she asked, emptying the bag's contents on the seat between her knees.

'Yes. I think that particular one came from a fabricator originally designed for making customized kitchen components.'

Rivers put the car into reverse, and the tractor treads crunched across the stone floor as he guided it carefully between the close-packed hovels and sleeping bodies, veering close enough to outstretched limbs at times to send Dakota's heart leaping towards her mouth. She studied the weapon's components and then carefully slotted them together, the grip sliding in last. When she held it in her upturned palm it felt light, insubstantial, more like a toy than a real weapon. Hugh Moss would have access to far greater firepower than this.

'I don't mean to pry,' said Rivers, 'but you said at one point you thought you might have trouble finding your way around on your own . . . ?'

'I can't manipulate data the way I used to, Mr Rivers. I'm not much more than a pa.s.senger on the Magi ships these days.'

Rivers nodded, looking embarra.s.sed. 'I'm sorry for asking. It seems so many of us are suffering from the bends.'

She frowned. 'The what?'

'That's what some of the other navigators are calling it now,' Rivers explained. 'The bends, or neural burnout a sickness from diving too deep into the world of data contained inside every Magi ship.'

'Really.'

'I've not been affected myself,' Rivers continued. 'But I suspect it may only be a matter of time.'

'How long have you been a Magi-cla.s.s navigator?'

'Six months,' he replied. 'Most navigators start suffering the ill effects after seven or eight months.' His smile faded a little. 'We should be going now. I found you a place to stay on a lower level.'

Before long they were trundling through a series of endlessly winding pa.s.sageways. Steps were carved into the stone on either side, every thirty metres or so, leading up to open galleries cut into the side of the pa.s.sageways, just below the ceiling. Terran flora was everywhere, although much of it had clearly been engineered specially for an underground existence. Vines dropped down from the ceiling to brush against their heads as they drove on, while dwarf trees oak, ash and a few unidentifiable hybrids lined every district they pa.s.sed through. These trees barely came up to shoulder height, and made Dakota feel like she and Rivers were a pair of giants going out for a Sunday drive.

Business districts merged into residential areas, the ceiling sometimes dipping so low that Dakota would have had to stoop if she disembarked, while at other times it soared to cathedral proportions, with tiers of recessed homes and businesses rising up and up, all interconnected by carved stone staircases. They moved through a cornucopia of odours, those of food cooked on open griddles in busy market places, the fragrance of pale-leaved flowers and the rankness of thousands of human bodies living for years at a time in this deep subterranean darkness. And as they moved from one district via a downwards-spiralling ramp to a lower district, the air became ever hotter, denser and damper.

'Tell me everything you know about Moss,' Dakota asked at one point.

'He turned up here slightly less than five weeks ago and established himself extremely rapidly. It's my understanding that he trains what are intended to be either bodyguards or a.s.sa.s.sins, depending on your source of information. Killers, certainly,' Rivers added, as they hurtled on.

'a.s.sa.s.sins? But to a.s.sa.s.sinate who?'

'Well, at first the rumours were that Moss was training soldiers to act as protection for black marketeers in Derinkuyu. Then it turned out he was killing off all the black marketeers instead, and taking over in their place. Keep in mind,' he added, 'that much of this remains mere rumour and conjecture. He also supposedly has some arrangement with a tribe of second-stage Skelites living in burrows at a much lower level than this one. It's believed he's aiding them in their war with a neighbouring tribe.'

'What do you mean by "second-stage" Skelites?'

'Skelites go through three distinct stages of development during their lives. The first stage is born in pools of volcanically heated water on the surface. Those who survive go on to stage two, which is large, aggressive, extremely territorial and technologically innovative, though their existence is spent mostly in subterranean burrows like these. Those who survive their constant wars then enter a third stage, where they return to the surface and spend the rest of their existence reproducing and engaging in what I guess you might call intellectual pursuits.' He glanced briefly at Dakota. 'The second-stage Skelites are the only ones who have any contact with other species. And, of course, they're the ones who are demanding their own starships, since-'

Rivers never got to finish his sentence.

Dakota was not immediately aware that there had been an explosion or that the car they were riding in had been pushed up from the floor of a tunnel with sufficient force to catapult it several metres into the air. Instead she now found herself some distance away from the car's burning wreckage, with no clear memory of how she had got from there there to to here. here. There were distant screams and shouts, and small fires blazed dimly through a spreading cloud of black smoke. There were distant screams and shouts, and small fires blazed dimly through a spreading cloud of black smoke.

She sat up, looking down to see that the black liquid of her filmsuit had spilled out to protect her. Her clothes were torn and ragged, but she herself wasn't even scratched.

She jumped up and ran back to the wrecked vehicle.

Rivers must have died instantly: his head was twisted at an impossible angle, while his eyes stared sightlessly up from out of the wreckage. Dakota looked all around and observed that the tunnel was tall and narrow, with an arching roof high overhead. Galleries ran along the side walls, set back just below the ceiling. Two stone bridges crossed overhead and connected these galleries like so much in Derinkuyu, carved directly from the living rock. Thick black oily smoke pooled under the ceiling itself, just above the level of the twin bridges.

She dropped to her knees and scrabbled around with her hands beneath the wreckage of the car, then ducked lower until her chin almost touched the ground. Peering past Rivers's corpse, she finally spotted the home-made pulse-rifle. She flattened herself to the ground and slid beneath the shattered vehicle until she could grab hold of it.

A low whoosh whoosh came from somewhere close by, and through the thick smoke she could see the glow of flames billowing from somewhere further along the tunnel. But the smoke was beginning to clear a little as it dispersed in both directions along the pa.s.sageway, and she now saw a figure emerge, moving with deliberate purpose towards her. came from somewhere close by, and through the thick smoke she could see the glow of flames billowing from somewhere further along the tunnel. But the smoke was beginning to clear a little as it dispersed in both directions along the pa.s.sageway, and she now saw a figure emerge, moving with deliberate purpose towards her.

Dakota pulled herself around the other side of the wreck until it was between her and the approaching figure, and there hurriedly rea.s.sembled the rifle. She kept it close to her chest and raised herself to a low crouch, wondering which was the best way to run, just as the figure came close enough for her to make it out.

The man bearing down on her had four arms: the extra pair were situated slightly below and behind what she presumed to be his original limbs. Each one of his four hands gripped some kind of weapon; she saw a wicked-looking blade, a sub-machine gun and two force-pistols. A broad belt slung from shoulder to hip was laden with cartridges, throwing knives and more pistols. She watched his face twist into a mask of fury at the same time as he raised the submachine gun and pulled the trigger.

Frozen until this moment, she ran off to one side, heading for a staircase that led up to one of the galleries. She was followed by a dull clinking noise, and it took her a moment to identify this as the sound of bullets striking her filmsuit before dropping to the ground, rendered harmless as their kinetic force was absorbed.

She took the steps three at a time. Bystanders who had come out on to the side galleries to see what was going on rapidly scattered as she got higher.

Four-arms stayed next to the wrecked car, but kept firing as she climbed. The bullets tinkled to the ground in a steady stream, which merely caused her would-be a.s.sa.s.sin to scream with rage.

Once she'd reached the gallery itself, she ducked out of sight. It was deserted now, but the entire pa.s.sageway rang with the wail of frightened voices.

Dakota stole a glance over the side of the waist-high wooden bal.u.s.trade alongside the gallery, and saw that the a.s.sa.s.sin was standing directly under one of the two stone bridges. He fired off a few more shots and she ducked down again.

Leaning on one knee, she balanced the plastic rifle on the rim of the bal.u.s.trade and aimed it directly at the underside of the bridge immediately above the a.s.sa.s.sin. She pulled the trigger, half-expecting the weapon to fail completely.

Her vision turned black for a moment, before her filmsuit compensated for the overwhelming flash. When her sight returned, she had a bird's-eye view of the bridge tumbling downwards in ruin.

Four-arms wasn't nearly fast enough to get out of the way in time, and so disappeared under a mound of boulders and gravel, along with the car and Rivers's corpse.

Dakota glanced down at where her rifle should be, and found all that was left was the handgrip containing the battery, along with several centimetres of shattered plastic barrel.

So much for home-made weapons, she reflected, pulling herself upright. At least the battery hadn't blown as well. she reflected, pulling herself upright. At least the battery hadn't blown as well.

She looked around, and could still hear the voices of people talking and yelling somewhere out of sight. Already a siren was sounding in the distance. She had no idea if four-arms had come alone, but in case he had any allies she needed to find something else to defend herself with. The filmsuit, however effective, could not protect her indefinitely.

Clearly, Dakota realized belatedly, Hugh Moss had found her first.

She made for the surviving bridge and ran across it, still holding on to the shattered rifle. It might be useless now, but someone at a distance might not be able to tell straight away. Another long tunnel stretched ahead, lit by glow-globes.

Another figure came running towards her, flames licking around his clenched fists. His head was smooth and shaved, and a satchel was slung across his bare chest. Even from a distance it was obvious there was something strange about his skin texture; it looked rather like the armoured hide of some ancient predator. He came to a stop and tipped his head back, his chest rising as if he were drawing in one enormous breath. When he lowered his head again, an enormous whoosh of flame was released from between his lips. At the same instant he drew one flaming hand back to throw something at her.

Dakota spun round and began to run back in the other direction just as a terrific explosion of light erupted behind her. She threw herself over one side of the bridge and dropped to the pa.s.sageway below, just as a rush of intense heat enveloped her. She didn't even feel the impact as she landed.

She then headed downwards, following the gradually descending slope of the narrow street for lack of any better idea. She kept her arms and legs pumping furiously, ignoring the faces that sometimes loomed out of the dim light of successive tunnels and pa.s.sageways, at first looking curious, then terrified as they glanced behind her. She didn't need a backward glance to know the burning man was still on her trail. Although the detonation hadn't physically harmed her, her clothes unprotected by her filmsuit were smoking and burning.

The street veered sharply to the right, and she threw herself around the corner, then ducked into one of the first doorways she saw. Maybe she could lose herself.

She found herself at the top of a steep and narrow stairwell, and followed it down to yet another vaulted pa.s.sageway with bridges arching overhead. Taking several side entrances led her further downwards, as she ran on in her search for a suitable place to hide.

Something now rumbled from deep within the rock, growing louder the deeper she went. She soon found herself in a confined s.p.a.ce whose roof was so low she had to almost bend double to make her way across it. Dakota realized she was now truly lost, and had to fight back her panic. She tried to connect with Derinkuyu's open access networks through her implants, but they responded with error messages that were not evident when she had met with Rivers earlier.

It had to be because of Moss. Somehow he had known she was here in the system, so he had engineered a crash in the networks servicing the local population.

Pa.s.sing through a door on the other side of the cramped s.p.a.ce, she suddenly found herself entering a vast, cavernlike area almost as extensive as the one she had first encountered Rivers in. But this one seemed empty of residents, and the air was filled with a heavy, thundering roar that suggested a subterranean cataract.

High up above her extended a curving ceiling painted in rich dark colours, adorned with a swirl of stars and shapes that gradually revealed themselves as a depiction of coreships and planets: a giant tableau that appeared to depict the earliest years of Derinkuyu's human settlement.

Across the huge chamber, a waterfall gushed out of one stony wall, spilling a dozen metres into a subterranean lake stirred up by a whirlpool several metres across. A dozen metal walkways, at different heights and interconnected by ladders, were suspended by cables from the ceiling. They crossed from one side of the cavern to the other and, even from where she stood, Dakota could see they gave access to yet more pa.s.sageways all around.

The entrance to one such walkway was right in front of her, and in the centre of it stood Hugh Moss, with an insane grin spread across his calloused features.

Dakota turned and saw the fire-breather enter the giant cavern behind her. He stopped for a moment, as if to catch his breath, then, grinning at her widely, began digging deep inside his satchel. Shortly he withdrew a wrinkled black lump that looked like a large seed of some kind.

Flames suddenly began to lick around his hands and forearms, whereupon the seed popped and hissed, and then began to glow.

Pulling his hand back, he pitched the burning seed directly towards her. Dakota watched mesmerized for a second, as the object arced through the air towards her. She turned, throwing herself on to the nearby walkway, its metal surface clanging noisily with her every slamming footstep.

The explosion lifted her off her feet and sent her sprawling. Dakota shrieked, and twisted around on to her back just in time to see the fire-breather stepping on to the same walkway. Moss hadn't moved from where he stood.

Without really considering what she was doing, she hurled the broken remains of the pulse-rifle at the fire-breather.