After a short distance the tunnel sloped downward and spiraled like a corkscrew.

By then they were all aware that this was no natural phenomenon.

Then abruptly they were in a larger space, itself pocked by pits several feet deep. This space then opened into a cavern filled with what looked like the colossal bones of along-extinct monster.

Once more the passage shrank, until it was a tunnel again, about ten meters wide. Abruptly it came to a halt, cut off by a wall of rock. A fault line had developed here and shifted many meters in one direction.

And yet in the center of the blockage was a hole, and round it on the floor lay heaps of rubble and rock.

The hole was a meter and a half wide, enough to allow a man in a suit through.

Something had bored through here, and recently.

"This way, we're getting warm," Chang said.

They went on . . . and emerged in a continuation of the tunnel. This soon opened into a much larger space, in the center of which was a vast pit brimmed with inky darkness.

Cautiously they approached the edge of the pit.

"Lights out, everyone, the control is in the palm of the right hand. We'll use my ankle lights to see the edge by. I don't want anyone who's already here to see us. "

Far below, tiny pinpricks in the distance, were lights, suit lights, in motion, climbing down the spiral gallery that wound around this gargantuan pit. They fuckered on and off as they passed from one opening to the next along the gallery wall.

"There they are," Povet said, handing a set of binox to Luisa.

Even at full magnification there was nothing more to be seen than four suited figures, glimpsed through the oval holes in the side of the gallery.

"All right, people, move back from the edge, then put on ankle lights and we'll start down. "

Hopester hesitated at the opening to the gallery.

"I suppose this is the best course of action. "

"It's the only one open to us right now. Unless you think we should wait out there with Cachester. "

"No, of course not. We have to go on."

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN.

THROUGH THE HALLS OF DEAD ANTIQUITY THEY TRUDGED, DEEP within the reef structure of the Highest of the High.

Here was the source, the genetic spring from which had come all parts and panoplies of the Empire of the Gods. Here those gods had wallowed, secure, magnificent, omnipotent.

But now the end of all things was revealed to the Battlemaster.

They strode the sacred floor of the vault of glory, but all glory had long since fled this place. Except for the haunting vibration of the ancient days, there was nothing here but dust and rubble.

A vast fault had even cut off one end of the space, bringing down in collapse a dozen floors of apostle chambers.

Through the deep tubs and feeding pools, where once only the most exquisite hot muds and delicious foods had coursed, there was just dust, and in one tub the mummified corpse of an isolated manytapper.

Frozen where it had fallen a billion years before.

Here in the reef structure it had floated, safe even from tectonic subsumption, since the great reefs were built to float above the geologic processes of the homeworld, and thus outlasted every other feature of the ancient time.

To Rhem and Heldheim it looked like a seal formed from tar that had then dried and withered in the sun.

The Battlemaster touched the dead thing gently, turning it over to examine the underside carefully.

An exalted manytapper, a servant of the Highest of the High. Hard emotions swelled in the heart of the Battlemaster.

"Witness this," it said to the humans. "This was a servant of the Highest. "

They passed the tubs of glory, deep pits like empty swimming pools, with drifts of dust in their centers.

"Witness this," it said to the humans. "This was once the lying place of the Highest Forms, they who were above all others. "

Rhem Kerwillig was getting the idea. The thing that called itself "Battlemaster" was having a religious experience. It kept talking about these huge ruins with words of extreme reverence. This was like the Forest of Batum to the Batumites, or a shrine for the Habitans.

"The holy of holies, eh?" he said.

With a terrible sadness the Battlemaster pressed on. They strode through the great hangar like space until they reached an enormous door, an entrance thirty meters wide, and went on into an even vaster space than that they had left behind.

And here was the sovereign lagoon, and in it the withered remains of the Highest Forms, a crowded jumble of blackened, twisted shapes, interlocked around the Origin Form itself.

Desiccated flesh forms crunched as the Battlemaster strode into the mass, heaving things apart to reach the center.

And there, fused together, were the Originals, manubria extended in the death agonies. Here they lay, the last survivors of an empire of genetic control and terror that had run roughshod over dozens of solar systems, exterminating all other life.

To this twisted mess of gray ropes the Battlemaster paid final homage.

Now was the end revealed in these tattered wisps. Roasted alive in their glorious envelope of luxury mud, consumed by the avenging fire kicked up by the Batrachian superweapon, they had then been preserved for aeons by the silence and the thin atmosphere in this deep, protected place.

Rhem stared at the things; images of worms and snakes, and things studded with what looked like tongues made of tar, ran through his mind. It was vaguely disgusting, like the charred black entrails of some enormous animal.

And yet this was something that made the Battlemaster worshipful. Rhem had always wondered what the "thing" was with religion. He had never felt its call himself; primal human atheism was his creed. But now he felt the awe and reverence that imbued the alien creature that had enslaved him.

All of this huge thing they had climbed down inside was like a city of some kind. And this was a cathedral, or a temple perhaps.

But it was all dead, all dead long ago.

"Now witness the Highest Forms, see the glorious ones where they are fallen," the Battlemaster's voice spluttered. It gestured to the things it stood among.

Glorious ones? "These were your rulers?" said Rhem.

"Human concept does not express well. These were origin of Empire, these were Gods."

Somewhere at the back of Rhem's addled wits there was a memory of history class at social school. A teacher talking about "God-Kings" of human antiquity, showing them video concerning the Great Pyramids in Egypt.

"We had 'em, too, God-Kings. Built pyramids for them, killed each other for them."

The Battlemaster was not interested.

"Witness this, and then come. We return to surface."

"We're going back? All that way?"

"We must go. You are witnesses now. You have seen what was the center of all intelligence, all strength, all majesty. This was the beginning of the higher nervous system."

The words had a weird ring to them.

"You really believed in it all, didn't you?" Rhem said, misunderstanding the nature of the Battlemaster.

"You believed you were a superior lifeform. "

"Human concept system does not well describe."

"This was it, wasn't it? This was your homeworld. "

"Yes."

"And these were the ruling lifeforms, and they recruited you and they sent you out to destroy everything else that lived for them. "

"Expansion was prerogative of higher nervous system. "

"But something went wrong, your homeworld was destroyed, everyone was killed, except you. "

"Long ago. No life existed on your planet then. The galaxy would have been ours."

Rhem felt a sense of triumph; he was finally coming to an understanding of all this.

"You're all alone, then. The last of your kind. "

"Yes, this is possible." Even this must be faced.

"What are you going to do now?"

There was no hesitation. "End everything. Nothing will be desecrated by humans who come after. "

"You're going to kill yourself?"

To this the Battlemaster made no reply.

"How do you intend to do it?" said Rhem, unfazed. In fact, Rhem would have been perfectly happy to help.

"We will set the controls for the heart of the sun."

"What?"

"Move," the Reena thing said.

Back through the sacred chambers of the dead gods they stumbled.

"God-Kings?" said Heldheim.

"Yeah, that's what held this together, it was all a religion. The rulers were the Gods."

"Do not talk on radio channel," the Reena thing said, giving Heldheim a hard shove.

They reached the great spiral ramp and started up it. The suit lights picked out the mouths of the openings on the interior side, like an ascending series of eyes filled with nothingness.

The climb was a long one, and Rhem sank into a semiconscious stupor after half an hour of it. When this was over, if it ever was over, and he got back to civilization again, he planned to rent a hotel room and stay in it for a full month, sleeping, just getting the ache out of his poor, abused feet.

Abruptly there was commotion. Bullets whipped past over their heads by less than an inch.

Rhem ducked with the good instincts of the dubtiger and hit the floor hard enough to knock the breath out of his body.

Things moved in a blur. The Battlemaster jumped up the sidewall of the gallery and slid through one of the many holes that pierced it.

Heldheim was lucky at first, but the Reena thing was not because it took the bullet that would have cut through the admiral's head. Reena's body absorbed three rounds and fell facedown on the ramp.

Heldheim ran and then tripped and rolled down the surface to a point behind Rhem, who was just below the line of sight of whoever was shooting at them.

"Who the fuck is that?" Rhem screamed over the radio on the all-channel setting.

The shooting ceased.

"Who is this talking?" a woman's voice said.

"Name's Rhem Kerwillig, and I'm here with Admiral Heldheim. "

"Admiral, you're alive?" The voice expressed incredulity, "Yes," Heldheim said with renewed hope for survival.

"Who did we hit, then? And what are you doing here?"

"You hit somebody who used to be human," said Rhem bitterly. "I knew her then, oh, how I knew her.

But these fucking things took over her body. She was, I don't know how to say it, she was completely changed, I mean she was gone, she died. Something else was living in her. "

"How do we know they didn't take over your body?"

Rhem swallowed hard; he hadn't thought of that. What if they just killed him to be sure?