“My God, Samuel, it’s sentient. It’s wearing things, look.” She focused on an arm, where a silver bracelet was wrapped around the wizened caramel skin. “That could be a watch, I think. It’s certainly technological. They caught a sentient xenoc and stuffed the poor bastard for their kids to look at in this freak show. Oh for Christ’s sake, what are we dealing with here?”

“You’re jumping to some very wild assumptions, Monica.”

“Then you explain what the fucking hell it’s doing in here. I’m telling you, they put it on show. It must have come from one of the planets they stopped at.”

“You’re in an archive, not a circus zoo.”

“Is that supposed to make me happy? So this is scientific not entertainment. What were they doing studying it? It’s sentient. It’s not a laboratory creature.”

“Monica, I know it’s shocking, but it isn’t relevant to our current situation. I’m sorry, but you’ll just have to ignore it for the moment.”

“Jesus fucking wept.” She spun round, and marched back towards the terminal where Oski and Renato were working. Heat and anger kept her going for several paces. Then she stopped and scanned the cube again. Her suit lights refracted off the gritty ice with its dark adumbrate core of sorrow and suffering.

When they’d come on board, she’d wondered about Tyrathca souls watching them. Now all she could think about was the soul of the unknown xenoc; lost and alone, crying out desperately for others of its kind. Could it see her now? Was it shouting its pleas for salvation from some obscure corner of the dreadful beyond? Unheard even by its own deities?

The medical monitor warned Monica she wasn’t breathing properly. She made an effort to inhale in a regular motion. “Oski? How are you doing?”

“I’m not sure. There are some files in here that look like communiquйs. I’ve just reverted to our fall-back option. We’re copying every memory to analyse later.”

“How long?”

“Programming is almost complete. It’ll take half an hour to datavise all their files over to our processors.”

“We can’t afford that.”

“I know. The bitek processors can shunt the information directly over to Oenone and Lady Mac in real time. We just have to hope the Tyrathca don’t come in here and find out what we’re doing until it’s finished.”

“That’s a safe enough bet. I expect they’ll be too busy chasing us.”

How the hell did they get up there?ione asked.

At least three Tyrathca soldiers were cantering along ring five’s ceiling gantries. The narrow metal walkways threaded amongst the crane rails and irrigation pipes were shaking alarmingly as the heavy bodies thundered down them. But they were holding. And they provided the Tyrathca with a dangerously effective vantage point.

There were now six separate smears of billowing dust blotting out entire sections of the ring, evidence of shattered towers caught in the increasingly brutal crossfire. Tyrathca bodies lay everywhere, bleeding fluid and heat onto the cold alloy floor. One of the two remaining serjeants was limping badly, its suit leg crushed almost flat around the knee. Caught by a huge chunk of debris whose inertia defeated the binding generators. Several processors and hardware units on its belt were dead, ruined by maser fire.

Worse, from a tactical viewpoint, only one Tyrathca was currently stalking it. The remainder had moved away from the mayhem it’d unleashed to chase down the remaining heat trails. Four of them, including one breeder, were congregating round the open airlock into the control offices.

“They know we went in there now,” Samuel datavised.

“The ones on the gantries will be looking for us,” Ione datavised. “And they’ll see us soon enough.”

“We’ve finished programming the file extraction,” Oski said. “The data is being received by the starships.”

“Excellent. Get out of the archive, I’m about to blow the airlock. Ione, can you take out the soldiers on the gantries?”

“I’ll try.”

“At this point, you’re not expendable to us, okay? We’re going to need back-up to get out of here.”

“Understood. But only one of me will be able to keep up with you on the ramp.”

The injured serjeant raised its missile launcher, and fired the two remaining smart seeker missiles. They soared off into the gloom, twin spikes of intense amber light, seemingly rising out of sight around the ring’s curvature. It began to limp into the seething dust, heading back towards the archive. Searching round on its belt, Ione found a magazine containing neutron pulse missiles. Only four of the twelve responded to a datavise. She slipped the magazine into the launcher anyway.

When the others made it to the shelter of the ramp, she could then make life seriously unpleasant for the Tyrathca left in ring five.

Samuel and the last serjeant were waiting for Monica, Oski, and Renato right outside the archive. Monica’s thoughts were still in such turmoil after finding the xenoc that she didn’t trust herself to say anything to him.

“There’s still one soldier-caste left up on the gantry,” Samuel datavised. “Not that it matters much now.” He triggered the charges he’d laid around the airlock.

They were close enough to see the flash: a dazzling ripple of pure white light that burst across the ring, fading fast.

Samuel started running straight at it. They only had a hundred and fifty metres to go. He datavised instructions to the others, who activated their rocket launchers. A semicircle of towers fell in unison as the missiles pulverised their ground floors. Dust strangled the thin plumes of potent flame, sending out a curtain of impenetrable darkness that fountained straight upwards.

The airlock leading to the ramp had been wrenched to one side by the charges Samuel had laid around its rim, buckling the thick slab of titanium like so much plastic sheeting. A tide of rock had spewed out of the gap, narrowing it still further. His boots dislodged small loose fragments as he scrambled up. There was enough space to pass through, providing he turned sideways. As soon as he was on the other side, he started slapping EE charges on the walls. Monica and the others wriggled through the gap, with the serjeant bringing up the rear.

Eighteen combat wasps were closing on Lady Mac , the third time in an hour Hesperi-LN’s defences had launched such a salvo at them. Each time, Lady Mac had simply jumped away before any of them were in range, leaving the drones to search round helplessly for their target.

“Good job the Tyrathca never met anything hostile when they were on their voyage here,” Joshua remarked. “I mean, Jesus, they are absolutely crap at space warfare. Why do they keep firing salvos when we’re far enough above the planet to jump?”

“They’re lulling us into complacency,” Ashly said cheerfully. “They’ve worked out roughly where we’ve got to emerge next time, and they’ve flown their superweapon there ready to zap us.”

“Nope. Keeping the jump emergence coordinate as a random variable is file-one in the combat manual.”

“They wouldn’t have a superweapon anyway,” Liol said. “Building stuff like that takes inventive flair. And they just ain’t got it.”

“They do seem to be very dogmatic,” Dahybi said. “As they haven’t got a combat capable starship to field against us, their options are limited.”

“Limited, yes,” Joshua agreed. “But not to one.” He studied the tactical display. The nearest combat wasp would be close enough to start deploying submunitions in another two minutes. “Stand by for jump. Sarha, how’s the memory dump coming on?”

“No problems, Joshua. The bitek array is accepting the load.”

“Great, let’s hope there’s something useful in there.” He cut the fusion drives, holding the starship stable with ion thrusters. The flight computer showed him the energy patterning node status as the combat sensors retracted. “Here we go.” They emerged forty thousand kilometres from the combat wasp swarm. Hesperi-LN’s SD network took nearly three minutes to acquire lock on.