It was a knock-on effect. Every bolt revealed someone's location. The crash team fired on exposed tekmercs who shot back.

Melvyn ordered a round of airbuster grenades into the cave. They exploded five metres above the ground in a blaze of ragged plasma, lightning tendrils lashing down, grounding out through tekmerc armour suits.

Suzi squeezed off a couple more bolts. One of them catching a tekmerc head on. Total detonation. This time there was no return fire.

The ECM jamming blanket ended abruptly.

"Suzi? You OK, girl?" Dennis asked.

"Yeah. No problem. Snuffed two. Can you spot Reiger for me?"

"I'll try."

"Did any of them get out?" Melvyn demanded.

"Isaac here, chief. Thought I saw two of them make it to Dean's cave."

"Dean? Dean, respond please."

"One was heading for Neil's cave, chief."

"Snuffed him," Neil called.

"Dean, respond."

The glare flares were definitely thinning out. She saw explosions away on the other side of the cave, orange fireballs splattering against the rock.

"Robbie, Lilian, get a reconnaissance disk down Dean's cave fast," Melvyn ordered.

Another bout of rip gun bolts ricocheted round the cave. More explosions smothered the rock opposite her. This time she caught the black darts flicking through the air before the blasts.

"Hey, the pricks are using missiles," she cried.

The pump casing was torn open, glowing metal fragments whirling away. A narrow jet of water fountained horizontally out of the rock wall above the pool; chunks of rock flaked away from the gash that had opened, skittering along the blackened smouldering moss. New cracks multiplied across the wall with frightening speed.

"Take out those flicking missile launchers," Melvyn shouted.

Tekmerc rip gun bolts mauled the wall, splintering the rock, concussion clawing the cracks apart. Two more spouts of water gushed out. A third formation of missiles impacted.

Suzi knew the rock wall was going to collapse under that kind of onslaught. "Dennis, where is that fucker?" She had to fight against crushing the rip gun butt she was wired so hot.

"Left of the stairs, behind a trough."

She swivelled like something mechanical. Five possible troughs. Infrared was no use, the whole cave still crawled with energy. The rip gun smashed the first trough apart.

There was nobody behind it.

Then the rock wall shattered.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

The first cave was a small one, with a single red-tinged biolum globe jammed up between the saw-teeth rock snags of the roof. Rosy light made it seem warmer than it was. Someone had hacked a circular depression in the floor, four metres across; it was full of some transparent gel with a tough flexible plastic sheet stretched across the top.

Greg tested it with his hand, and watched a sluggish ripple ride across to the other side. Eleanor would like to hear about this, she adored waterbeds. He smiled furtively, wondering what she was doing right now. New London was on Greenwich Mean Time, which meant they would have finished the day's picking by now. She would probably be sitting outside by the camp's range grill, supervising the evening meal.

The clump of Teresa's boots as she climbed down out of the crack broke his train of thought.

"Tol," Sinclair called. "Tol, me boy. You're all right, 'us only me." He looked at the other two openings in the cave walls, and grimaced ruefully. "Ah, well. I was hoping the lad would be down here. Your tin men, they won't be going shooting at civilians, now will they?"

"No," Greg said. "If he does wander back into the village cave, he'll be quite all right."

"That's fine, then. He's a good lad."

Julia and Rick were already down in the cave, Jim Sharman was bringing up the rear. Julia ignored the gel bed.

"Where now?" she asked.

Sinclair pointed to one of the openings. "This one. It goes into one of our storage caves."

"Carlos," Greg said. "Lead out." He could hear faint whines and thuds coming along the crack to the village cave. Melvyn getting ready. He wished Suzi had come with them.

The passage sloped downwards. Greg watched the rock grow darker, from burnt ochre at the entrance to a deep slate-grey; it was harder, too, more brittle. Almost like flint, he thought.

By the time they reached the store cave his breath had become a white mist. There was a sprinkling of hoarfrost on the walls. It was a small cave, barely more than a wider section of the passage, with an uneven floor. A rough lash up of metal shelving stood along one side. Composite cargo pods were stacked opposite them, the names of various shops and New London civil administration departments stencilled next to long bar codes. There was a weak vinegar smell coming from the apples and plums on the shelves. The globes of fruit were large, gene-tailored, their skins crinkling.

Carlos walked past the end of the shelves, helmet lights picking up the thicker rime covering the rock.

"This is it?" Greg asked Sinclair. "The drone was here?"

"That's right, Captain Greg."

"Dead end," Carlos said.

"You knew that," Julia said. "And you still brought us down here." Her mind boiled with weary frustration.

"'Tis what you wanted," Sinclair said sullenly.

"It's all right," Greg said. They were in the right place, he would have known otherwise. There were levels of intuition, and this seemed to be the most intangible, yet perversely the most resolute. He reckoned that if he shut his eyes and started walking he would wind up standing beside Royan and the alien. Close, it was close now.

"Wait there," Greg told Carlos. He ordered up a secretion, the neurohormones acting like a flush of icy spring water in his brain. His thoughts seemed to lift out of time as he walked down the cave towards Carlos, mind flicking methodically through the impressions of his sensorium, searching for evidence of Royan, that unique spectral imprint his soul discharged in its wake.

The rock walls beyond the shelves were lined with small holes and slender zigzag clefts. Tiny splinters had flaked away where water had penetrated hairline cracks and expanded as it froze; the result was as if someone had taken a chisel and meticulously chipped a million pock scars into the walls.

There was a horizontal gash, about four metres long, varying between half a metre and a metre wide, level with Greg's head. He stood squinting into it, listening to the silence it exuded. The alien's siren song. "Bring some of those pods over here," he said.

"You can't be expecting me to go in there," Sinclair said as Greg stood on the pods and shone his torch into the gash. It was flat for about five metres, then angled upwards. "'Fraid so. It must get wider past that slope. Carlos, can a suit get in there?"

Carlos sent a fan of green laser light into the gash from his shoulder sensor module. "Tight fit, but we can get through."

"Any electronic activity in there?"

"No."

Nerves fluttered back to hound him as Greg levered himself into the gash. It had an uncomfortable resemblance to a pair of lips, plates of the mouth waiting to bite down.

Stop it!

He lay on his back, and shifted his buttocks sideways, shuffling towards the slope at the rear. His breath was melting the hoarfrost on the rock above him, tiny beads of oily water flowing into droplets that fell onto his face.

When the floor began to lift he stopped and shone his torch up. It seemed to be some kind of kink in the gash, rising up a couple of metres, then levelling out. Growing narrower, though, maybe two metres long at the top. Sighing, he began to work his way up.

He could tell there was a cave just beyond the top of the kink. The air had the right deadness for an empty space, sucking up sounds. Exertion was leaving a layer of sweat all over his skin which would quickly turn clammy cold as the suit's shunt fibres kicked in and drained the heat out. The temperature palpitation was bloody irritating.