‘That you, Tergal?’ he asked.

‘No, it’s Unger Salbec,’ replied the voice from without.

With a sigh, Anderson wrapped a towel around his waist, and looked at the metallier handgun on the bed. The sudden déjà vu he felt was almost painful. The first time had been five years ago, when he was stripping off his armour inside a minerallier hut so he could find out just exactly where the Salbec boy had stabbed him. Dressings were laid out ready for him, and a steaming bath. He remembered the occasion well:

‘Who is it?’

‘I am Unger Salbec’

Fusile quickly up and braced against his hip—he had kept it loaded.

‘What do you want?’ Anderson pulled the hammer back and advanced to the door.

‘I want to talk to you about my brother.’

‘What’s to say? He committed crimes, knowing the penalties, and he paid. Have you come to tell me how he was really a good boy and had been sadly misled?’ Anderson leant forward and flipped the latch over with the barrel of his gun, then rapidly moved back and to one side.

Unger Salbec opened the door and stepped into the room. She seemed not to be carrying weapons, so perhaps only a tongue-lashing was to come. But then, he considered, she probably had a gun tucked into the back of her loose trousers, concealed by her tunic. Ah, any moment now, he thought, as she reached back to close the door and latch it.

He went on, ‘The other one I get often is how poor the criminal’s family was, and how with money he or she would never have turned to crime, which I’ve always considered insulting to those poor people who graft all their lives without putting a foot wrong.’

There was no denying that, barring her resemblance to her sociopathic brother, Unger Salbec was an alluring woman. Her brown hair was tied back from a wide but attractive face, and since she was of metallier ancestry, she was without lip tendrils or wrist spurs. Also, Anderson couldn’t help but notice the unrestricted movement beneath her tunic.

‘You are right, it is insulting,’ she said, moving in from the door. ‘From childhood I trained in the husbandry and breaking-in of sand hogs—and only last month was I finally considered competent. I have supported my parents, and… Querst. He repaid me by trying to rape me, and when I beat him off with a thuriol hook he went and found my best friend Elasen to rape and murder instead. I’m not here for vengeance, Anderson Endrik—I’m here to thank you.’ She shrugged and gave him a deprecating grin.

It all sounded so plausible, but that same plausibility was the reason he required the dressings. Foolishly, he had thought the boy Querst would run, when in fact he had waited in ambush. Anderson intended never to repeat such mistakes.

‘I’d like to believe you, but you’ll understand my caution.’

‘I am unarmed,’ she said, holding her hands out from her body.

‘So you say.’

‘You don’t believe me?’

Anderson shrugged.

‘Very well.’ Unger reached up to the neck of her tunic, and dipped forward to tug it off over her head. She kicked off the sandals she wore, undid the cord of her trousers, and dropped them to her ankles, stepping out of them. Now completely naked she moved closer to Anderson and turned one complete circle. ‘See, no weapons.’

His mouth feeling a little arid, Anderson stared at her plump breasts then down at her shaven crotch. He noted the wheel tattooed over her belly button—a metallier sign—and the curved scar on her thigh. This last decided him, for it was the kind of mark received from the sharp edge of a young sand hog’s carapace. Clicking his fusile’s hammer down, he put the weapon aside.

‘Now let me really thank you,’ she had said, and so she had.

Returning to the present, Anderson realized he had a raging erection. It had ever been thus, and he cursed his treacherous body.

‘The latch is off,’ he said.

Unger Salbec stepped into the room, a touch of grey in her hair and the angles of her face somewhat harsher. “Did you think you could keep on avoiding me?’

‘I’ve managed to do so for a year,’ Anderson replied.

She eyed the towel around his waist. ‘But I can see you’re glad to see me.’

‘I’m filthy, and I need a bath,’ he said.

She stepped up close, pulled his towel away, then reached down to close her hand around his penis, and slowly began to rub it.

‘It’s a big tub. I’m sure there’s room for the both of us.’

Anderson sighed. One way or another he had been running away from this woman for the last five years, and she knew how to catch him every time

Cormac had never before come out of cold sleep with a stinking headache, and he realized that his reaction to Jack’s news could perhaps have been a bit more positive. But after he applied an analgesic patch his headache faded and he began to see reason.

‘I understand why you zapped the Vulture,’ said Thorn, sitting in one of the club chairs, ‘but doing it straight away will have given him ample warning we are here.’

He looked better now, comfortable in ECS fatigues, and not hallucinating as Cormac felt sure he must have been shortly after his surgery. What he had seen was not possible, surely? With a degree of unease Cormac remembered something similar happening with Blegg on the Occam Razor, but of course that just wasn’t the same.

Still pacing, Cormac replied before the AI did. ‘Those swarms of U-space sentinels probably aren’t all Dragon’s, so Skellor would have detected us the moment we entered this system.’ He looked up at the view displayed of the sandy planet wrapped in pearly scarves of cloud. ‘The first ECS imperative was to make sure Skellor doesn’t get away. Jack acted on that, even if in doing so he destroyed something we might have used as a trap.’ He glanced across as Cento and Gant entered the bridge, shortly followed by Fethan, then added a little acidly, ‘I suspect the larger AI view is that once Skellor’s contained he can be destroyed at leisure, and that any collateral damage will come into the calculation later.’

‘It’s like Masada,’ Thorn observed.

‘How so?’

‘Like Masada—only turned about. Skellor wanted to capture you there. He destroyed what he thought were all means of transportation from the surface, then sent in his hunters but with no great urgency because he knew he could burn the entire planet down to the bedrock any time he liked.’

‘Is that how you feel about it, Jack?’ Cormac asked, turning to the automaton sitting in its club chair.

‘There are humans down there,’ said the hangman.

‘That wasn’t what I asked, but never mind. What about Dragon?’

‘Over the plain adjacent to where I destroyed Skellor’s ship, a hard-field dome has been erected. It is ten kilometres in diameter but of no great height. The Dragon sphere is probably underneath it, underground. I surmise this because that particular point is the epicentre of a gravity phenomenon.’

‘What?’ asked Cormac.

‘Gravity waves are being generated from there, causing earthquakes throughout the area.’

Cormac wondered how the hell he was supposed to factor that in: a Dragon sphere underground playing around with gravtech. He decided things were complicated enough already.

‘Go on,’ he said.

Jack continued, ‘Also, one of my telefactors is approaching the area, and I have already detected subterranean tunnel systems similar to those first found around Dragon on Aster Colora.’

‘Have you tried communicating?’ Cormac asked.

‘Only light penetrates the barrier. I’ve tried using message lasers, but get no response.’

‘Could Skellor be inside that barrier?’ Gant asked. ‘Maybe you need to put a few slow-burners through the plain as well, and maybe a couple of imploders—just in case.’

‘More likely Dragon erected it to keep Skellor out,’ said Cormac. ‘We know Dragon has as much liking of Jain technology as you have of Dragon itself, Gant.’