‘How do I say, “I must return to hell”?’

Mihi redeundum in infernos.

The Emperor uttered something else and limped nearer. Walnut crusher glanced briefly at his imperial master, then closed in, obviously intent on his own agenda. Polly took quick aim and shot him once in the chest, the impact hurling him back into several of his comrades, then crashing to the ground. All the soldiers froze where they were. Polly stared down at the dead man.

‘And how do you say, “He is dead”?’

Mortuus est… Polly.

She turned to Claudius and repeated both statements. The Emperor fought to reply, but couldn’t manage it. Polly turned away, straight towards a wall of soldiers, who reluctantly parted to allow her through. She had put some distance between herself and them before they finally came to their senses. As the silence turned to an outcry behind her, she turned briefly to watch the squads of men running towards her. Placing the automatic back in her hip bag, she shifted again—and folded that bloody world away.

Saphothere’s face looked ravaged by fatigue as it turned to Tack in the light of prehistoric dawn. Removing one hand from the mantisal eye, he pointed out of the glassy construct towards the distant horizon. It took Tack a moment to drag his attention away from the ground just twenty metres below—Saphothere had promised dinosaurs and he was damned if he was going to miss seeing them.

For a moment Tack reflected that the sun appeared very strange here, until he realized that the sun was actually behind him and what he was seeing on the horizon was a titanic iron-grey sphere, misted by distance.

‘Sauros?’ Tack guessed.

Saphothere nodded briefly and returned his hand to the constructs eye. The mantisal jerked forward and began drifting towards the horizon.

‘Damnation!’ said Tack, when something he had first taken to be a lichen-covered boulder raised its shielded, horn-decorated head from grazing a low groundcover scattered with lush red flowers. It looked up with vague bovine curiosity, as it munched in its beak enough ferns to roof a jungle native’s hut.

‘Styracosaurus,’ explained Saphothere, glancing down. ‘They move into areas like this that have already been grazed down by the duckbills, and feed on the subsequent low growth. But this isn’t the time of the titanosaurs, so not every tree in sight gets flattened.’ He gestured to the many strange arboreal plants widely scattered across the landscape. Their trunks were very wide at the bottom, narrowing up to comparatively small heads of foliage.

‘What about tyrannosaurus rex?’ asked Tack.

‘Oh yes, he’ll be about somewhere.’

Tack returned to studying the ground below and realized that, after Saphothere’s latest comforting reply, the mantisal was descending.

‘Can’t you take us straight to the… city?’ he asked.

‘The mantisal’s natural environment is interspace. More than ten minutes in atmosphere would kill it.’

‘Coptic and Meelan flew theirs to Pig City,’ Tack told him. ‘Its structure became clouded first, then veined with something black.’

‘Nitrogen absorption,’ Saphothere explained. ‘Enough of that will kill a mantisal, but then the Umbrathane wouldn’t care about that—they regard mantisals as machines rather than living creatures.’

‘Do you consider this,’ he gestured at the hyaline cage enclosing them, ‘a living creature?’

‘I do. It is both manufactured and grown. Its genome forms the blueprint for most of its structure, but many other processes are involved. The final result is a living machine with about the intelligence of a dog, though that is not strictly true either, as the bulk of that intelligence is applied to dealing with senses and abilities no living creature on Earth has ever possessed.’

Tack reached out and touched the glassy structure. It was hard, yet there seemed a lightness to it. Deep within it he could see organic or advanced electronic complexity.

‘What’s it made of?’ he asked.

Saphothere glanced at him. ‘The main structure is a material manufactured since long before your time: aerogel—the lightest solid in existence then. It was originally used as an insulator. But, having a wide molecular matrix, there is room in it for the submolecular components you see. Underneath your hand is just one product of the unification of the sciences—call it bioelectronics or perhaps electrobionics. Maybe a good illustration would be for me to point out that Heliothane technological capabilities are of such scope that it is possible for us to grow a gun, an electric drill, or even a microwave oven.’

‘Oh,’ said Tack, unable to think of a more appropriate answer. He turned his attention back to the fast-approaching ground.

Seeing them close to, Tack realized that the red flowers were the product of vines spreading in a mat across the other ground-cover, and sometimes climbing the trunks of the trees. This vegetation was penetrated by cycads, tree ferns sprouting from wide stumps next to the decaying fallen cylinders of their original trunks, stands of more familiar shrubs, young giant horsetails spearing into the air, and dark green bushes like laurel but scattered with small yellow apples. Dropping from the mantisal, when it was low enough, he was glad to sink no further than to his ankles into a carpet of vines. Beside him Saphothere unshouldered his pack, while the mantisal fled back to its natural and chemically neutral environment.

‘So we walk?’ enquired Tack, fingering his seeker gun and scanning his surroundings suspiciously.

Saphothere merely glanced at him then squatted down and took from his pack a device that looked like a mobile phone fashioned of perspex, before being heated then twisted out of shape.

‘Your comlink?’ Tack asked.

‘No, my comlink is very similar to yours, though embedded in the bone behind my ear and with a subvocal transmitter linked into the temporal lobe of my brain.’

Tack reached up and touched his own ear stud. His comlink was solar-powered, so was necessarily external to his body. It operated by bone-induction, so any communication he received only he could hear, but any reply he made had to be spoken out loud in order to be picked up. He supposed he should be grateful this device had not been torn out of his ear lobe, considering all that had recently happened to him.

Saphothere opened out his phonelike device to expose two twisted screens, the lower of which switched on to show shifting virtual controls. He continued, ‘The defences of Sauros block external comlink communications because of the possibility of computer viral attack. This — ’ he held up the device—‘is an encoded tachyon transmitter imprinted to me. If anyone but me tries to operate it, they’d find themselves getting turned inside out through a vorpal singularity. The result is not pretty.’ His fingers followed the virtual controls, and the upper screen lit to show someone’s face. Saphothere addressed the face in the same language used by Coptic and Meelan, then he snapped the device shut.

‘What now?’ Tack asked.

‘Now we wait, if our friends over there allow us the opportunity.’

Saphothere pointed somewhere behind Tack, before returning the tachyon communicator to his pack. Whirling round, Tack saw three creatures approaching through the low vegetation, some hundred metres away. As these slim-boned dinosaurs moved, heads and tails extended horizontally, they stood no higher than a man’s waist, but every now and again they stopped to peer about them, raising their heads much higher. Their precise movements were reminiscent of herons, but their long hind legs were built for speed, their foreclaws for ripping apart living flesh, and though their heads were narrow and ophidian, they possessed mouths large enough to swallow the lumps they might rip from their prey.