The four creatures below sounded like barking dogs as they tore the piece of her coat into tatters. Then, dissatisfied with this sport, they mooched around, staring up at her hopefully. Polly took out the automatic and examined it. The slide had jammed back—the gradual rusting taking its toll.

Look after your weapon and your weapon will look after you, as my old major used to say. Which didn’t help him when a bomb stuck under a cafe table cut him in half.

‘Just tell me how to get this working again,’ said Polly.

Clean the rust from all the working parts, then just oil the damned thing. But he sounded doubtful whether it would ever work again.

Meanwhile Polly took out her taser and propped it securely in open sunlight. Making herself as comfortable as she could, she finished the last of the water from the canister. Then she began to concentrate on the automatic, rubbing away the rust with the edge of her coat and scraping the more inaccessible crevices with a nail file. How long this took her, she had no idea, but the sun had dropped out of sight behind the trees. Now the action of the weapon seemed much better, but still not as smooth as previously.

Without lubrication it will start to rust and jam again.

Polly searched through her sparse belongings till she discovered something effective. When the gun had been suitably lubricated with lipgloss and eyeliner, she inserted the clip, then stretched a condom over the weapon to keep out the damp.

I would applaud you, had I hands.

The gun safely back in her coat pocket, Polly attempted to get some sleep as she was horribly tired. After dozing for a while, she gazed down and noticed that the four carnosaurs were still putting in the occasional appearance, so felt no inclination to climb down. Instead she climbed higher to see if she could look out over the canopy.

‘Oh, my God.’

Misted by distance and shimmering behind heat haze, an enormous sphere rested on a sea of greenery. She stared at it open-mouthed. Was this some moon fallen to Earth—or some strange geological formation? Focusing on it more closely, she could just discern irregularities on its surface, and indentations that could only be windows.

Some sort of ship? Perhaps even a city?

‘There’ll be people there, then! It must be where this canister came from.’

Don’t be so sure. Who’s to say it’s humans that occupy it?

‘OK, but I have to get there.’

Polly then remembered the roving carnosaurs and did not greatly rate her chances.

‘I’ll wait… perhaps later those things will go away.’

An hour or more passed, but the beasts kept venturing in and out of sight below her. Eventually Polly had the clever idea of securing the coat, by its sleeves, between two springy branches, and then lay back on it with her legs either side of the trunk. After that she slept deeply, only waking next morning to the sounds of the carnosaurs barking excitedly. She herself was still hungry and thirsty, but the scale had obviously taken enough nourishment from her, for the webwork was ready inside her for another time-jump. She gazed out again at the great sphere nestling in the green expanse, and felt a leaden frustration. To ever get there she must travel through kilometres of jungle, yet she was unable safely even to climb down from this tree. There was only one option.

‘Screw this,’ she said and shifted, intending to make the leap as brief as possible. But the webwork gripped her hard and took her all the way down.

Interspace was a chaotic nightmare of glimpses into the real, into the vast and terrible landscape of the beast, into twisting nether-space and the incandescent distortion of Heliothane weapons. Forces buffeted the mantisal with its rider and passenger, though not the sort that threw them about, but those that stretched them thinly as the mantisal deformed: at once being drawn into a worm shape, smeared over impossible surfaces; folded again into another solid shape, yet in another dimension. The scream Tack saw first as a bright red halo around Saphothere’s face and a red glow on the inner surfaces of the mantisal, before he managed to dispel the synaesthesia, and he actually heard it. Briefly Tack glimpsed a neck, kilometres long and rising up out of shifting midnight, topped with a nightmare head the size of a continent. Then the mantisal returned to the corporeal world like a ball ejected from a tennis machine. It slammed against dry earth, distorting for real this time, bounced in a cloud of iron-tasting dust, bounced again and again, then rolled to stop against a massive tree.

Tack unlaced his arms from protecting his head and struggled upright. He glanced at Saphothere, who lay spreadeagled in the bottom of the mantisal, then turned to two of the packs, quickly unstrapping them from the construct and tossing them outside onto the dry ground. Then he turned his attention to the traveller. Maybe his back was broken and it would not be a good idea to move him. But nevertheless Tack gripped Saphothere under his arms and dragged him out. It was a rule of travel: get out of the mantisal quickly so it can return to its natural environment before the real world kills it—every other priority was secondary. Clear of the construct, he watched it as it jerked away from the tree and rose until touching the higher branches. It tried to fold away, but distorted, and instead went two-dimensional. It tried again and managed it this time. Tack glimpsed nightmares as it went and smelt burning flesh.

Saphothere looked wasted: his face skeletal, eyes sunken and lips drawn back from his teeth. His skin was icy and there was no heartbeat. Tack ripped open a pack and removed the medkit. Finding what he wanted, he pulled open Saphothere’s shirt, placed a pulse tag against his neck, then, in a technique unchanged in millennia, injected adrenalin directly into the traveller’s heart before placing a discharger against his chest. The light on the discharger flicked to green and Saphothere’s back arched. It went red and he collapsed. Green again, then again, then the discharger shut off—the pulse tag on his neck now displaying the hesitant thump of his heart.

Tack rocked back on his heels and looked around. They were again at the edge of a forest, which seemed their mantisal’s favoured location for bringing them out of interspace, as it gave them an easy option for avoiding hostile fauna. The dusty plain was African red and scattered with scrub and trees similar to acacia, but with yellowish needles rather than leaves. The forest rim was a dense wall of conifers and the occasional giant club moss, from which issued strange hoots and slithering movement. There seemed no immediate danger, but Tack made sure his gleaming new Heliothane carbine was ready to hand before returning his attention to Saphothere.

The diagnosticer revealed dehydration, starvation, cracked ribs, and the fact that both Saphothere’s radius and ulna were broken. The traveller’s spine still being intact, Tack dragged him back beside the tree and made him comfortable with a heat blanket and inflatable cushion, before setting up a drip to feed him a mixture of saline, glucose and vitamins. He then took out a scalpel and, with no more ado, sliced open Saphothere’s forearm, rested one knee on the hand and pushed and twisted to get the bones, now visible, into position. He then set two bone clamps in place before using an organic glue to stick the split flesh back together. There wasn’t much blood, but then Saphothere’s heart was beating at a rate barely noticeable.

Now, with as much achieved as he could manage, Tack took time off to assess their situation. It was possible that the mantisal would never be coming back. Its cataclysmic arrival here might have been due to Saphothere’s loss of control, or the distortions in interspace caused by the battle around Sauros, or it might be because the mantisal had been damaged by those distortions, into which it needs must return. This being the case, Tack knew he would have to leave Saphothere here and continue his mission alone. All that was required was for him to take his implant offline and allow the tor to take over.