A torrent descended from the dome above, soaking them both immediately. Dakota propelled herself instantly away from the fountain and hit the ground rolling. Moss began screaming as the artificial rain shorted his lightning gloves, and she almost gagged from the awful stink as he jerked and writhed in an expanding cloud of steam. Fresh torrents continued to drench him from above.

The stricken man staggered blindly towards her, and then he fell face-forward right into the pool.

Just then a sonorous boom sounded from somewhere deep within the asteroid, so faint at first that Dakota wondered if she’d imagined it.

But more, heavier vibrations followed, rippling underfoot in regular pulses, each growing slightly stronger than the last. She heard yelling, and voices calling to each other, back in the general direction of the plaza. But then the voices faded, as if moving further away.

Then there was a sound like the sudden onrush of an ocean tide. It lasted several seconds, before silence fell again.

Dakota remained rooted to the spot for another few moments, desperately wondering what the hell was going on.

She then crept back along the walkway leading to the plaza, noticing how the lush, damp grass below her now-shone with thousands of fragments of shattered crystal from the gazebo roof. Without warning, the entire plaza shook so hard she was almost sent tumbling over the railing to the ground some metres below.

No wonder Bourdain’s soldiers had fled. Whatever was going on here, Dakota wasn’t their priority any more.

The rumbling faded as quickly as it had started, whereupon Dakota made her way down to the ground level as fast as she could. She was conscious of glass crunching noisily underfoot, but that hardly mattered now there was no one around to hear.

Or so she at first thought. Two security personnel, their weapons already raised, emerged from where they’d taken cover under the dense foliage. Dakota gave a shriek and dived out of the way just as bullets whined off the tree trunks right next to her.

The ground rolled and rumbled beneath her with considerably more violence. Then it tipped sideways, suddenly transforming into a vertical plane.

Dakota went tumbling into some bushes, her senses spinning with the sudden shift in gravity. Her stomach twisted with a surge of nausea, and she desperately grabbed some branches, her legs dangling in empty air. The sidewall of the plaza was now several metres beneath her swinging feet.

Something was very, very wrong with the planet engine.

One of the two security men had grabbed hold of a tree trunk somewhere above her, then lost his grip and plummeted past her with a yell. He crashed into a concrete pillar supporting one of the walkways, his neck twisting at a sickening angle. His companion already lay dead nearby.

A steady shower of broken glass fell past her and on to the two corpses, but fortunately the dense foliage of the bushes sheltered her from most of the tumbling shards.

Then gravity began to right itself, just as she could feel her grip starting to weaken. A few seconds later the world had returned to normal, and Dakota found herself kneeling on the soft, wet grass again.

It took her a while to find the courage to stand upright.

Someone had clearly activated the GiantKiller.

Someone who wasn’t her.

There came another series of dull booms from far beneath Dakota’s feet, each one sounding closer than the last. Cracks began to appear in the nearby walls and in the grass. The plaza suddenly split into two halves, drawing away from each other. Dakota threw herself over the yawning chasm, landing safely on the other side, and ran for her life back the way she had come.

The constant tug of the Rock’s artificial gravity began to fade. Suddenly Dakota was swimming through the air, carried forward by her own momentum. A howling maelstrom of escaping atmosphere roared up from the lower levels of the Rock, spilling out through the yawning crack in the plaza’s floor and rushing upwards through the shattered roof.

Dakota activated her filmsuit and, under her clothes, it coated her bare flesh within moments. Her lungs shut down automatically and, as always, it took her a moment to get over the sensation that she was suffocating.

She then hurriedly discarded everything she was wearing, wanting to move as freely as possible. But first she removed the Shoal’s gift from the pocket it nestled in, and clutched it firmly in one night-black hand.

Unfortunately for them, nobody else on the Rock enjoyed the benefit of stolen Bandati technology such as her filmsuit. Most of those guests she’d seen in the Great Hall earlier were either already dead or very soon would be. The only others likely to survive were the Shoal-members and the occasional Bandati she’d seen there. The priests she’d spied with their Pope-avatar were vacuum-proofed and radiation shielded, of course, as all their kind were. But whether they were alive or not in the first place was a matter of conjecture and religious inclination.

Now the only thought in Dakota’s mind was how to escape.

‘What did you say to her?’ Bourdain demanded from inside his own protective bubble of shaped fields. In a corridor filled with people desperate to find a way out, he’d caught up with the Shoal-member that had spoken with Dakota earlier. ‘How could you let her go?’ he screamed. ‘For God’s sake, look at what she’s done!’

There was no sign of Moss, but Bourdain had received a verbal report from one of the squad he’d sent after her of how she’d threatened to activate the GiantKiller. Bourdain raged at the thought of her actually following through, and right behind that thought came the appalling awareness that he had so badly underestimated her.

As soon as he had things under control, he was going to hunt that murderous little bitch down remorselessly. And when he had her-well, he was going to take his time over what happened then. It would require time and imagination.

‘Simple enquiry made concerning Dakota’s cargo, nature of,’ the Shoal-member that called himself Trader-In-Faecal-Matter-Of-Animals replied. ‘Perhaps to peruse Mr Bourdain’s thoughts concerning aforementioned matter?’

Anarchy now reigned throughout the ruins of the Great Hall. One of the ceiling buttresses had given way during the initial panic, sending a mighty spray of water across the cavernous space as the structure began to tumble into the artificial lake. Small decorative fish twisted frenetically in air that was misty with water now free of gravity’s grip.

Like Bourdain, a very few humans were wealthy enough to afford personal shaped field technology. Those had long fled, along with anyone else who had been able to reach the docks before the atmosphere gave out. But most of the rest hadn’t got that far, and their corpses littered the air all around.