‘I’m going to need this as well as you, kiddo,’ she admitted to Kysandra as she rubbed it on red-raw skin. ‘That was a long ride, and I haven’t been on a horse in years.’

Kysandra sighed in relief as the mild analgesic took hold.

‘We should put some dermsynth on that,’ Nigel announced. ‘It’ll strengthen your backside for tomorrow.’

Kysandra yiped in shock and hurriedly pulled a towel over her bare buttocks. She glared up at him. ‘Don’t they have privacy in the Commonwealth?’

‘Hmm.’ Nigel scratched the back of his head, seemingly bemused. ‘It kind of depends which planet you’re on.’

‘Out!’

He chuckled as he left the tent. Kysandra glared at the flap for a long moment. Her u-shadow told her Nigel was sending a file, which she accepted reluctantly. It was a list of dermsynth properties.

‘Always got to be right,’ she grunted. ‘Madeline, fetch the dermsynth spray, would you?’

‘Sure thing, kiddo.’

Russell started a small fire and cooked their rations. As the sun finally went down, Kysandra was suddenly very aware of animals snuffling about through the long gangrass at the periphery of her ex-sight where she couldn’t quite identify them. Cries of lone roxwolves began to sound further off across the savannah, answered by the challenging howls of dingo packs.

‘They won’t come near the fire,’ Nigel said, picking up on her concern.

‘It’s not the genuine animals I’m worried about,’ Kysandra said. ‘It’s the Fallers. The eggs don’t get to choose what they eggsume.’

‘Interesting,’ Nigel said. ‘They must have some basic parameters. I mean, eggsuming a roxwolf I can understand, but there’s no point in them becoming bussalores or flies.’

‘They call it the first forty rule,’ Kysandra said. ‘I read it in the Research Institute’s manuals. If an animal weighs less than forty kilos, it doesn’t get attracted to the egg in the first month, but after that the egg gets less fussy and starts to attract smaller creatures.’

‘So they’re smart even at the egg stage,’ Nigel mused.

‘Not smart,’ Russell said. ‘Cunning, like all evil things.’

Kysandra grinned at the man’s certainty. Even this new Russell liked his world simple.

‘We’re going to have to examine an egg at some point,’ Nigel said. ‘See what makes it tick.’ Then he cocked his head to one side. ‘But the Faller Research Institute must have done that already; and they would have had the best equipment – if it worked. We need to get their results, if they ever published them.’

‘Coulan will find it,’ she said confidently.

‘If it’s there.’ Nigel gave Kysandra a sharp look. ‘So, do Faller animals eat humans, too?’

‘No. They only ever eat what they’ve become, it’s in the manual.’

‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ Nigel muttered.

‘The animals know,’ Madeline said in satisfaction. ‘They can always tell if one of their own is really a Faller. They attack instinctively. Bienvenido would be overrun otherwise.’

‘But Faller animals kill humans, they always have,’ Kysandra said. ‘They know we’re their real enemy. That’s why . . .’ She gestured into the night.

‘I’ll be on watch all night,’ Fergus assured her. He patted the high-powered hunting rifle Skylady had fabricated to look like a normal Bienvenido-manufactured weapon. ‘You’ll be perfectly safe.’

Despite the worry about possible Faller animals, and the nagging pain from her thighs and bottom, Kysandra fell asleep quickly.

It was another two days’ ride over the savannah before they reached the foothills. This was the southernmost point of the Bouge range. Three hundred miles directly east lay the coast with the Eastath Ocean beyond, while to the north the Desert of Bone rolled away for nearly eight hundred miles before eventually breaking up against a small range of hills that dipped down to the northern, equatorial, coast. The north-eastern boundary of the desert was formed by the Salalsav mountains; while not as high as the Bouge range, they formed an effective barrier to any rainclouds coming off the Eastath Ocean. So only the southern edge of the desert was unguarded by highlands, and it was a rare wind indeed which blew any rainclouds in that way.

They trekked round the Bouge foothills until the scrubland grew arid, gangrass giving way to tufts of succulent weed which itself soon became sparse. Loam turned to gritty soil. The first of the dunes were visible a few miles ahead, and with the sight of them came fine particles of sand, blown by the parched wind that came off the Desert of Bone, stinging Kysandra’s face.

‘There’s a stream over there,’ Nigel said, standing up in his stirrups. ‘That’s where we’ll camp and prepare.’ He flicked the reins, reinforcing the ’path order to his horse. The rest of them followed.

The stream was barely more than a winding line of rushes in the grit, betraying the damper ground. When they parted the sharp blades to expose the water, it was brackish and slow moving. ‘It should be enough,’ Fergus said. He took a spade and started digging.

‘I’ll help,’ Russell said, always keen to prove his worth.

Nigel, Kysandra and Madeline opened the trunks the modhorses were carrying and unloaded the extra bundles of rods, laying them out on the ground in the pattern they’d all memorized from the countless rehearsals they’d gone through before setting off. Had anyone examined the thin composite struts, they would have assumed they were just more tent poles.

Once they had them in the right order, they clipped them all together, forming three simple square framework platforms. Kysandra slotted the curving struts together to form wheels and fitted the tyres to them – superstrength fabric tubes that weighed less than a kilogram each. There were six of them. She twisted the footpump hose into the valve of the first and started inflating. It was hot, exhausting work that had her sweating profusely after the first minute, but she kept going determinedly. Nigel took over and inflated the second. Once all six tyres were inflated, they fixed the wheels to the platform axles, and they had three small carts which the mod-horses could pull.

Russell loaded them with the water bladders made from the same fabric as the tyres.

‘Now the tough pumping,’ Nigel declared.

They used a second, larger, footpump to siphon water out of the hole Fergus and Russell had dug, impelling it through a sophisticated filter and into the bladders. There were three on each cart, holding a hundred and fifty litres each.

‘Isn’t this too much?’ Kysandra asked, a question she’d asked often enough back at Blair Farm as they put their equipment together.

‘It’s a desert,’ Nigel had explained patiently. ‘Eight hundred miles long and three hundred at its widest. We have to find the one point that produced the anomaly, and I’ve only got an approximate coordinate for that. Now I have no idea how many days this search will take, but I’m budgeting a couple of weeks. A horse will consume a minimum of twenty-five litres of water a day under normal circumstances, but this is a desert, not normal circumstances. And we need a good three to four litres a day ourselves. Even carrying thirteen hundred litres, we’ll have to go back to the foothills and refill every few days.’

‘All right, all right,’ she surrendered.

They’d only pumped three of the nine bladders full when Fergus said: ‘Oh, yes, look at this – there, where the air’s cooler.’

Kysandra looked in the direction he was pointing. High on a slope about three miles away she saw some grey specks moving slowly round the gradient. When she zoomed in, she realized just how big the animals were. ‘Are those elephants?’ she asked. She’d always wanted to see one of the big animals.

‘Mammoths,’ Nigel said, with a knowing smile. ‘Hell, I remember when the first one was born. San Diego Zoo was swamped for months after; even baby pandas got ignored by the media.’