Quoit started to run over to the core. I hung back. I couldn’t see Tsenong, and I was looking around for him. Quoit reached the base of the strut and was about to start climbing up to Whalley, when two black holes appeared in the back of his suit. He shook violently twice, threw his arms out, and fell over sideways, I flattened myself behind the valve, my eyes doing the best they could, despite the restrictions of the visor, to scan the full three hundred and sixty degrees around me. I saw a flash of white behind a cluster of monitoring gauges, and I fired a burst of three bullets. A figure in white stood up, clutching his arm, and through his visor I could see clearly the face of Ben Tsenong. He had one arm clamped over the other, and he started to run for the door. I swivelled my gun round at him and was about to pull the trigger again when a bullet smacked off the handle of the valve right beside me, ripping a chunk out of the enamel paint; it was then that I knew what had been bothering me.

The voice of the man that Horace Whalley had met in the field, the voice that I had heard before and couldn’t place – it was here that I had heard it before, when I had come down on the day of the press conference and Ron Tenney had shown me around. Ron Tenney with that soft voice, that hint of an Irish brogue: Ron Tenney was Patrick Cleary. He had come around and was right behind me and I fired off three bullets without even aiming, just to scare; another bullet smacked the floor beside me. I saw the bastard, saw him grin, I was sure, as he stepped behind an air-vent housing. I sprawled myself flat on my stomach. There was a flash of white, and I fired another burst, then cursed myself; the white had vanished long before I pulled the trigger. I waited. I caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of my eye, something moving. It was the pincer hand of the robot and it was moving over towards me, and it was moving damn quickly. I had fifteen rounds in the gun, nine had gone. I had to get the bastard fast.

There was a flash of white. I sprang onto my knees, fired another burst and sprinted madly forward, if the lumbering motion that is all one is able to perform in these suits could be called sprinting. I reached the other side of the housing. Cleary would be wondering where the hell I was. He might know how to pull a trigger, but he sure hadn’t been taught much about gun-fighting.