He smiled. The girl’s core had already been shredded at a quantum level; she would be better able to survive the Wraiths’ cellular predation than the others he’d taken, even without a plasma suit. And, with the process recorded, even if the Earth-Child died in the process he would know exactly what strands of mutated genetic code made that better match possible.

‘Master!’

The Ratt’s nervous gasp was like a scream in the ears of Halogi-Kari. He rounded on the intruder, casting out his hands and with the force of his mind pinning the creature against the wall, spreadeagled and squealing.

‘I’m sorry, Master,’ the Ratt babbled, wide-eyed. ‘The processed ones – some have gotten out of the holding area.’

Halogi-Kari closed his eyes for a moment. The Ratts were a motley, substandard race of work units, which was one reason the Proclamation took such little heed of them and their activities. The psychosurgeons had destroyed thousands in attempts to resurrect the Wraiths, but the Ratts’ brain capacity was simply too limited to allow effective integration, even after he’d employed that fool Crozier to perform augmentation. He’d had no choice other than to incubate some of his surviving Ratts with limited time-storm powers in order to gather more suitable livestock. But the feeble-minded idiots couldn’t be trusted to do much else on their own.

‘How did the processed ones get out?’ Halogi-Kari hissed, and as expected, the Ratt had no answer. ‘They are unarmed and there is nowhere they can go.’

The Ratt squirmed in the invisible grip. ‘But—’

‘No excuses. You and your fellows must contain them again. Fail me and I will plant a time-storm in your feral hearts so that they burst in your chests. Now, go!’

He waved a hand and the terrified Ratt fell to the floor and scurried away on all fours.

Trusting that such incompetence would soon be rectified, Halogi-Kari resumed his meditations, probing with his senses through the outer frenzy of the quantum interface.

And he smiled as he heard the Earth-Child screaming.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

As the four robots approached along the corridor, Ryan passed Chantelle the baseball bat and dug into his pocket for Ace’s cylinder.

‘You want a piece of me?’ Chantelle raised the bat at the robots. ‘Cos the day I’ve had, I’ll give you more than you—’

A metal tendril zipped out and struck the silver, jarring the bat from her hands in a blaze of sparks. Chantelle yelled and recoiled as the tendril retracted, blackened and smoking. The other three robots stopped their advance, hovering suspiciously. Ryan caught Chantelle’s arm and dragged her further back along the corridor.

Chantelle pointed to the bat, which was smoking. ‘What about that?’

‘Too hot to handle,’ said Ryan, tipping a Nitro-90 marble from the holder into his palm. He threw it towards the robots. ‘Speaking of which …!’