As the room was travelling backwards, I couldn’t see where we were heading, but I had to assume I was being taken to a specific destination. As soon as we arrived, my first priority would be to scout out a safe route back up to the surface. Then I could find somewhere to hole up until my supplies grew low, by which time I hoped those bastards in the armour might have given up and fucked off back to whatever hellhole had spawned them. Then I could work my way back to the wreck of the ’dam and find a transmitter. With luck, help might arrive before I died of hunger.

I let the sudden anger subside. I leant my cheek against the cool glass of the transparent door and looked down at the twinkling pattern of other doorways far below, arrayed in grids across the curving base of the spherical void.

Where had those soldiers come from? Until now, I had been too shaken and upset to consider the question. The armour they had been wearing had been scuffed and ill matched, as if various parts had been replaced over time and scavenged from a variety of sources. None of it had been standard issue, and that suggested the men wearing it hadn’t been regular troops, leaving pirates or mercenaries as the most likely explanation.

Pirates would never have had the balls or the firepower to take down anything as large and well defended as the Geest van Amsterdam. And even if they’d somehow managed it, they wouldn’t have hung around to pick off a couple of wayward survivors. They would have plundered the wreck and been long gone, running for all they were worth. So, these guys must be mercenaries. But who had hired them, and to what end? Certainly, the fact they had stuck around so long, and followed us into these depths, suggested they were determined to wipe out all survivors from the crash.

Even if I assumed they were trying to kill me in particular, that didn’t narrow the list of suspects, as there were countless groups and individuals from all sides of the Archipelago conflict who would be more than happy to see the sentient forests of Pelapatarn avenged, and Annelida Deal’s head impaled on a pike. In my absence, I had even been condemned by my own government—by those I had been serving and protecting when I took the decision to end the war.

I straightened up and considered the three blank walls of my enclosure. Until I knew where I was being taken, and why, my plans would have to remain necessarily vague. But that imprecision also lent them an attractive simplicity. I needed to improvise some sort of weapon, and then outwait my opponents. A liner had been destroyed in a disputed star system; somebody would send a ship to investigate. All I had to do was be on the surface when it arrived.