Cesar looked back and forth between them. ‘What – you found something?’

‘There’s an anomaly,’ Ty explained. ‘It was right there in front of me the whole time.’

‘So why the hell didn’t you mention it before?’ Nancy demanded, angry again.

Ty shrugged, then remembered the gesture probably wouldn’t be visible to the others, regardless of how light and flexible their suits were. ‘You didn’t really give me a chance. I came up here when you called, and—’

‘Okay,’ Nancy said, cutting him off. ‘Okay, what anomaly?’

‘I’ll need to show you,’ he replied.

Nancy conferred quickly with Martinez and got permission for them to go back inside the asteroid. Cesar remained on the surface to supervise the spiders as they busily manoeuvred the packed tents and supplies on board an unmanned cargo transport that had just arrived from the frigate.

‘I hope you know I’m risking my life for you,’ Nancy muttered over a private channel, her voice tense.

‘I promise I won’t read too much into it,’ Ty replied. The shaft walls slid past as they dropped down into darkness, each of them carried by a spider-mech. ‘God forbid you might ever admit to actually liking me.’

‘It’s not that I don’t like you; it’s just that . . . I don’t know.’

‘“I’m just not your usual type.” That’s what you always say, isn’t it?’ he asked.

Sudden, intense sexual relationships were to be expected, while so far from home for months at a time; and such had been part and parcel of Ty’s experiences while exploring other clade-worlds in years long gone by. But he never let himself forget that Nancy Schiller was a Freeholder. She was not unlike Karen, in that she was used to a life of discipline, and her body was a landscape of smooth, well-trained muscles; whenever they shared a bed, Ty would find himself wondering whether life under an assumed identity had left him with a perverse attraction to the threat of discovery.

He heard her sigh, over the channel. ‘Forget I said anything,’ she muttered. ‘How long before we get to this chamber?’

‘Not long. Does it matter?’

‘No,’ she grumbled. ‘It’s just . . .’

‘What?’

She made an irritated sound. ‘I just can’t stand to think of those . . . machines hunting us through all this darkness.’

‘It’s not far,’ he replied, knowing she was referring to the images of swarm-components they’d occasionally watched since departing Ocean’s Deep.

The mouth of the shaft had shrunk to almost nothing, and now the only light came from the spider-mechs’ lamps, which cast sharp-edged pools of illumination against the walls of the shaft as they rushed by. Their conversation lapsed into silence, and Ty guessed Nancy was just as intimidated by the scale of the clade-world as most people were the first time they found themselves inside one.