‘Everything points to here,’ he said, unable to contain his exasperation. ‘The records I found way back when, the spiral texts we discovered here, and even this Atn.’

Nancy said nothing, simply stood there waiting, while he stared at the Atn’s metal carapace. They were hardly elegant creatures: slow and ponderous, the size of a small car. There was, he suddenly thought, a lot of room in there.

He bent down again to read more closely at the creature. There was something, he was sure, wrong with its head. He put both hands under it and tried to lift it. It moved with surprising ease, as if it were nothing more than an empty casing.

He stood up again. ‘It’s in there,’ he declared, flushed with sudden and overwhelming certainty.

‘Excuse me?’

‘The smashed discs, the walled-off passageway . . . none of it makes sense unless there’s something inside the body.’

He stared at Nancy, his eyes bright, while she gazed back at him in mystified, thin-lipped silence. ‘How can you be sure?’

‘Frankly, I can’t. There’s just nowhere else it could be. Nobody’s been in here since that false wall was put up, so it has to be inside that thing.’

‘We don’t have time to break it open,’ Nancy replied decisively. ‘We’d need cutting tools for that, which means we’re going to have to get it back to the Mjollnir.’

Ty nodded. ‘Tell Martinez we’re coming out.’

The Atn lay with its head pointing in the direction of the main shaft, the bulk of its massive body pushed up against the wall on one side. Deciding to move it was one thing, but managing it was another. Ty got in touch with Cesar and told him what he was planning, while Nancy reopened the link with the Mjollnir and fielded Martinez’s angry demands.

Ty glanced down at the image of the swarm’s movements projected on the interior of his visor, and saw that some of its members were converging on the Mjollnir’s location a lot sooner than he had expected.

Nancy signed off and just stood there, looking tense and angry. ‘How long did Martinez give us?’ he asked her.

‘Thirty minutes, that’s it. And then they jump without us.’

‘I just talked to Cesar,’ Ty explained, ‘and he’s got an idea he wants to try.’

‘Fine. In the meantime, let’s get this thing hooked up to the spiders, then haul it the hell out of here.’