Thorn leant over the edge and fired. The purple flash disclosed the depth of the silo before rubble exploded from it on a hot flash. Something began screeching in the ruins behind them and they turned to see a couple of corvine birds flap raggedly into the sky. Thorn tracked their course for a moment, and then turned back to the silo. The rest of them turned with him and, as smoking stones rained down, they waited expectantly.

Eventually Thorn said, in a bored voice, ‘Nothing stirring.’

‘Try the next one,’ Cormac told him.

They circled the edge of the silo, well back from the corroded metal at its lip. Thorn made adjustments on his weapon.

‘If this doesn’t work, do we move on to the CTDs?’ he asked casually.

‘Have to,’ said Cormac.

He could see Thorn’s smile of satisfaction.

Shortly they reached the lip of the next silo.

‘Energy readings . . . difficult to locate,’ said Aiden.

Thorn moved forwards. ‘We’ll see—’

It shot out of the next silo like a white-hot jack-in-the-box. Cormac’s visor polarized, re-adjusted—and before him was the fantastic creation of some godlike glass-maker. It was a dragon, a real dragon. Then, the next moment, it was not.

The Maker seemed to be made of glass supported by bones that were glowing tungsten filaments. It had a long swanlike neck ending in a nightmare head that had something of a lizard and something of a praying mantis about it. Wings opened out, seemingly batlike at first, then taking on the appearance of a mass of sails. A heavy claw gripped the edge of the underground silo, or was it a hand shaped like the body of a millipede, with hundreds of leglike fingers? A glowing bullwhip tail thrashed the air, sprouted sails, fins, light. Cormac froze. The Maker was about five metres high. How had it gotten through a twenty-centimetre hole? Then he realized: it was not matter, it was energy; it could probably be any size. He had just never seen anything like it before. Was it Dragon’s ultimate joke to name itself thus, when the kind that had made it looked like this?