The Golem handed it over: a grey box the shape of a soap bar, with a single screen and ball control. Cormac turned it on the three of them, and saw how little of a reading he got from Aiden. There were separate heat sources at his chest and groin, but the rest of his body was almost invisible. Mika and Thorn were statues of molten glass on the screen. Cormac moved the ball control and the area covered by the screen expanded. Positions relative to the sensors on the end of the scanner were given in metres, in three dimensions. He tilted the scanner and saw that these measurements did not change. The device was keyed to a ground level, then. He nodded with satisfaction and put the scanner in his pocket. When Aiden moved to hand over Thorn’s proton gun, which lay on the back seat, Cormac held up his hand.

‘I won’t be needing that,’ he said, and got out of the car. In silence they watched him go. He walked away with the rucksack slung over one shoulder: a tourist out for a brisk hike.

As he reached the cave mouth, Cormac ran a quick diagnostic on shuriken. It might have been damaged by the android, or by the seeker bullets. The miniscreen pointed out a slight aberration in the programming sequences, and some minimal damage to the chainglass blades. Both defects were acceptable. The blades were still more than serviceable, and he reckoned the source of the slight aberration was Tenkian himself. No way had he programmed shuriken to intercept seeker bullets, then hang in the air like a bristling terrier.

Cormac entered the cave.

A rush of creatures that he at first took to be bats fled past him. A close inspection of them showed him that they indeed had batlike wings—but seemingly no body or head. There was also something insectile about them. The cockroaches and burrowing beetles on the floor of the cave were terran, but the blue-metal centipedal creatures that seemed to be preying on them were from somewhere else entirely. Cormac trudged on through fallen bodies like dry leaves and turned on Aiden’s scanner.

It indicated that there was something large about fifty metres ahead, and twenty metres further down. He advanced cautiously, wondering if he had been foolish to refuse the proton gun. He had not wanted it because shuriken seemed capable of dealing with anything the Maker might put in his way, and a proton weapon might well have brought the roof down on him. He paused for a moment and opened his rucksack. The box he took out was from Thorn’s kit—he suspected it had belonged to Gant. He opened the box and took out one drone light, initiated it, then tossed it into the air. It ignited and shot off ahead of him.