"All right," said the voice. "And just how do you reckon on getting across the lawn? We can't shut off the masers, and the ground floor's sealed tight."

The message laser flashed out a long complicated story.

"No way!" the voice called.

"Screw you, arsehole," Suzi shouted.

"Throttle down, gal," said Teddy, and even he sounded tired. The message laser flashed once more.

"All right," said the voice. "Listen good. Only Victor may use the cannon. If one of those plasma shots lands anywhere but on a maser you are dead."

"And up yours, too," said Teddy. "OK, let's get the Rockwell together."

Eleanor started kicking again, her legs like lead. Teddy and Victor were moving forwards, towards the shore.

"Touching ground," Teddy said. He was five metres short of the lawn.

Eleanor came up beside him, toes prodding the viscous lake bed.

"Let's have it, gal."

Victor drifted up on the other side. He and Teddy started muttering at each other as they mated the Rockwell's cable to the power unit by touch alone.

With the Rockwell gone, Eleanor thought she'd be able to fly. She weighed nothing at all.

Victor stuck the Rockwell's targeting imager over his right eye, its cable coiling down below the water.

"Ready," he said.

Eleanor saw that Des, Suzi, and Nicole had swum up level with her. Unidentifiable, blind tumours of crêpe fabric. Behind them, on the shore where the trees bordered the lawn were two swift-moving red blobs. No, her mind cried. Enough, we've had enough. "Sentinels," she called out, voice rasping in her throat. "Sentinels, they're coming."

Victor fired the first plasma bolt. A solar-bright fireball tearing through the night, overloading Eleanor's photon amp. A near-ultrasonic whine ending in a stentorian thunderclap. One of the manor's chimney stacks exploded.

The sentinels were sprinting for the lake shore. Eleanor watched the two people closest to them churn about, trying to reach their weapons. Steam billowed up around one of them as the frantic motion lifted their shoulders out of the water. Eleanor started to swim breaststroke. Suzi had said the Braun was waterproof, although she had no idea if it would work in the water.

Both sentinels leapt together.

MASER ATTACK, Eleanor duckdived fast.

Surfacing, just in time to hear the second concussion as more of the manor's masonry was vaporised. Three more to go. A locust-swarm of slate fragments tumbled through the air high above Wilholm.

The sentinels were in the water, two whirlpools of surf. Des was screaming. Eleanor headed for the nearest conflagration. Couldn't even remember if she'd recharged the Braun.

MASER ATTACK. Plunging.

A sentinel shrieked in mortal terror, a keening that sliced right through Eleanor. The sound electrified, freezing her limbs. What in God's name could a sentinel possibly fear? She saw it disappear below the surface of the lake, sucked down backwards in a maelstrom of bubbles. Something was floating inertly where it'd vanished, undulating with the swell.