This time, however, he realized there would be no new Blegg. Now the truth in all its raw and painful detail stood open to him, just as his facsimile human body now lay open to his internal inspection and under his absolute control. There could be no more Blegg because a certain point had been irrecoverably passed. Time, he felt, for this to be made known.

He gazed across the dank cave in which they now found themselves. Cormac still lay unconscious, and Blegg knew that on some deep level the agent probably fought against waking. Thorn had gone the way of Gant—both of those human Sparkind soldiers dead now, both of the men who had joined Cormac at Samarkand.

Blegg watched his fellow agent, waited, and remembered his many deaths.

Consciousness returned abruptly and painfully and the first clear image in his mind was of Thorn’s face melting apart before him. For a moment he could not equate the image with anything he knew, then the full impact of memory hit him.

My decision.

Cormac opened his eyes, ramping up his light sensitivity in the gloom. He lay against a pack which in turn was propped against a rock. He realized his visor was open, but was breathing okay so did not hurry to close it. The planet’s air mix could sustain human life, with only its temperature being too high on the surface. Cool down here.

He sat upright. ‘What’s the situation?’

Too abrupt a move, for he became suddenly dizzy and nauseous. A huge spider tracked across his vision over to the left -Arach—then Blegg loomed before him.

‘We lost many,’ said the old Oriental. ‘There are only seven dracomen with us down here, though five others made it into the jungle. Three human Sparkind surviving, one of them probably not for much longer. Six Golem Sparkind too, some of them badly burnt but still functional. One remaining autogun and Arach.’

‘The enemy?’ Cormac asked.

‘We collapsed a thousand feet of cave behind us. If they want to kill us, I suspect a near-c projectile could penetrate this deep. However, our scanners can hear them burrowing, so evidently they still want to capture us alive. At their present rate it will take them perhaps ten hours to reach us.’

Cormac checked the timings in his gridlink: fifteen hours before the NEJ and the Haruspex could reach the USER, and he suspected that whatever happened there would be concluded very quickly—one way or the other. He slowly heaved himself to his feet and looked around.