They crawled through crevices where sometimes Cormac found it necessary to turn his head sideways to manage to worm through. It was exhausting work, and during the first few hours Cormac stayed thoroughly aware of time passing. Reaching an area in which it again became possible to stand almost upright, he called a halt and they broke out supplies. He eyed the dracomen, who opened packets of what looked like raw meat and gobbled it down. He, Blegg, and the human Sparkind enjoyed more standard fare, and Cormac never knew coffee to taste so good.

‘Time is passing,’ Blegg noted.

‘It is,’ Cormac replied. ‘At our present rate of travel we should reach the pool Scar’s people detected—not long before the estimated breakthrough time of our friends above. We definitely need to be underwater by the time that autogun runs out.’

‘Yes, we certainly do.’

Cormac glanced at him. ‘Not feeling so fatalistic now?’

Blegg started to say something, then decided against it. ‘We should be moving on,’ he finally replied.

Cormac was worming through another particularly cramped stretch when he heard the distant sound of the autogun firing. Checking, it surprised him to see how much time had passed, and realized Blegg’s estimate not to have been far off—it took their attackers ten hours and fifteen minutes to break through. Cormac’s estimate of their own progress had not been so good. Even the dracomen were growing weary, and the pools not yet in sight.

‘Thirty yards to go,’ came Arach’s call from ahead.

‘Move!’ Cormac bellowed. ‘We need to get through here fast!’

Here, as soon as the CTD blew, they would be fried—the heat and energy of its blast funnelled down to them through the fissure. They all began moving a lot faster and with less regard for minor injuries. Cormac listened to the whoosh and chatter of the gun -waiting for that moment when it ceased. Abruptly Scar and Blegg, just ahead of him, were rising up onto hands and knees and progressing faster. He heard a splash, and yet another splash. As he too rose up from his belly into a crouch, Scar passed the ring end of a line back to him. He attached it to his winder—too easy to get lost under water that might quickly turn murky. Through his gridlink he raised the helmet and closed the visor of his envirosuit, and followed the others down into water lanced through with their envirosuit light beams.

About them the pool lay deep and wide, but soon the two dracomen ahead led them into a narrow intestinal pipe corkscrewing through the rock. Twice they surfaced in travertine sumps, and on a third occasion a glare of light passing through the water ignited the sump with rainbow colours.

‘The autogun just ran out,’ one of the human Sparkind commented.

They waited, then suddenly the water itself surged upwards, forcing them towards the ceiling.