The stretch of wall between Villaeus and his two comrades burst open, and a second creature surged through.

SKI: Fucking PF!

Villaeus rose off the floor, one of the second beast’s limbs tightening around his body like a hawser. He gripped his pulse-rifle in one hand, constantly firing into his attacker’s hideous face. One of his legs suddenly detached at the knee, and in a blurred movement Chaline saw the boot stripped away, cloth, skin, muscles, lengths of tendon, bloody individual footbones taken in different directions.

‘I said run!’ Villaeus screamed. One side of his face had now disappeared, then his right arm and pulse-rifle was jerked from his body. The creature took both rifle and arm apart with equal precision and alacrity. With his left hand the trooper groped desperately for something at his belt. Breaking out of horrified fugue, Chaline turned away as, beyond the monster, purple fire flared again and again, and the roar of proton fire rose and fell. She rounded a corner—to her left more explosions. Then the wall blew in ahead of her and she thought for a moment it was all over, but Judith and Smith rolled neatly through and came quickly upright.

‘Keep moving!’ Judith yelled.

SK1: Detonating now.

The explosion from behind blew Chaline down on her face. Before she could get up, the other two dragged her upright and hurried her on. A sulphurous stink permeated the air, which probably meant a dome breach and the outside atmosphere was leaking in. Time to go.

End it.

Cormac opened his eyes. His heart pounded and he shook with an adrenaline rush. He supposed it no wonder that people once became addicted to such memcordings. You could experience anything: sex of any kind, the actual act of murder lifted from the minds of killers sentenced to death, even the moment of death itself should you so wish. And all without physical danger—though of course some subsequently went mad. Now addiction was simply a matter of choice, for available technologies could root out most of its causes.

‘Chaline’s observation was apposite,’ he observed. ‘It was quite similar to the creature guarding the tunnel down to the Maker’s escape pod on Samarkand. Like that one too, these creatures were designed for just one purpose: to go through that base just as fast as possible and acquire everything there.’

‘One notable difference,’ said Asselis Mika, gazing at him steadily. ‘These ones could heal themselves as fast as those calloraptors Skellor made. That means they were a direct product of Jain technology. The one on Samarkand, I would say was the result of technology learnt at one stage removed from Jain tech—nowhere near as robust, nor ultimately as treacherous.’