It affected him more than he would have expected; the analytical part of his mind momentarily swamped by the emotional reaction. His views, through the robots, were clear – in fact provided much more clarity than through his own eyes – but besides hearing, they lacked one other sense. The robots did not possess a sense of smell and, on entering the hydroponics room the smell of shit assailed him, in the trousers of those who had died or from their ruptured intestines, accompanied by other warm butcher’s-shop odours. Steam spread around the fresh corpses, their blood beaded the air.

He studied Hannah, trying to gauge her response. She stared at the dead, nodded to herself, before she went over to one man who had been neatly riveted through the forehead, picked up his weapon and then pulled the spare clips from his belt. Saul retrieved the gun from another corpse, and saw Braddock also collecting weapons and ammunition.

‘Low-impact ammunition,’ Braddock observed. ‘It won’t last.’

‘They won’t know what happened here,’ Saul replied, then instructed the robots to move ahead of them to the next bulkhead door, the spraybot again leading the way. ‘Smith rightly assumed that the cams going out meant we were located here and he sent these men to seize us. They only went over to automatic weapons when they realized what was attacking them, so the tasers were for us.’

‘He wants us alive, then,’ said Hannah.

Saul nodded. ‘That won’t last either, once he has some idea what I’m up to. The next ones will come equipped with ceramic rounds and probably something stronger.’

Just then the whining in his head faded to leave a hollow emptiness. Obviously Smith had just decided to fix his communications problem, which meant he would be kept in constant contact with the next soldiers he sent against them.

‘He knows something’s wrong,’ Saul said. ‘The EM field is now out.’

‘Probably others further in heard the shooting.’

That seemed likely.