She still expected him to open fire, but he abruptly lowered his weapon. The robot was now behaving very strangely, as with one sharp foot it wrote something on the mud bank. After a pause, he scrambled down the bank and waded forward to take a look. Hannah heaved herself to her feet, leg aching again, and waded after him. They both peered down at the mathematically precise letters.

‘PWRFL GOVT COMLF TRCKD U THRU ME. J.’

‘Janus?’ she gasped.

‘Are you?’ Saul asked the robot.

The spider dipped briefly in acknowledgement.

‘Powerful government comlife?’ she queried.

He glanced at her. ‘That would be something you should know more about than I do.’

‘NET UNSAFE MST EXIT’ the thing now wrote.

‘How?’ he asked.

‘DWNLD’

‘Download?’

Again that dip of acknowledgement.

‘We needed it to do so anyway, and we’ve got the right place for it,’ said Hannah shakily. That was the next stage, after the installation of further hardware in Saul’s head.

‘The secondary processor,’ he observed. Then he addressed the spider, ‘You’re fully loaded to this readergun?’

‘NO’

‘How do I download you?’

‘THRU U BUT COMLF WIL KNO LOCA’

‘I have to tell you when . . .

‘BECON’ Janus scribed in the mud, then something crackled inside the spider and, smoking, it sank down into the dyke water, jerked once and lay still.

‘Beacon?’ He looked round at Hannah.

‘Janus must have found you by following the beacon in your processor,’ she said. ‘I can only think it’s shut down now, probably by Janus, and that you’ll be able to find some way to start it running again.’

He nodded. ‘Yeah, but before then we need to find a mobile surgery.’ He stepped over the now burnt-out robot and led the way on along the dyke. As she followed, Hannah’s foot kicked against something in the water, and for a moment she gazed down in horror at the skull she had brought to the surface – the thing wearing a wig of yellow silkweed. She then saw bones embedded in the dyke bank, all the way along the bank for as far as she could see.

6

The Stars Are Ours