“All plans require urgent acceleration, including full provision for the extraction of valuables,” said the translator’s voice, and some kind of switch had been thrown to give it a lower, ominous tone. Dr. Rat had relaxed its extraordinary posture but was still standing tall—defiant, Lee read. And, behind that, frightened.

“You want out now, and you want to bring your stuff,” she summarized.

“Your surmise is admirably accurate,” came the translated sentiments of Dr. Rat.

“We can do that,” Mal said confidently. Lee badly wanted to qualify her friend’s words. This was high-stakes poker, and Mal was bluffing on a hand of utter junk. Still, Dr. Rat seemed to accept the promise without question. It bunched itself, the layered clothes concertinaing about its lithe body, and then bolted almost straight up through the hatch in the ceiling.

The translator cowered when Lee approached. There was intelligence in its eyes and manner, rather than it being some lobotomized cyborg. In the reddish light from the opening above, its shaved head looked blotchy and misshapen. The edges where its flesh met the metal implant were ragged and badly healed.

“Does that hurt?” Lee asked. The creature seemed to understand, although it flinched back from her voice. Perhaps the relatively low voice of a human sounded unpleasant and threatening to its cropped ears. Then it said—no, recited—“We are all in pain together.” The phrase sounded like a piece of folk wisdom or a politician’s campaign slogan. She remembered the rodents who’d been reclining in luxury when they’d jumped through with Dr. Khan. They hadn’t looked like they were in pain, but she could imagine them mouthing the words to the suffering masses below. Or perhaps she was inventing all that out of whole cloth and the cultural fine print was too small for her human eyes. It left her with a queasy feeling, nonetheless.

Then a cable dropped down, and both she and the translator twitched. It was segmented with regular nodules and, before its end had stopped swinging, rats began crawling down it, nose first. Nose to tail, nose to rump, a grimly determined procession until Mal and Lee were surrounded by a host of scrawny, hairy bodies.