And then the challenge came that she’d been waiting for all this time. A voice snapping out for them to halt, in English. They kept moving until he called again: not Rove but his thug.

“What’ve you got in the box?” came the voice. “You, Brainiac, I know you can translate. No point playing dumb with me.”

Then the calm, feminine voice of the translator’s implant. “This is hazardous waste requiring disposal with the utmost of delicacy.”

“Sure it is,” said Rove’s man. “And not a human scientist at all, then. Only, I’ve just been by the lab, Squeaker. On account of how I saw Doc Khan was working late, and how I’d got hold of a dozen packs of Benson & Hedges and was up for sharing. So imagine my surprise when the cameras showed Dr. Khan but my eyes didn’t agree. Open the box.”

“Hazardous and dangerous to the utmost extent,” the translator noted calmly, though Kay could hear Dr. Rat’s fevered chittering over it. “Inadvisable in any degree to access the containment. I raise all manner of protests!”

“Can it,” said the thug.

Then something impacted the top edge of the crate—the man’s boot, she realized. The crate tipped sideways, the lid came off, and she spilled out across the metal floor. For a brief moment her uppermost emotion was sheer relief that she wasn’t crunched in any more.

Then she looked up and saw the man and his gun—levelled steadily even though he was bent under the low ceiling. There were half a dozen rat troopers behind him, all with their nasty flechette shooters that would doubtless turn her and the other fugitives to jam. She crouched behind the upended crate, not that it would help.

“Dr. Khan,” the thug said. “Over here, now.”

Dr. Rat yattered something, but instead of the translator paraphrasing it, the creature’s spindly hand grabbed Khan’s wrist and dragged at her, trying to get her further down the low passageway.

“Not going to help,” she said, but it was still tugging, its nails sharp in her skin.

“Dr. K,” the thug said, and his hench-rats were muscling past his legs, screeching their own warnings.

Dr. Rat cast a look back. She saw the dim light glitter on his monocle before he leapt onto the toppled crate and went for what she had assumed was a decorative broach on his outlandish outfit.

The translator beside her shuddered. It clung to her arm, twitching and spasming. The rat troopers had the same reaction, dropping their weapons as they writhed, clawing at their rubbery masks. Kay could hear a high, tinny sound, like the whine of something electrical. Dr. Rat brandished the broach triumphantly.

“Know that I consider you something akin to a niece or distant cousin!” the translator passed on, to Kay’s absolute bafflement.