Gobleka watched for a while, until the discomfort became too great. He picked up his assault weapon, left the gantry and walked up two flights of stairs to an upper platform. Below him, the words echoed around the tower.

On the platform, there was a modular container, a metal cargo pod from a commercial shift-ship. It was battered and rusty. He disengaged the lock and swung the door open. The smell of decay that wafted out was sickening.

Gobleka backed away, his hand clamped over his nose and mouth. Organic waste fluid trickled out over the container’s sill. He left the door wide open.

He waited. Then he turned his back on the container and sat down on the platform edge beside the head of the stairs.

Below him, the words grew louder. A light began to glow from the gantry below. It throbbed and grew steadily brighter. The machine hum in the tower grew louder.

After a while, he heard a knock and a scrape as things stirred inside the battered cargo pod. He did not look around.

Nor did he look around, a few minutes later, when the first dragging, shuffling footsteps moved past him towards the stairs.

‘So,’ said Drusher, ‘not that I’m saying I’m unhappy about it or anything, but how come you’re not dead?’

Nayl was leading them up the staircase towards the massive girder frame under the Loom. He glanced back.

‘I got shot, magos, I fell,’ he said. ‘I survived both.’

‘Simple as that?’

‘Luck is never simple,’ replied Nayl. ‘Jaff got me in the back with a las-shot. My jack armour stopped the worst of it, but the thing with jack armour is that it dissipates the force so it can’t penetrate. The impact knocked me right over the rail.’

‘That’s luck?’ asked Drusher.

‘I fell,’ said Nayl. ‘Quite a long way. But, as you may have noticed, there’s a lot of machinery in this place. I bounced off some gigantic flywheel. Banged up my head and my shoulder. Then I got hooked up. By the strap of my rifle. Wound up just hanging there from a cog, throttled by my own gun-strap.’

‘And that’s luck?’

‘Well, it broke my fall,’ said Nayl. ‘If it hadn’t been for the cog, I’d have gone straight down to the bottom. I waited as long as I could, waited for the cog to cycle around, then cut the strap and climbed down some gears onto a platform.’

‘It’s very interesting what you call “lucky”,’ said Drusher.

‘I’m still alive, aren’t I?’ asked Nayl. ‘That’s the lucky part.’

Drusher was fairly sure Nayl was downplaying the cost of his escape. From the way he was limping, the way he was holding himself, it was clear he was carrying some considerable injuries.