Eisenhorn swayed, leaning on the handrail to stay upright. He clawed with his cuffed hands and found the injector sticking out of his neck. He tried to pull it out. His fingers were numb and wouldn’t work properly.

He fell to one knee, gasping. He finally managed to yank the injector out, but he could see it was empty.

He looked up at Gobleka. Davinch hobbled into view, dripping blood. He clutched Gobleka’s shoulder for support.

‘You get him?’ he asked through swollen lips.

‘I got him,’ said Gobleka.

Twenty-Two

TWENTY-TWO

Sark’s Instruments

‘Look away,’ said Drusher simply. He grabbed Macks, pushed her face into his shoulder, and fired. The shot went through Hadeed Garofar’s chest. The pinpricks of emerald light in what had once been the deputy’s eyes went out. His body fell back hard on the catwalk decking.

Macks looked up at Drusher. Her eyes were streaming with tears.

‘Those bastards,’ she whispered. ‘I am going to kill all of them.’

‘Keep moving! Keep moving!’ Voriet yelled.

More animations were approaching around the curved catwalk. One was a rotting thing, the others, two skeletal horrors that looked like they had been burned and fused. All crackled with green electricity. They all advanced slowly, one halting step at a time, but a fourth appeared behind them. It was Deputy Edde. Her eyes were blank, and her throat was a black mess of clotted blood.

She pushed past the skeletal things, advancing swiftly, with expressionless determination.

‘Go!’ shouted Nayl. He knocked Edde down with a single shot, then turned to run after the others. Drusher and Macks were almost carrying Voriet. He was murmuring in pain from the vigorous motion. There was no time to be gentle about it.

They came around the curve of the catwalk. There were two more animations right in front of them. One, the closest, was a stained brown skeleton draped in tatters of skin and disintegrating clothes. The other, a woman, was a mangled nightmare that looked like it had been systematically pulped with a hammer.

She was moving faster, blood leaking from her ruptured flesh. Drusher fired, but he was hasty, and his shot went wide. He fired again, and the mangled thing dropped bonelessly onto the deck.

But the skeletal animation was right on them. Macks yelled and shoved Drusher and Voriet out of the way. Voriet fell hard, jolting his arm and shrieking. The skeletal thing reached for Macks, clawing, but she evaded and turned her dive into a tumble that took her out from under its swinging arm. It turned instead on the helpless Voriet. Soil-caked finger bones grasped at him, flickering with the lambent ghosts of the flesh and tendons that had once been there. Voriet tried to crawl out of its path, dragging urgently with his working arm.