Macks tore free from his grip. The Scipio bounced once. She dived for it. It bounced a second time. She grabbed at it, and missed it by a hair’s breadth.

It disappeared over the edge of the deck.

She knew she was done. The animations were right on her. She curled into a ball, her legs tucked under her, her hands over her head, and waited for the horror to end her.

Nothing happened.

She looked up. Cronyl and the lurching skeleton had moved past her, ignoring her. They were making straight for Gobleka.

He stared at them in horror, eyes wide.

‘Back off! Back off!’ he yelled. He tried more un-words as he wrestled to get his rifle off his shoulder.

Macks got down as flat as she could. Still yelling un-words, Gobleka hosed Cronyl and the skeleton with bursts of autofire. The furious volley ripped across the control deck stations, but left the advancing animations untouched.

Gobleka turned to run. Macks saw his staring, violet eyes as he broke to flee.

She had never seen terror like it.

‘Why not her?’ he cried. ‘Why not her?’

Gobleka ran to evade the reaching hands of Cronyl and the skeleton thing, and found Audla Jaff, slack and loose-limbed like a hanged man, advancing from the opposite direction.

Her ruined, dead face blank and tilted to one side, Jaff embraced him. A moment later, Cronyl and the skeleton reached him too, their hands on his back, on his shoulders.

Gobleka began a scream, but it faltered and broke. Green sparks, like a raging swarm of insects, whirled around him, spreading from each point of contact, each clasping hand. As the sparks spread, Gobleka vanished. His clothes shredded away and became dust. His living skin turned to paper and withered like powder and ash. Beneath, tissue and muscle and fat rendered down, exposing bones that deformed like melting wax.

In less than ten seconds, Goran Gobleka was reduced to a few misshapen bones and a deformed, stained, screaming skull that fell to the deck between the three animations, and lay smouldering and sparking.

The animations stood over the steaming heap for a moment, then moved on without reaction, disappearing down the curve of the platform.

Macks rose to her feet, shaking.

‘Marshal?’

She turned. Nayl was limping towards her. He looked like he had been kicked and punched repeatedly. He was carrying a laspistol.

‘What happened?’ he asked.

She brushed locusts away from her face.

‘I think the rules just changed, Nayl,’ she replied.

‘You have to stop, sir,’ Voriet said. ‘You have to stop this now.’

He was slumped against the bars of the cage, too tired to do anything except speak, too weary to brush away the locustforms that were settling on him and crawling on his face.

‘Listen to him!’ Drusher yelled through the bars.

+This is a chance. The Cognitae have handed it to me. I won’t waste it.+