A purple flash lit the air as the Skinner was knocked flat. It howled in fury.

Just then, Ron leapt from behind the rock slab with his machete raised.

‘We’ll finish it!’ he bawled, charging towards the fallen monster. Janer tried another shot at Frisk as she dodged through the trees, missed, then swore and looked around. Boris and Roach had vanished, though he hadn’t seen them go. Keech suddenly rose and leapt out of hiding. The monitor fired once into the woods and a muted purple flash showered burning leaves some distance behind the escaping Frisk. Then he turned and looked over towards the Skinner. Ambel came running to stand at his side.

‘You’ll kill it,’ he said flatly. As Ambel nodded, Keech went on, ‘Then Frisk is mine.’

The monitor set off at a trot down the slope taken by Frisk.

Ambel went after Ron, who had nearly reached the fallen Skinner. Janer followed.

* * * *

It had all become just too much. The work offered by Svan had seemed attractive enough at the time: a month at most spent on a low-tech world where apparently Sable Keech had arrived, without backup. It had been described to him as a job combining protection of the client, who would meet them there, with the burning of a few natives, and which would culminate with the hit on Keech, for which they would receive a bonus on top of their usual daily rate. However, from that first moment of incredible luck, stepping out in the shuttle and seeing Keech right before them, it had all started to go terribly wrong.

First Nolan being blown away by a dead man, then a rhinoworm trying to bite their dinghy in half and deposit them in a leech-infested sea, then that screwup on Tay’s island, then the journey in the Prador spacecraft with those monstrous stinking creatures all around, then - after finding a suitable ship - the swim through the sea with leeches grating at his armour and other things trying to drag him down. He hadn’t believed the stories about Hoopers, until he’d seen how hard they really were to kill, until he’d seen what happened to the hardest and most professional of his comrades, until he’d seen Dime the . . . There had been no relief after that. He’d relaxed his guard for just a moment and lost two fingers to a thing out of an ancient cartoon. Then the prill . . . Tors screaming . . .

Shib ran blindly. He didn’t know where he was going. He just wanted to be anywhere that thing back there wasn’t. The sails, the prill and the frog whelks were bad, and the leeches worse still. His insides folded with shame at how he’d reacted, but there had been nothing else. He’d just been unable to move. Even the pain of that leech grinding into his face hadn’t unlocked his paralysis of fear. Now . . . now that thing . . .