"I can't and I won't believe Scar is somewhere underneath that," said Cormac, as ever revealing nothing of what he felt.
Gant disagreed. "He may be there still, but if he is you can guarantee he's not dead."
"Unlike some I could mention," said Thorn.
"I'm not dead," Gant pointed out. "How can I be? I'm a machine."
"This isn't helping," said Cormac before Thorn could formulate a reply. "Gant, why so certain he's not dead?"
Gant shrugged, turning so that the snout of his cradled APW pointed down into the slowly refilling crater. "As you know, he doesn't need to breathe oxygen. As I understand it, he is just more efficient when he is surrounded by a gaseous oxidant he can breathe in to burn his body's fuel. He can use other types of atmosphere, as we've already found out, and I know that without any atmosphere to breathe he can run on his body's fuel for days before simply going into stasis."
"And how do you know all this?" Cormac pretended interest in the answer.
"Mika. Not from her directly, but she's built up quite a database on dracomen." He nodded towards the crater. "He could be in stasis under there — or digging his way out even now."
"But do we wait to find out?" Thorn asked.
Cormac studied the two men while he considered the present situation. Maybe they should stay and wait to see if Scar would indeed dig his way out, because it seemed to Cormac that any other efforts were futile. The Theocracy would destroy the rebel army, either on the surface in straight combat, or underground — along with the rest of the population there — by kinetic missile. And it was all such a pointless drama: the squabblings of geese in a pen outside an abattoir. Cormac felt hopeless: he'd fallen so far he was not sure he could get back up again.
"Do we wait?" asked Thorn.
"To achieve what?" asked Cormac.
Perhaps this time the bitterness came through in his voice for both Thorn and Gant looked at once confused, then not a little apprehensive.
"We should return and help Lellan Stanton," said Thorn. "She's an effective commander, and committed to the Underground cause. She deserves whatever we can give her, little as that may be."
Only half-hearing what the man had said, Cormac continued to stare down into the crater. Then something clicked. "Lellan Stanton," he said, turning back to the pair of them.
"Yes?" inquired Thorn.
"You arrived here in John Stanton's ship Lyric II. But how did you get through undetected?"
"The ship had chameleonware. Pretty sophist—"
"And this ship is now up in the mountains somewhere?"
"Yes…"
Cormac turned away from the crater and set then a rapid pace back towards the ATV. Hurrying along behind, Thorn asked, "You're thinking of hitting that Ragnorak device with it, aren't you?"
Cormac let out a brief bitter laugh, abruptly halting and turning to face the other two. "Maybe I haven't painted a clear enough picture with what I already told you, or with what I passed on to Lellan. Perhaps that's because I left out one pertinent fact." He glanced at Gant. "Your partner understands, I think, but I'm not sure he's allowing himself to understand completely."
"Skellor?" said Gant, and Cormac thought the pale grimness overtaking the Golem's expression was a superb emulation of the real thing.
"Precisely, Skellor. Skellor subverted an AI dreadnought using Jain technology, and is direct-linked to a crystal matrix AI, and surviving. I told you this, and I told Lellan this, though I'm not sure just how much of it she understood."
"Enough to know he's dangerous," said Thorn.
"Dangerous," Cormac echoed leadenly.
"Tracking him down and stopping him will become an ECS priority — something like him cannot be allowed to exist," Thorn added.
"Yes," said Cormac. "And if Earth Central knew about him, it would already have ECS tracking him down and stopping him, as you put it. You see, the fact I've missed out is that only we few on this world actually know about Skellor. We few, and whoever else we may have spoken to here."
A look of horror slowly crept into Thorn's expression as he realized what Cormac was telling him. "He's coming here… he won't risk letting the news get out…"
"He killed the entire crew of the Occam Razor," reminded Gant.
Turning to continue on his way, Cormac added, "And he's coming here in control of that ship, one capable of incinerating everything on the surface of this world, so, frankly, fuck the stupid little rebellion here and its suppression. If Lellan's transmission doesn't get through, I have to get off this world and warn the Polity. And with me off and away from here, and Skellor knowing about it, maybe he won't be so inclined to hang around killing every human being in this entire system."
For a second or two Cormac stared at the clearing, and the two tracks disappearing into the flute grasses, and wondered which particular deity was crapping on him from a great height.
"Mika!" shouted Thorn, running forwards to stoop by the bloodied form sprawled on the ground. Signalling Gant to move over to one side, Cormac pulled his thin-gun and followed Thorn out into the clearing. Glancing at Mika, he knew she had been wasted: the position of the bloodstains informed him of the entrance and exit wounds, straight through her chest on the right-hand side. Poising his gun to one side of his face, he looked down at the tracks left by the ATV. Who was responsible? That girl? Fethan? Whoever it was, he would kill them.
"Look, stop fussing. I'm all right."
Cormac registered the voice, but recognizing it just did not coincide with any kind of reality for him. He watched, dumbfounded, as Thorn helped Mika to her feet. He then stepped forward and caught her under the elbow as she appeared about to collapse.
"I'm all right. I'm all right," she insisted.
"You've been hit," protested Thorn.
Cormac tried to reassess what he was seeing: the spread of blood around one hole under Mika's right breast and a greater leakage of blood around a larger hole ripped out of the back of her jacket, the insulating layers splayed out like a thistle head: entrance and exit wounds. Thorn clutched Mika as she slumped drunkenly against him. Cormac used the barrel of his gun and one finger to gently part the ripped fabric on her back. There was plenty of blood there, but underneath it a nub of purplish-pink flesh like a deep-rooted tumour.
"Physician heal thyself," he murmured, releasing the fabric and stepping back, as he remembered the creature he had killed in Skellor's laboratory — the creature Mika had later studied so intensively.
She glanced round at him, a certain amount of calculation creeping into her woozy expression. "It was soldiers, Theocracy soldiers."
At Cormac's shoulder Gant said, "Survivors from that lander, probably."
"You well enough to walk?" Cormac asked her.
Mika nodded.
"Then we follow them — at least they're heading in the right direction."
"What about Fethan?" asked Gant.
"He'll catch up, I assume."
Later, as it became apparent that Mika no longer needed anyone's help, and while Thorn moved ahead with Gant, Cormac leaned close to her and said, "Doctor, you've been taking some of the Outlinker's medicine?"
"I have," Mika replied.
"And it's good, I think?" he said.
"Better than good," said Mika, tapping her finger against the contents indicator on her oxygen bottle. The indicator had gone from green through orange to deep dark red, which meant that the bottle was completely empty. Cormac wondered if, when she had earlier changed her bottle for a new one, she had done this just to keep up appearances, or if, like Scar, she operated more efficiently when breathing a suitably gaseous oxidant.
Even though Speelan delivered his report with a terseness and rigidity of control that was almost machinelike, Aberil could feel fear coming through the link. Whether that fear was of the hooder still out there, or of the expected wrath at Speelan's loss of a lander and twenty-four men, Aberil could not make up his mind. In fact he felt no wrath, just curiosity at what their two captives — one of them obviously an Outlinker — would have to say for themselves. The Proctor, Molat, who had been brought to him earlier in the day, had provided no information of tactical value and was beginning to bore him. Only the story about the siluroyne had been interesting because Aberil had known the Proctor was lying about something, but sufficient pressure had only revealed Molat's silly guilt over the sacrifice of an underling. Obviously Proctor Molat had reached the limit of his advancement within the Theocracy.