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One of the prisoners was standing above her, his face red, eyes that could Ve looked mischievous now looking dull and blank. He shot Fettal once again, in the hip this time. The crack of the laser discharge echoed round the camp.

'I'm going to leave you there to die, you K'Arme bitch. I'm going to watch your blood boil in the heat. How does it feel?'

Sam stared up at him in confused elation at her escape. 'Help me with Tanhith!' she cried.

Tanhith stirred at his name, and twisted himself round with a grunt of pain.

His eyes focused on the man with the gun. 'Sost - is Dwynaar all right?' he muttered.

Sost looked back, dispassionately.'Not very.'

Sam tried to ease Tanhith back. Fettal's breathing was ragged and with an edge to it that rubbed Sam up the wrong way. The woman was clearly in agony, but Sam couldn't bring herself to feel any pity. She concentrated on Sost.'I said, help me with him!'

Sost's eyes were stone-cold in his hot face. 'Help him yourself, you freak.

You made all this happen. I'm going to fetch Dwynaar. Show him this dying bitch. Show him I got her. Then we'll decide what to do with you.'

Suddenly Sam clutched her head in dizziness. The world seemed to swim around her, her vision blurred and deadened; then a crackle of energy seemed to jump-start her senses. The first thing she noticed was that the sun had moved round in the sky, the clouds were different. Even some of the men she'd seen milling round in the background had moved, vanished, as if into nothing. Again, recent events overcrowded her mind in a series of freeze frames, and a terrible pressure built up behind her ears. Tanhith was clutching his head. Was it affecting him in the same way?

Suddenly she realised Sost was screaming in rage. He was looking at Fettal. The blood that had dribbled through her uniform in a spot was suddenly an enormous stain, and her breathing had stopped.

'No! You're not allowed to die yet! Dwynaar.

Sam watched as Sost stumbled off towards the meeting hall, calling his friend's name, thankfully without another glance in her direction. She turned anxiously to Tanhith to see if his body had suffered in the same way. But his wound seemed to have begun to heal. The damage to his back still looked awful, but it was a better kind of awful than before.'Time...' she breathed to herself.

Then the ragged breathing started up again. Sam spun round to see Fettal's eyelids fluttering, her face contorted in pain. She gasped in surprise, then thought hard. 'Frozen in time for a few seconds?'

This place was breaking down. Time was running out, running amok as it left. Pushing Tanhith forward, holding on to Fettal...

With a twist of fear, she wondered how it was affecting her, looking at her sunburnt hands, checking for wrinkles rubbing her fingers along her face.

Then she heard Tanhith stirring again and helped him to his feet. As he paused to catch his breath and deal with the pain, she looked at the helpless eyes pleading up from Fettal's sweaty face.

She wouldn't tell Sost that the woman still lived, she decided, her mouth set in grim determination. That was all. That was all she could do.

Gently, she helped Tanhith to stumble away from the blood-soaked ground towards shelter.

***

Sangton gasped as the dizzying -wave of nausea broke over him and the world speeding along outside the land transporter seemed to slow down, to twist and undulate around him. His senses seemed shrouded in grey, punctuated with flashes of brilliant colour, colours so vivid and intense he couldn't even think of names to describe them.

When it passed, he realised the sun was now glaring down from a new vantage point. The clouds had changed, their feathery mass shifting round towards the west, stretching up for miles into the pink sky.

And the two specks in the distance were now directly in front of them.

Huge, powerful-looking alien creatures, dark brown, the sunlight glittering on - Surely that had to be armour, not skin? The huge heads