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With a sudden shock of cold air she was back on the surface, taking in great whooping gulps of air. A smooth grey shape bobbed under her arms. R’tk’tk made a series of clicks and began swimming towards the shore. ‘Didn’t anyone ever tell you that it’s dangerous to go swimming in a hurricane without a dolphin?’

Garrett stood for a long time in the darkness, listening to the Cythosi ship breathing around him. He struggled to make sense of the sounds.

Familiar, and yet... utterly alien. He struggled against an onslaught of strange memories.

Skuarte. The name sounded strange to him. A voice was screaming at him. Skuarte was... his Cythosi disguise. His cover. He stared at the transmat pad in his hand. Had he used this, or had he been brought here?

He looked at the huge cylinder he was carrying under his arm. The weapon...

With a roar he hurled the transmat pad aside and lumbered off down the corridor.

Confusion reigned on the Cythosi ship as shuttles docked. Waves of soldiers and technicians, just teleported in, milled about the command deck awaiting orders and arguing.

‘Silence!’ bellowed Mottrack. ‘I want to know what happened down there. Bisoncawl...’

‘We’re still not certain, General. Sabotage, certainly...’

‘The Doctor was out at the reactor with you.’

‘He never left my sight,’ said Bisoncawl. ‘Besides, he knows what a nuclear explosion down there would mean for the colony he’s been 168

fighting to save...’

‘Enough!’ barked Mottrack. ‘Then we must assume that the saboteur was Skuarte. For whatever reason, our agent is now working against us.’

‘General,’ one of the functionaries said timidly, ‘something’s happening... The teleportation systems are overloading...’

A tremor ran through the ship. The lights dimmed for a moment, and a peculiar hissing, groaning sound filled the room.

Bisoncawl strode across to the functionary and pushed him aside.

Bavril followed in Bisoncawl’s wake.

‘What is happening?’ Mottrack demanded.

‘There’s a massive influx on the teleports... It’s the holding tank!’

Bisoncawl unholstered his gun. ‘Three squad, with me,’ he barked.

Garrett gazed in wonder at the massive, transparent holding tank, thick with an amber liquid that shimmered and groaned with the swirling mass of quantum energy that had appeared within it. Slowly, shapes were beginning to appear in the maelstrom. Shiny, black ovoids. Giant eggs... They seemed familiar to him. Edgily he fingered the weapon.

His uneasy reverie was broken by the sound of heavy footfalls. His eyes flashed about him, and he disappeared at a run into a gloomy corridor.

Through Bisoncawl’s twenty-strong squad Bavril could just about make out the weird light dancing in the huge tank, gradually darkening as it gave way to hundreds of black shapes which pushed up the liquid level in the container until it was touching the tank’s thick ceiling.

‘Surround it, said Bisoncawl. The troops fanned out on his order.

He raised his communicator. ‘The eggs, General,’ he said.

‘They’re in the holding tank, just as planned. I don’t know why or how...’

‘Commander,’ one of the troopers grunted. ‘There’s something else in there.’

Bavril could see he was right. Something was moving – thrashing around in the viscous liquid.

A human hand slapped against the inside wall of the tank. Two hands. A man’s face pressed against the thick, transparent metal.

Bavril recognised him. He had visited Mottrack on the shuttle. He seemed to be screaming...

‘You,’ Bisoncawl barked, ‘open this thing. Get him out of there!’

A trooper climbed the ladder set into the side of the might,’ tank. He triggered a release mechanism, and a panel rose on the lid. He fished inside, gripped the man by his coat, and lifted him high into the air.

The man hung like a rag doll in the Cythosi’s hand, dripping thick, 169

yellow goo. It was in his eyes. In his mouth. The guard descended and laid the man at Bisoncawl’s feet.

‘General, it’s the Doctor,’ Bisoncawl said into