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‘Your optimism gives me cramps, Brindle.' Nevertheless, she knew the Eddy babysitters stationed on Llaro had to be strictly bottom-of-the-barrel recruits if General Lanyan hadn't even needed them as cannon fodder against the drogues. She didn't expect there'd be much in the way of shooting.

Nikko leaned over the two pilot seats, squirming with anxiety. ‘Did you send a message telling my parents that I'm aboard? Have they answered? Has anyone responded at all?'

Only a whisper of static came back. ‘No questions, no demands, no “happy to see you”. Everybody must be playing hide-and-seek.' Tasia looked down, checking the coordinates. ‘That's damned peculiar. The settlement and base should be right down there.'

‘We're coming over the horizon now. We'll be in view in just a few minutes.'

As they flew over it, Tasia's eyes drank in the details of what remained of the colony town. The permanent settlement and colourful temporary camps had been smashed flat, materials strewn about as if a tornado had hit; the croplands for miles around were burned or excavated. ‘Shizz, what the hell happened down there?'

New termite-mound towers and lumpy structures had sprung up everywhere, and a large trapezoidal frame that must have been a newly built transportal stood out in the open. The Klikiss ruins were no longer ruins, but a full-fledged metropolis five times the size of the old towers she had seen on her first visit here. Dark forms like gigantic bugs moved about on the landscape. Some of the creatures climbed down from the alien towers, others took wing and flew.

Tasia suddenly remembered a bizarre piece of news that the Mage-Imperator had sent via green priest to King Peter. ‘By the Guiding Star, those are the Klikiss! They came back to Llaro. They--'

‘They demolished the whole damn colony,' Robb cried. ‘That explains why nobody's answering.'

‘I'd rather be facing the Eddy watchdogs.'

Nikko gripped the back of the copilot's chair to keep his balance. ‘We can't assume everybody's dead. We don't know what happened. Maybe there are survivors. We have to check!'

‘Take a look and draw your own conclusions.'

‘No! We don't know enough! Some people might have gotten away. A lot of them. We can't just give up.'

‘I wasn't giving up,' Tasia said. ‘Not yet. But I don't think it's a good idea to go ask those bugs what happened. They look too damned much like the black robots. And I've got issues with those things.'

Robb leaned forward. ‘What's that? Something shooting into the air.'

Dozens of small boxy ships launched from the burned fields, heading toward the Osquivel. The ground was covered with the angular craft, and they took flight like wasps from a rattled nest. ‘Aw, hell, now they're after us.'

Robb was already turning them in a high-G loop. Tasia threw herself in front of the weapons controls.

‘We can't just run away.' Nikko looked very pale. ‘We don't know… we don't know for sure--'

Seeing how the creatures had wiped out the settlement, she decided there was no point in negotiating. She started taking potshots and blasted a pair of individual craft into debris. Another wave of the component craft streaked after them like bees.

The individual Klikiss units returned fire, shooting a high-intensity plasma burst unlike anything Tasia had ever seen. By making an extreme course correction that threw Nikko against the wall, Robb avoided the blast. He accelerated and dodged, scanning the wrinkled landscape, but saw no good place to hide among the arroyos and rock outcroppings.

‘You've got no reason to complain about not having enough targets, Tamblyn. Stop gawking and keep firing.'

Tasia responded with a vengeance, three shots and three more destroyed Klikiss ships. ‘Hey, our new weapons work like a charm.' The alien vessels closed in, and four of them opened fire at once. A powerful bolt scored the underside of the Osquivel's hull; another grazed their engines, making Robb's cockpit instruments jump wildly.

Pulling himself forward against the heavy acceleration,