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A scrawny African looked around the lounge with evident disgust. "We'd as soon as kill you all ..." There were mutters of assent from those around him. "But she doesn't want that. She said just take the bastard." He grinned. "It's your lucky day."

Skull struggled, tried to say something. Someone cuffed him around the head. Their leader grunted in their language and they kicked open the hatch and left the lounge, dragging Skull with them.

As soon as they were gone, Kat hurried across the room and closed the door. The lock was smashed. "Don't worry about it, Kat," Edvard said. "I'll fix it."

We sat down around the table in silence. I think each of us felt pretty much the same mix of emotions: a vast relief that we were still alive, a kind of retrospective dread of what might have become of us, and guilt as we thought back to the reassurances we had given Skull.

Eventually, Kat said, "So ... what do we do?"

Danny said, "We leave right now. Head for the trench as first planned. Lose them. We were lucky, just now.

Let's not push that luck. Yes?"

He looked around at each of us. Edvard and Kat nodded their agreement.

"Pierre?"

I thought of Samara, the ecstasy I had experienced with her just hours ago. At last I nodded. "Let's get the hell out of here," I said.

Danny drove, Kat in the cab beside him. Edvard retired to his bunk in an attempt to catch some sleep. I tried to sleep, but visions of Samara's body, and the look of terror in Skull's eyes as he was dragged away, kept me awake.

I moved to the rear of the truck and looked out through the observation screen. The sun was coming up ahead of us, casting our long shadow far behind. As I stared, I made out the glinting, glimmering shape of Samara's hovercraft, following steadily in our wake.

My stomach lurched with a sensation that was not wholly dread.

We made steady progress during the day, south-west towards the trench. The hovercraft tracked us all the way, a constant presence. I moved to the cab in the early afternoon. Danny glanced at me. "Still there?"

I nodded.

He eased the throttle fonvard gently and we accelerated. Kat slipped from the passenger seat and moved through the lounge. I sat beside Danny as we crawled over the sea-bed. Ahead, the sun was a blinding white explosion high above the horizon. All around us the sea-bed was barren, utterly lifeless.

Kat returned. "They're still there, keeping pace."

"What the hell do they want?" Danny muttered. "I mean, they could have taken everything we had back there."

"Perhaps Samara was being truthful," I said. "She wants us to travel together, for safety. And she just wanted Skull back, for her own reasons ..." It sounded lame, even as I spoke the words.

Danny shook his head. "I don't buy it. They want something."

Two hours later, as the sun sank and ignited the horizon as if it were touch-paper, Danny signalled ahead. I made out, perhaps a kilometre before us, a dark irregularity in the sea-bed, a mere line widening as it ran away from us.

We had arrived at the eastern end of the sea-bottom trench. Danny slowed and veered so that we were travelling parallel to the widening rift.

"I reckon Tangiers is around a hundred kays south-west of here," he said. "I'm going to stop here and just pray that the bastards keep on going."

He eased the truck to a halt beside the lip of the ridge. After the drone of the engine, the silence rang with its own eerie volume. We sat quietly as the truck ticked and cracked around us, and minutes later saw what we were secretly fearing.

To our left, the hovercraft moved into view, slowed and settled a couple of hundred metres from us.

Danny said, almost in a whisper, "I just hope Skull didn't tell them about the rig."

The very idea filled me with dread. I stared out at the hovercraft's array-encrusted carapace, expecting at any second a hatch to crack and Samara's men to come pouring out.

After ten minutes, with no discernible movement from the vehicle, I began to breathe a little easier.

We ate the evening