the Department of Adaptation.'
Another of the creatures stiffened at so public a rebuke.
'Our remaining plankton farms at the south pole are now reporting ninety per cent harvest failure, despite the successful seeding of the latest heat-resistant strains.'
'Then your new strains of plankton were obviously not nearly heat resistant enough,' hooted the council member who had been singled out for criticism a moment earlier.
Sharp beaks clicked angrily at each other, but Molly's vision lacked the means to translate so quickly.
'There is another way,' announced one of the creatures. There was something about this one. Molly probed and got back the answer. This creature was the source of the secret recording of these events, the one who had passed it on to hands that would have been regarded as outlaws by the others within this chamber. 'We can make a truce with the faction of the healers. They have a plan to regenerate the heart of the world, to inject the core with modified bacteria to begin to clean the atmosphere, to-'
'For shame,' hissed the giant bull creature whose entry had started the meeting. 'Do we have a hundred generations of life left to us to wait for such a wild scheme to bear fruit? Our land is dying now. To hear such defeatist anti-science sentiments from one of our own council. Our people strive to master base nature, not surrender to it. Would you invite disease back into our world as well? Would you take the cells of predators from our zoo's refrigerated vaults and release extinct killers back into the land? Would you turn off our sky control and allow superweather systems to ravage the surface without check?'
'You can see about you what wonders our industry has wrought,' argued the dissenter. 'When land temperatures climbed burningly hot we adapted our bodies to live under our oceans, but now even the seas our grandparents swam in, the seas we have farmed for centuries, have dwindled to a barren desert with a shrinking lake at its centre. This chamber once rested secure on the seabed and now look at it.' The dissenter raised a tentacle to point at the ceiling. 'The walls of our sanctuary hum with the buzz of insects swarming over stagnant water. How shall we adapt our bodies to survive next? Will we become sand serpents wriggling through the wastes of the dunes? Is that the fate you wish for the children of our mighty civilization, to hunt rodents through the deserts we ourselves have wrought, only dimly remembering that they were once masters of machines and the keepers of ancient wisdom?'
'There is food enough,' said the giant bull. 'You know of what I speak. Food enough to last our people for the handful of generations we require to lay the plans to reach our final sanctuary.' As the creature tapped the desk in front of him, the image of a blue sphere flickered into view, bands of white clouds swirling above seas and green landmasses.
Molly focused in closer on the rotating globe. A verdant, ocean-covered celestial sphere. Green fields. Oh sweet Circle! Catosia hadn't fallen to a horde of polar barbarians. Quatershift hadn't been invaded by the bear- pulled sleds of any northern warlord. These invaders were from one of the celestial spheres neighbouring the Earth – a devastated dead world of sand and dunes. Dunes… all the images of Kaliban produced by Coppertracks' observatory rose up at once. Kaliban. As if confirming her epiphany, the vision running across her mind shifted to a scene of black cones lifting away from the endless wastes on beams of light, great shell-like vessels to cross the celestial darks and burrow into the poles of their new home – the valuable polar territories, always the last land to heat up and lose its life-giving moisture while the world's bounties were depleted. Locusts and despoilers, indeed.
Molly's vision started to shift onto something new, but the scene fragmented before it fully formed, broken by Purity's scream as the window looking out at Tock House's inner courtyard shattered, the dark shape that had been pressing its face to the pane judging its prey located.
Something black and heavily muscled swung through the gap. Molly stared dumbly at the creature for a second, frozen by the splintering of the vision that had been filling her head and paralysed by the shock of the brute's sudden appearance. Taller than a man by a head, the bipedal creature appeared both rangily thin and densely muscular at the same time, moving across the floor with the deadly predatory grace of a flicked whip. The intruder's skin was dark and oily, covered in chitin-like plates and glistening like a blood-wet blade, the slyly darting skull a flat, shockingly eyeless oblong of bone, a fanged mouth leering under a cluster of nostril slits. It moved on all fours like the killer apes Molly had idled afternoons away watching in Middlesteel Zoo, but quicker, long talons on its fingers clicking on the floor where they briefly gashed the wood. The womb mages of Cassarabia were said to be masters of growing horrors inside the wombs of their slaves, and if they had captured a demon and crossbred it with a mantis and a bat – then spiced the mix with the instincts of a shark given legs – something like this thing might have puddled out of some poor unfortunate's thighs in the caliph's slave pens.
Purity was retreating to the far side of the bedroom but the intruder wasn't after the ragamuffin – it flung itself at Kyorin, lashing at a shield of energy cast by the traveller, invisible save where the beast's claws struck, sparks flying off. Molly dived for her sideboard and her purse gun as Kyorin and the beast rolled across the floor.
Molly was pulling her pepperbox-shaped pistol out of the drawer when two other eyeless fanged faces appeared hissing at the broken window, one of them poking its own big black pistol through into the room. The realization that these things hunted in packs struck Molly like a lead cosh as she fumbled for a crystal charge to prime her gun. Don't feel the fear, don't feel the – a shadow lengthened across the room and the two beasts clinging to Tock House's wall disappeared with a wet slap.
'About bloody time.' Molly snapped the purse gun shut and shot Kyorin's attacker in the back, dead in its spine. Its head turned slowly towards her and she saw the blood running down the thing's fangs. Green blood.
Kyorin had stopped struggling; his shield broken under the storm of claw strikes. With a yell of anger, Purity grabbed a poker from the room's cold fireplace and ran at the beast. The creature didn't even look around at the girl as it batted her and sent her flying across the floor. Molly broke her pistol, ejected the shattered charge and reached for another shell. On the creature's back a bubbling froth of blood had congealed as hard as stone, closing the wound. A purse pistol was no thunder-lizard gun, but even so – she had just shot this thing square in its spine. No street thief in Middlesteel could have taken such a shot and survived. The creature turned the eyeless plate of its skull towards her and raised its hand, wagging a finger disapprovingly – the scalpel-sharp talon flashing in the half-light, a coughing rasp laughing mockingly at her. Circle on a stick, the damn thing was sentient. How lethal did that make it?
In the corner Purity pulled herself to her feet. She was a game young bird, tougher than she looked, obviously. Molly squeezed the trigger and her pistol's clockwork mechanism struck the fresh charge, but there was no explosion. Misfire! No time to clear it. Arms outstretched, the creature leapt at her, an arc of death springing across the bedroom. Only to meet a wall of flesh as the taut bare-chested form of Duncan Connor slammed the beast off balance. It rolled over and brought both its long muscled arms up, fingers twitching like miniature sabres, marking the location of its new prey with a series of sonar clicks out of its throat. Duncan charged first, roaring his anger and scooping a knife-long shard of broken glass from the floor. Springing forward, the beast tried to regain the advantage of the fight, but it wasn't used to this. Prey ran, prey begged for life, it didn't attack first.
The ex-soldier drove a foot down into the creature's knee, ducking under its sweeping claws and seized the beast from behind. There was a quick flash of glass as Duncan slashed the creature's throat. The beast stumbled forward, the sudden fountain of blood slowing almost immediately as it congealed rock-hard. But whether it was healed enough to resume its attack was left to conjecture as Commodore Black kicked open the bedroom door.
'Hello, my bucko.'
The multi-barrelled deck-sweeper that had once graced the conning tower of the commodore's u-boat jolted with an eruption like a cannon and the creature was shredded and thrown across the room, flailing onto Molly's bed. The beast tried to move, spitting out a few guttural words in a language Molly didn't recognize – but then the words' meaning formed in her mind like an echo of the alien tongue. It was counting, reeling off a line of numbers before growing still. How could she possibly understand what this terrible creature was saying, and what did the sequence of numbers mean?
'That's a blessed ugly thing you've let into the house to disturb my sleep this night, Molly Templar.'
Molly waved her diminutive purse pistol at the commodore by way of thanks and looked over at Kyorin, his body half-concealed by the kneeling form of his ragamuffin companion. Tiny sparks of the vision from Molly's joining with the foreigner flickered in her mind as she bent down beside them both.
