The air was hot and stale in this hole. But at least the noises from above had begun to change.

"They're building." The low bat-whisper was the first thing besides Maggot susurration and his own quiet breathing and heartbeat that Chip had heard for hours now. He recognized Bronstein's voice easily enough. Despite the generic similarity of all the voices produced by the synthesizers, each rat and bat still managed to maintain a distinctive tone.

Chip ground his teeth. Maggot tunnels above them! Maggot tunnels could be miles wide and five hundred yards high. "Look, we've got to get out of here. We're gonna run out of air and suffocate soon anyway."

"We'd be foine if it wasn't for the primate using two-thirds of the oxygen," grumbled a bat. That was Behan, surly as usual. "Still, we should be able to start diggin' out now. Those builder-digger Maggots are really stupid. When I was in that mole in Operation Zemlya, we popped out right next to them. All they did was stand around and get butchered."

"When who starts digging?" sneered Fal. "You damn flyboys can't dig." The rat heaved his corpulent form upright. "Who does all the work around here, and why do we, hey, flyboy glamour-puss?"

"Work! 'Tis ignorant of the concept you rats are!" snapped the big male bat. He called himself Eamon Jugash… something or other. Chip couldn't remember. Or see the point. Bats didn't really have decent jugs, after all.

But that was bats for you. Bats always chose mile-long pretentious names for themselves, to replace their official Society-issued numbers. What Chip principally remembered about this one was that Big Dermott had said that that particular bat was trouble. He would tell her The realization hit him like a sledgehammer. He wasn't going to be telling Dermott anything. She was dead for sure, by now.