" 'Ware Maggots!" In the pallid greenish light of Maggot lumifungus on the walls, Chip could see a column of the scorpion-digger Magh' skittering closer down the passage. The bats were already flapping upwards in the high tunnel. At least they'd have a chance, now that they had flying room.

"… Off to Dublin in the green! Our bayonets a-gleamin' in the sun!" shrieked Eamon, diving on the Maggot-scorp column. He wasn't going to run… or fly from the enemy. The big male bat might be dead set on treating humans like shit, but he liked to fight, especially against the odds.

Well, Chip knew bats were like that. Crazy. After brewing up the cyber-enhanced rats, the genetic engineers at the New Fabian Society's labs had tried for more heroic and idealistic helpers for mankind's war when the bats' soft-cyber units were downloaded. They had put Irish revolutionary songs and old "Wobbly" tunes into the bats' vocabulary memory units.

Truth to tell, the bats were more idealistic and courageous than the rats. A lot more. But, in Chip's opinion, they were even more off-the-wall. And they were prone to endless political theorizing and disputation.

The rats claimed it came from hanging upside down and getting too much blood to the head-not to mention abstaining from drink and having sex only once a year or so. Chip thought the problem might be simpler. The bats didn't know if their enemies were the humans or the Maggots. (Neither did the rats, he suspected-but, ratlike, they didn't worry much about anything beyond the next moment.)

As always, however, the Maggots solved the problem. Magh' had no doubt at all who their enemies were-everybody else. Chip and the rats ran… well, like rats. There had to be some way out of here, surely?

Eventually they bolted down a twisting side tunnel, and then rushed back out again, nearly falling over each other in their haste. One of the biggest Maggots that Chip had ever seen had been coming the other way. Chip'd seen a lot of varieties… he thought he'd seen them all, but this was a new one. He reckoned the grunts 'ud call this one "Maggot-mutha."