"Anyone got a headlight there?" Chip asked softly. A Maggot could nail him so fast now. He still had his knife… but it was no use poking blindly at Maggots. He knew he had to cut precisely, and that he'd only have one chance. He wouldn't have said "no thanks" to his standard issue bangstick, an assegai with a cartridge set into the blade. It wasn't a great weapon, but it allowed some margin of error. It was a lot better than the rest of the issue crap: a stupid little ice axe thing and a trench knife you couldn't slice baloney with.

The slowship which had settled the planet of Harmony And Reason had taken the colonists out of the network of industries which twenty-second century technology needed to support its complexity. So, except for the clone units on the ship, the colonists were back at self-sustaining tech levels. From the manufacturing point of view, that meant nineteenth to early twentieth century. Which meant no mono-molecular edged knives.

Chip had once tried to tell an officer-a Shareholder, naturally-why the thing was effing useless compared to his own. In typical officer fashion the jerk had told him to shut up, and demanded to know where his regulation trench knife was. After all, what could a veteran grunt know about fighting Maggots? Much less than some still-wet-behind-the-ears lieutenant, of course.

Still, the bangsticks worked. When you pushed them into the right bit of Maggot, that is. He really wouldn't have minded having his. It must be buried back there somewhere…

He tried again. "Anyone got a light?"

Nobody replied from the darkness. But at least there were no Maggot scritch-scritch noises either.

"Who else is in here?" he asked, daring to speak slightly louder. He strained to hear one particular voice, hoping…

He'd seen the wall come down on Dermott. The slowshield would have protected her from the debris, but had she managed to get out before the roof came down?