Strata

itself in a power cable.
    There was a sound like the snapping of locusts. Silver and Marco appeared for a moment like a tableau, Silver a big fluffy ball as every hair stood out from her body.
    Kin scrabbled on the floor for Marco’s anti-disc weapon with its insulated handle. It took all her strength to knock the vibrating pike out of his hand. When it came away, the two aliens collapsed.
    Aliens, she thought. I called them aliens. Oh, shit. She knelt down and sought for signs of life. Something vague was happening in Silver’s chest, but she didn’t know where even to begin looking for either of Marco’s hearts.
    The lights overhead dwindled to a sickly orange glow. There were footsteps behind Kin – strange, rattling steps. She turned, still crouching, to see the tall figure that had appeared behind her.
    The most obvious thing was the weapon that was sweeping down towards her. Instinctively she flung up an arm, which was still holdingMarco’s club. The scythe hit it hard, and shivered into pieces.
    Kin started to laugh. The thing in front of her was a skeleton in a black bathrobe, grinning perplexedly at a wooden handle that now had no blade. Who were They trying to scare?
    The scythe handle in Death’s white claws
flowed
. What it became was at least appropriate to the age of genocide, and Kin had time to wonder where They had found the pattern. There were two rows of oscillating teeth and a brisk little engine.
    A power-scythe. Kin had used them herself to clear scrub on new worlds.
    Death advanced. Had he lunged Kin wouldn’t have survived, but ancient habits die hard. He swung, instead. And Kin dived forward. She heard the power-scythe crash down behind her and gyrate across the floor as she stared up into eyeless sockets. Struggling, she brought one knee up – a pointless tactic that merely jarred her kneecap. Death had no balls.
    A necklace of bony fingers closed round her throat. She lashed out with the back of her hand, willing the blow home. It hit Death in the face, and then there was something like an explosion in a domino factory.
    Kin was standing alone. There was a black robe on the floor in front of her, and a few pieces of bone scattered around. They disappeared in a series of small thunderclaps. A largerone marked the disappearance of Marco and Silver.
    Kin disappeared, too.
    A minute later a couple of cuboid robots trundled along the tunnel and started to clean up the mess.
    Now she was in a—
    ‘No,’ she said. ‘No more. I give in. Do you know how long it was since I last had a drink?’
    A glass of water appeared hovering in the air in front of her. Kin wasn’t particularly surprised. She caught it gingerly, and drank it. When she tried to hang the glass in the air it plummeted down and smashed.
    Now she was in a – call it a control room. The disc control room. This had to be it.
    It was surprisingly small. It could have been the flight deck of a medium-large ship, except that a ship would have more screens and switches. This had one screen and one bank of switches, in front of a deep black chair. Over the chair was what could have been a computer-link helmet.
    ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘Not me. I’m not putting that on.’
    The screen flickered and a word appeared.
    BETS ?
    Kin moved forward and got a better view of the chair. It was a disturbing complicated shape, and looked almost alive.
    Its occupant was dead. Not offensively dead, because the air in the room was crisp and dry and had expertly mummified him, but undeniably dead. If he had believed in reincarnation, he’d come back as a corpse.
    There was an old wound on one withered arm. It didn’t look fatal, but there were antique blood stains on the floor. He could have bled to death but that seemed a derisive death for a disc master.
    If he
was
a disc master. Somehow Kin had never brought herself to think of the disc’s overlords as human, but the man in the chair was human enough. Given a heavy shave and a fresh skin he could have called anyone cousin.
    The screen in front of the chair blurred, then produced a word. It hung in front of Kin, glowing pitifully.
    HELP
    Marco crouched in the semi-darkness when he next heard the voice.
    After a while he surfaced from the mists of rage enough to realize that it was talking to him. It was familiar. The ape-descended woman?
    ‘Kin Arad?’ he croaked.
    ‘Marco, where’s Silver?’ the voice insisted.
    Marco’s eyes felt like fire pits, but the light from the millions