Kraine raised his night-sighted Tronsvasse autorifle to his shoulder and scurried forward. He'd lived in a lightless warren of city all his life until Ravenor recruited him. This gloom suited him.
The sound of catapults grew louder. There were several of them at work now, buzzing out a duet with heavyweight lasguns. I heard the gritty thump of a grenade.
Kenzer, the archaeologist, was lagging. He wasn't part of Ravenor's official troop, merely an expert paid to help out on Promody. I didn't like him much. He had no fibre and no real commitment.
I didn't need to read his mind to see that he was only here for the potential fortune a few exclusive academic papers about the Ghiil discovery could make him.
'Hurry up!' I yelled at him. My back was getting tired and the blood in my mouth was back again.
Kenzer was hunched down at the base of the chasm side, fidgeting with his hand-scanner.
I called a halt and stomped back to him, my heavy boots, reinforced with the brace's metal frame, kicking up soot. Ironhoof, indeed!
I believed my greatest annoyance wasn't the brace-frame or its weight or the lumpen gait I was forced to adopt, not even the non-specific haemorrhage that was seeping into my mouth.
No, the worst thing was my cold scalp.
I really couldn't get used to it. Crezia had been obliged to shave my head in order to implant the cluster of neural and synaptic cables that would drive the augmetic frame around my legs. She had been upset all through the implant procedure. It really was terribly crude, even by basic Imperial standards. But out in the middle of nowhere at all, it had been the best she and Antribus could cobble together.
Needs must, as they say.
I was bald, and the back of my skull was raw, sore and clotted with the multiple implant jacks of the sub-spine feeds my faithful medicaes had installed to make my leg frame work. The steel-jacketed cables sprouted from my scalp and ran down my back into the lumbar servo of the walking brace. The bunched cables were flesh-stapled to my back, like a neat, augmetic ponytail.
I would get used to it, in time. If there was time. If there wasn't, what the hell did it matter?
I stopped beside Kenzer, throwing a hard shadow over him.
'What are you doing?'
'Making a recording, sir/ he gabbled. 'There's a marking here. The carved walls we've seen so far have been blank/
I peered down. It was difficult to bend.
'Where?'
He pulled a puffer-brash out of his kit-pack and blew the soot away.
There!'
A small spiral. Cut into the smooth face of the rock.