Nyra pulled down a probe mounted on an extensible arm and held it over the injury. An image appeared on a screen at the head of the table.

'The scan shows no deep internal damage,' she said to Susan. 'The coagulating agent in the temporary dressing has limited the blood loss so you won't need a transfusion.

Luckily the bullet pa.s.sed right through. You've got a couple of broken ribs and some lacerated muscles. Nothing I can't fix.

In an hour you'll be as good as new.'

She sounded more confident now, Ian thought; even pleased with herself.

Using another aerosol applicator she sprayed a release agent over the temporary dressing and it fell away easily, revealing the blood-caked wound underneath. Nyra took up a swab and a suction device and began to remove the clotted matter.

'I'll just clean this up first, then I can rebuild those ribs and...'

She faltered and Ian saw her face go pale. She took a step back from the table, dropping the suction tool which swung loosely on its hose hissing loudly.

'Oh... good grief,' she said faintly.

'Is there a problem?' the Doctor demanded, striding quickly to Nyra's side.

Susan was trying to twist about to look up at them.

'What's wrong?' she asked, her voice catching.

Ian saw incredulity and then utter dismay flicker across the Doctor's face. Ian moved forward, clasped Susan's hand in rea.s.surance, then nerved himself to look closely at the gaping wound in her side.

A flap of skin had been torn open by the pa.s.sage of the bullet, exposing her ribs. But where there should have been white bone there was only buckled silvery metal and plastic.

Chapter Twenty-Four.

The Plateau The lights in the cave that housed the workers' barracks flickered on, illuminating tiers of metal-frame bunk beds filled with sleeping figures. A speaker came to life, blaring out the shrill of a bell. The figures stirred wearily, groaning and coughing. A voice replaced the bell: 'First meal in fifteen minutes. First meal in fifteen minutes.'

Barbara and Susan blinked the sleep from their eyes and gave each other slightly forced smiles of rea.s.surance. They had been so tired from their exertions of the previous day that they had slept even in these new and disturbing surroundings.

Around them women were climbing stiffly from their bunks. They appeared thoroughly downcast, hardly sparing the newcomers a glance as they tramped wearily through to the adjoining washroom. Barbara and Susan wearily followed their example.

On their return they saw Plaxander Vendam through the double part.i.tion grille that separated the women's section of the dormitory from the men's. He looked lost and afraid.

When he saw them he gave them a half-hearted wave, then dropped his hand as though embarra.s.sed.

Sets of barred doors slid back automatically, opening on to a short tunnel. They filed down it into another cave laid out with plain tables and benches. It was a communal dining hall with s.p.a.ce for about two hundred people. They gathered up plastic utensils, cups and trays moulded with depressions for food. As each worker put their numbered tag in a slot in the wall a hopper dispensed a portion of vegetable stew, a hunk of bread and a slice of hard cheese on to their trays. It was not especially appetising but Barbara and Susan were too hungry to care and started chewing on the bread before they even started to look for s.p.a.ce at a table.

When Plax put his tag in the machine it only gave him a measure of water. He looked bemused and began thumping its scarred metal panels angrily. Others in the queue behind him pushed him aside.

'You've been docked a meal... don't waste your time, boy a man told him impatiently. Plax rounded on him, losing his temper.

'How dare you speak to me like that. Do you know who I am? I'm '

Barbara and Susan quickly intervened, pulling him aside.

'Don't be stupid,' Barbara said. 'Sit down quietly and have some of ours.'

They found s.p.a.ces at a table in a corner of the room and sat Plax between them. He sank his head in his hands. Barbara exchanged rueful glances with Susan. On top of all their other concerns they had somehow become responsible for the young man. They fed him bread soaked in stew until he managed to look shamefacedly at them.

'I've never had to take... charity before,' he said.

'There's a first time for everything,' Susan said encouragingly. 'You'll be all right.'

Barbara said: 'This is all new to us as well, but we have survived worse things. Be patient, look, listen and learn. It's the only way we're going to get out of here. I know our friends will be looking for us and from what you've said so will your father. So we must watch out for them, or for anything else that might help us. But meanwhile don't start unnecessary fights, understand?'

Plaxander nodded. 'Yes... and thank you.'

They had hardly finished eating when the speakers came on again: 'You will report for work a.s.signments!'

They disposed of their trays and utensils down a larger slot in the food machine and filed down another tunnel to a solid, much heavier door.

It slid back revealing a long, cold cave open to the outside air at its far end. They could see the sky flushing from grey to dawn-pink. Looking down on them from gantries that circled the walls were a dozen grey guards, the first they had seen so far that morning.

Hanging on wall racks were one-piece coveralls, overboots and thick gloves, which the workers began to put on. Numbers matching those on their tags were stencilled on the backs of the coveralls. Barbara, Susan and Plax found their respective sets of workwear and pulled them on gratefully, for their breath was steaming in the bitterly cold air. Beyond the racks of clothes were stacked picks, crowbars, shovels and simple two-wheeled hand barrows.

A grey man carrying a clipboard addressed them from above.

'Form into five teams of thirty,' he commanded. 'Each team to take ten barrows, five picks, fifteen shovels. First three teams out will board the transporters.'

The workers milled around obeying their orders, and Susan, Barbara and Plax eventually found themselves in the fourth team. The girls took up shovels while the young man gingerly chose a pick, looking as though he had never held one before in his life.

In their teams they marched through the cave mouth into the open air.

They were standing on gentle slopes that rose at one end of a plateau that Barbara guessed was perhaps eight miles long by five wide. Around them jagged peaks capped with snow thrust up into a sky filled with ragged clouds, edged with gold by the still invisible rising sun. Purple shadows cloaked the frosted plateau floor which stretched away, level and even like a dry lakebed, to distant foothills.

'What's that?' asked Susan.

Two dark parallel lines ran from a point not far below them in a die-straight line along the length of the plateau floor, until they were lost in the shadows of its far rim. Between them was a streak of silver that mirrored the lightening sky.

Under the watchful eyes of the grey guards they marched along a well-worn path that wound down the hillside in a series of switchbacks. As they descended and the light grew brighter they saw that the valley floor was not quite as smooth as it had at first seemed. It was pockmarked by craters of all sizes, making it look like a stretch of moonscape.

'Meteor craters,' Susan said. 'This place must have been hit by meteor storms. Like the city.'

'It looks as though a lot of them get through,' Barbara observed. 'Isn't it defended in the same way?'

Plax spoke up, seeming to lift himself from his dejection for the first time. 'Anywhere within a hundred kilometres of the city you'd see the defences working. They must want to keep this place secret.'

The parallel lines resolved themselves into steep-sided earth embankments fifteen to twenty feet high. The silver streak between them was obscured as they reached ground level, but they could now see that the embankments merged into the hillside. The ground had been cut back between them to form the mouth of a tunnel which was closed by towering aircraft-hangar sized double doors.

Three balloon-tyred trucks were waiting with wide flatbed trailers in tow. The first three teams loaded their tools and themselves on to them and were driven out across the plateau.

The fourth team was marched away in the same direction.

At regular intervals they pa.s.sed narrow slots in the embankment, just wide enough for a man to pa.s.s through, but could not make out any details of what lay beyond. After half a mile they came to a place where the embankment wall had partly collapsed. There was a fresh meteor crater a hundred yards away and the shock and ejected material from this had clearly done the damage. The team was set to clearing the loose debris and rebuilding the embankment.

A relay of barrows was arranged. Susan and Barbara shovelled loose material into them while Plax used his pick, rather inexpertly, to break up larger rocks so they could be more easily handled.

After an hour the sun had lifted high enough to burn off the last of the cold mist and they were all sweating. Plax was getting blisters for the first time in his life. Now they could see that the embankments on the far side of the plateau did not stop at the edge of the level ground. Keeping to the same line they ascended in a gentle curve up through the foothills, and vanished in the glare of the rising sun somewhere amongst the high peaks.

'But what's it for?' Plax muttered for the fifth time.

'I wish I knew,' Barbara admitted. She stopped digging for a minute, straightened her back and wiped her brow. 'We could ask... but these people don't seem to be very forthcoming.'

'Maybe they're too frightened of the guards,' Susan suggested.

As if to prove her wrong the man pushing one of the barrows they were loading said: 'You three are new, aren't you?'

'Yes,' said Barbara, looking about furtively and lowering her voice. 'Who are you?'

'I'm Tressel, this is Semanov,' he went on, nodding at the woman handling the barrow next to him.

Barbara introduced Susan, Plax and herself.

'Don't worry about the guards,' Tressel continued. 'As long as we keep working they don't care if we talk.'

'They almost act as though we're not here,' Barbara said, making a show of her shovelling.

'We were only brought here a few days ago, but other workers who've been here over a year say they've always acted that way... when you can get them to talk, that is. Most seem to have given up.' He and Semanov took up the handles of their full barrows and started off towards the embankment.

'Speak to you again next time round.'

When they returned, Barbara said: 'The guards almost seem guilty, as though they'd rather we weren't here.'

'They should feel guilty about making people work like this,' Plax interjected with feeling. 'Even NC2s don't deserve this sort of treatment.'

'But why don't they use machines?' Susan asked. 'They'd be much more efficient.'

'There's some wrecked earth-moving equipment up near the caves,' Semanov said. 'They lost it in a bad storm and couldn't replace it. Slave labour was the next best thing.'

'By kidnapping citizens with that ridiculous machine?'

Plax asked.

'I think it's an old disguised security enforcement vehicle,'

said Tressel. 'The suction device was meant to pick out targeted individuals from a crowd or occupied buildings.'

'But who's using it?' Plax asked. 'Is this place run by the government or a private faction?'

Tressel looked uncomfortable. 'We've been wondering about that. I used to work for the government myself... but I've found out recently how little I knew about Arkhaven. We don't know and nor does anybody else we've asked.'

Susan said: 'We guess these walls are meant to protect whatever's between them from the fragments thrown up when a meteor hits, but what is it?'

'See for yourself,' Semanov said. 'Take over our barrows for this trip. As long as we keep working they don't care who's doing what.'

Susan kept her shovel while Barbara and Plax exchanged their tools for the loaded barrows. They followed the wheel tracks up the side of the embankment to the top of the section being rebuilt. They took their time tipping and pounding the rubble into place while they looked down the other side.

Barbara estimated that the walls of the two embankments were sixty or seventy feet apart. A flat-bottomed trough perhaps thirty feet wide and lined with gleaming sheet metal had been sunk in the ground between them. It might have been designed to channel water, except that it was quite dry.

Running along both sides of the trough, and standing almost ten feet above it, was a peculiar kind of fence. It was formed out of ma.s.sive stanchions, obviously set deep into the ground and braced from the outside by angled struts. Heavy cables could be seen rising out of the ground at regular intervals and running up to the fence's single wide rail. On the inside face of the rail above each stanchion was mounted an ovoid coil of heavy copper-coloured wire over three feet long. Both the trough and fences ran in an unbroken line along the entire length of the embankments.

'What's it for?' Plax wondered.

Susan was frowning. 'I don't know... but it must be important.'

Suddenly the futility of their situation seemed to weigh down on Barbara. She fingered her watchstrap irritably. An image of the Arkavians' great escape rocket came into her mind. The Ship, Plax called it. Yes, it was vitally important that she got to the Ship... but she didn't know why.

Chapter Twenty-Five.

Flesh and Blood Lord Vendam was initially disappointed, rather than concerned, when he learned at breakfast that Plax had not been home at all that night. He a.s.sumed he must have stayed over at a friend's house.

Captain Lanes visit the previous day had strained relations between father and son. Vendam had never been happy about Plax's involvement in the so-called 'hunts'. There was the matter of Outer Zone security, of course, although the deception they maintained there should be capable of standing up to temporary intrusions of the sort the hunts entailed. It was more the element of risk involved in the chases. He recalled friends of his own youth who had come to grief while racing fast cars, and Plax was his only heir... and the last living reminder of his beloved late wife. The boy had definitely grown wilder after she had died, but Vendam had refrained from ordering him to stop because he believed a young man should learn by experience as far as possible. He also had a shrewd idea how far such a ban would diminish Plax's standing among his peers... and there were few enough of them left in Arkhaven.

But now that the hunts had caused a watchman to come to the house to question Plax like some common criminal, it was a different matter. The Vendam family had certain standards to uphold, after all. The previous day he had told Plax of his change of mind.

'I don't want you to take part in any more of these hunts of yours.'