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floor. I can sense nothing from him.
    Even deadened as my feelings are, I am terrified.
    Then, he stands, slowly. The armour withdraws, running like quicksilver from him, revealing his bone-white hair and red skin. It retreats reluctantly, pooling upon the floor, and gathers itself into a short staff, ancient texts scrolling around the top and bottom; the inert form of the Armour Prime.
    Yoechakenon stands naked. He looks about the room, searching, but he cannot see me. Fires have sprung up in the deep places of the chamber. Debris rattles down from above with every impact. “I will not do this any more,” he says, and I feel horror rooted deep within him. “These things, revenge and injustice, these are not what I fight for. I renounce the status of champion. I will make no more war for the Twin Emperor. I will defy fate. Thanks be to the Spirefather of Olm.”
    This I did not foresee. This should not happen. This is against the tides of fate. Yoechakenon is strong of will, but here, now? This is not a point in time where fate is pliable.
    It can only mean one thing.
    The Stone Kin are coming.

 
    CHAPTER FOUR
     
    Into the Volcano
     
    “W E’VE DONE VERY little here as yet,” said Maguire. He sat beside Holland in a small electric cart like the cargo drones, self-driving, fitted with four seats. The tube’s walls went past at a stately roll, their layered kerbs of frozen lava rising and falling, animated with false life by the progress of the open top. “There’s not been much need to, aside from the lights and cabling running down the main ways. Nature’s been very generous in providing us these little roads.”
    “Can you see a time when they’ll be inhabited?” asked Holland. “The outgassing will be a problem.”
    “You’re right there. We can’t seal it like the caves back in Canyon City, precisely because of the methane, and even were that not a problem, it’s just too big to close off, way beyond our current capacities here. The tube network is huge, I mean really huge, and that’s before you get into the remnant biome caverns. Nothing back home on Earth compares to it. But in the future, who knows?”
    “I’ve wanted to see it for a long time,” said Holland. He looked up as best as he could in his environment suit. The ceiling was some twenty metres above him. The tunnel was slightly oval, so the walls were further away than the ceiling. The floor was smoothly rippled, a perfect pahoehoe flow – where roof falls had deposited material on the floor, it had been cleared, explained Maguire. Consequently, the ride in the six-wheeled open top was far more pleasant than Holland’s trip in the rover. “I can’t really take it in,” he said.
    “The tubes are much bigger than those back home, a combination of the lower gravity and the lower density of the material,” said Maguire eagerly. He was enjoying showing off the network, and Holland enjoyed listening to him. Maguire’s enthusiasm was as infectious as his good humour. “There are over four hundred miles of tubes,” said Maguire. “Four hundred miles on Ascraeus Mons alone! The biggest tube network on Earth is Kazumura cave on Kilauea; the main tube there is forty miles long. The biggest here is twelve times that length. The geological forces here must have been immense.”
    “And yet it’s all over now.”
    “Pretty much. There’s some activity deep down – we’re running geothermal feasibility tests at the Canyon City science station, but pff, not likely.”
    “You read Franz Heimark’s latest? He’s proposing the construction of an artificial moon-sized satellite, can you believe that?” said Holland.
    Maguire’s laughter rang in Holland’s helmet speaker. “Yeah, ambitious – a bit of tidal forcing might warm the place up, but how the hell would they pull it off?”
    “It’s an ambitious plan,” said Holland.
    “The man is a genuine lunatic,” said Maguire. “Shooting for the Moon.”
    Holland laughed with his