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life.
    ‘Okay,’ Everett M said, looking around him. He listened again. No contact, no clear trace leading from the dead dog deeper into the graveyard. But there was something, a vague hum, a hiss of activity, with no direction and no centre. Everett M closed his eyes and concentrated. Beneath him. In the ground. He was right above a circle of Nahn activity.
    Everett M’s eyes flew open at the first earth tremor. Water droplets fell from the branches. Again, the ground beneath his feet shook. The Nahn noise was a roar now,and in motion, moving upward through the soil towards him. A tombstone lurched and cracked. Trees shook. Movement. Everett M whirled. The grass in front of the sheared-off pillar gravestone bulged, as if something was punching out from beneath. A hand thrust up through the grass. A long-dead bone hand reached into the night air. Black fibres writhed around the bones, binding them in shiny black sinews. With a titanic heave, a skeleton wrenched itself out of the grave. Nahn muscles bound themselves to rotting Victorian bones. The skull, still wearing a few wisps of hair, turned to Everett M. The empty eye sockets filled with black orbs of insect-eye.
    ‘You have to be joking,’ Everett M said. The earth shook again, hard enough for him to lose his footing. As Everett M went down, the Nahn skeleton lunged at him. Goal-keeper reactions rolled Everett M out of the way, opened his right arm and extruded the laser. He was dangerously cold and hungry but he needed every weapon Madam Moon had installed in him. The laser sliced the skeleton’s head from its body. Black Nahn tendrils writhed from the severed spine. The headless skeleton kept coming. He took its legs from under it. It crawled towards him, dragging itself along on bone fingers. ‘Oh come
on
.’ Laser in the right hand, pulser in the left. One EM blast froze the Nahn-stuff infesting the skeleton and shattered it like black ice.
    Now Everett M understood the earth tremors. All around the circle of tombstones the graves had burst open. Thedead leapt out. Their bones were strung with Nahn muscle. They were fast and strong. Everett M ducked under outstretched bone hands, rolled and slashed the Nahn corpse in half, top to bottom. The two halves of the body twitched, sending Nahn tendrils reaching towards each other. He EM-pulsed it to nothing, even as a zombie still dressed in the rags of a Victorian mourning dress spat black Nahn-stuff from its fleshless jaws. He beheaded it with one laser blast, counted the seconds until his pulser recharged. Come on, come on,
come on
! And fire. You’re proper dead now. Everett M spun. A scythe of laser fire toppled Nahn zombies like trees. He hacked them to bits, and as they squirmed and crawled towards him, he took them out, blast by blast.
    All was still. All was quiet. Nothing creeping, nothing crawling. Job done. Zombie invasion taken out quick and neat and early. He stepped over the ring of shattered bone and crystalised Nahn-stuff. And something shot up out of the mash of dirty bones, opened its dead jaws in his face, reached for him with claw hands. A baby – the skeleton of a dead baby, animated by the Nahn. Everett M leaped back in shock before his augmentations took over. The EM pulse caught it mid-air, froze all its Nahn-stuff to black ice. It fell to the ground. The black ice shattered like glass under Everett M’s running shoes. One final scan. Nothing. Planet made safe, and all before dinner.
    ‘It’s teriyaki time.’

6
    Charlotte Villiers stepped out of the Heisenberg Gate. Her alter Charles was two steps behind her. Her heels rang on the metal ramp. The Earth 7 hosts waited at the foot of the ramp: identical smiles, identical handshakes.
    ‘Welcome, Fro Villiers,’ said Jen Heer to Charlotte Villiers. He was a stout, middle-aged white man, greying early, wearing creased pants and a frock coat over an elaborate brocade shirt.
    ‘Welcome, Her Villiers.’ Heer Fol simultaneously greeted