The cell they'd emerged from was part of a block of four, and it occurred to they to wonder who might be in the others. Two were empty, but when Victor opened the last one he found two battered-looking men staring out at him in some puzzlement.

Jeremiah, in the simplest and most efficient explanation possible, handed each man a gauss rifle as Vasquez was asking their names. They identified themselves as Hans Fastolfe and Johan Kepler, lichen farmers. Their story was all too familiar; strayed to close to Anardir, picked up, duffed up, interrogated and curtly told to prepare for a life of offworld slavery.

Taking them along, again as faux prisoners, the agents headed towards the guard room. Their initial march through the facility and subsequent trips for grilling had given them an idea of the layout of some of the building, and taking out the guardroom seemed essential.

Jeremiah walked in first, chatting cheerfully over his shoulder as he did so, to boost the masquerade of being a guard. There were four guards inside, two playing cards, one making coffee and one leaning on a wall.

"Did you sort 'er out then?" laughed the man leaning on the wall. Vasquez stalked across the room and smashed him down with her rifle as the others brought their weapons up to cover the startled guards. Her blow nearly missed - no depth perception - but it was enough, and Jeremiah's growl of "Nobody move!" was more than enough to prevent them doing anything unwise.

Herding the guards into one of their own cells was a quick process, and their weapons furnished some much-needed ammunition. There was no more medical equipment, and Vasquez gritted her teeth and carried on.

Hans and Kepler (dubbed 'H&K') dressed themselves in the captured camos, clearly relieved to be promoted from ersatz prisoners. Then Vasquez opened the door into the main hall.

She and Jeremiah froze in horror. Right there in front of them, ten feet away, was a Vorka security robot, the same type as they'd fought in Shimuusha's house. They were caught, boxed in by Victor's bulk behind, with no cover available should it open fire.

An endless couple of seconds passed in frozen silence, during which Jeremiah noticed the barrel he was staring down was much bigger than last time, and then the decicredit dropped; they were dressed in security complex uniforms. The robot probably couldn't tell them from the real thing. "What a depressingly stupid machine." commented Victor.

''Can you talk to it - make it go away?" they asked him nervously. He tried, but it told him rather sharply that he did not have the authorization to give it orders. So in the end they ignored it and walked past it.

Pausing for Victor to bring the two lifts serving the upper floor down and lock them there, they started checking exits off the hall. The first one opened into a combination store-room and autogalley. A single marine in battledress - less helmet - was drinking coffee standing up, and they distracted him with conversation until everyone was in, then Vasquez attempted to knock his coffee up into his face, and missed, sending it flying. This still distracted him enough for Jeremiah to crack him across the head with his rifle. The man staggered, but didn't go down, so Victor punched him; the terrifying force of the metal fist crushed his head in like an eggshell and he dropped dead.

In a trice, Jeremiah had stripped the dead marine's battledress and donned it. It wasn't a perfect fit - no-one else's armour ever was - but it was good enough, and he settled the helmet in place with a sigh of pleasure.

Tapping into the armour's internal settings, he matched it to the gaussrifle he'd been using, allowing the weapon to use the armour's optical systems as its' gunsight. He also tried to tune into the base battledress commo channel, but got only silence. He shrugged and was about to give up, when a thought struck him and he asked Victor to look at it.

The robot plugged his interface into the armour and suddenly was signalling frantically to the group not to make any sounds. He made internal adjustments, then spoke. "You can speak now. He had opened a channel; they'd have heard everything he said if it had been left like that." The robot also set the suit up so that Jeremiah could communicate privately with Vasquez via the latter's implanted short-range system.

The next door they opened was even better news; the battledress storage room! It took a while, but eventually they found a set that Vasquez could wear, and adjusted Jeremiah's so that it was a really good fit.

Once settled in the armour, the diminutive agent reached up to the chest and snapped the injector tab, dosing herself with battlefield-strength painkillers, then replaced the injector module with a fresh one. Then the pair of them systematically disabled all eight remaining suits.

The next room was harder than the usual doors to get open. Inside, they found the facility armoury, containing the following equipment:

• Racks for 50 Gaussrifles, with 8 present
• 249 Gauss clips
• 25 10-round boxes each of HEAP, HE & KEAPER RAM grenades
• 22 cutlasses
• 11 9mm autopistols
• 41 empty 9mm clips
• 87 50-round boxes of 9mm ammo
• 5 daggers
• 27 5-round boxes of 10mm tranq Snub rounds [for the robots]

There were also six crates marked 'prisoner personal effects'. Two contained the PCs' confiscated gear (2x sabres, 1x impact knife, and the camera gear.) Two more helld Hans' handcomp and .44 revolver, and Johan's sword and laser pistol-9. Once they'd looted what they wanted, Vasquez set a booby trap for anyone interfering with the big heap of munitions she'd left in the middle of the armoury.

The central core of the building turned out to contain the computer system and some other machinery; Victor thought it might be sensors but wasn't sure. The computer was a useful find; Victor was able to extract a schematic of the building.

So, five minutes later, the agents were gathered at the end of a corridor outside the door to the Communications room. They could hear voice from the other side, discussing something with some interest.

The phrase "So where the hell have they all come from?" drifted out.