When they tallied up the casualties, there were three dead and four people injured. It would be five people if Mark Summers suffered what Gruber called Cell Reversal as a result of being without his chest magnet for nearly a full minute. As the other doctor continued to attend to the injured, Summers was staring down at his hands as if he'd be able to see his cells reverting to an embryonic state.

"Well I guess we're turning back now," said Duffy, sitting on the hot ground with his back against the overturned cab of the eighteen wheeler.

"We will not be turning back," said the Sergeant flatly.

The physicist stared at him in astonishment. "But we can't go on," he said. "We've suffered three deaths." He stared around at the other surviving members of the expedition. "Three people are dead. We have to go back."

The sergeant walked over and stared down at him. "I have a wife and two daughters out there," he said, waving vaguely at the world outside the anomaly. "And this thing is growing. My job is to get you people to the centre of it where you will stop it. I will not let my family fall victim to this... Whatever it is. You are going to stop it."

"We'll probably all be dead before we get there," the Canadian replied.

"You have family out there, right?"

"I have a brother. He's got a family."

"Then you'll be wanting to protect them. We're going on."

"We no longer have the generator," pointed out the physicist. "The horses carried it that way." He waved a hand to the north.

"Look again," said the Sergeant, though, turning to look in that direction.

Duffy looked and saw that the two soldiers the Sergeant had sent, Parkin and Dustu, were returning, each sitting on one of the lead horses pulling the wagon on which sat the generator and the rest of their equipment. They waved cheerfully as they approached. Elsewhere, other soldiers had rounded up some of the other horses while others were gathering up what they could of the water and food that had fallen from the supply wagon. The wagon itself, and the horses that had been pulling it, were nowhere in sight. Neither was the wagon the experts had been riding on.

"Guess we'll be walking then," said Bright, fingering the bandage around her arm.

"And what will we be drinking?" asked Duffy. The soldiers had managed to gather up a couple of dozen half litre bottles of water, they saw. Just over one bottle each for the people still alive. At the rate they'd been drinking it in the desert heat it wouldn't last them long.

"There are small towns and isolated houses along our route," said the Sergeant. "Everything we need."

The Canadian stared in disbelief. "We can't est or drink anything tainted by the anomaly," he said. "We agreed it was too dangerous."

"We have no choice," the Sergeant replied. "Costanzo, Jackson, check out the polaris. I want to make another attempt at contacting the command post. The rest of you, get ready to move out."

"What about them?" asked Robinson, nodding her head towards the three corpses lying side by side, each with their robes draped over them to hide them from sight. The robes were held down by rocks to keep the wind from blowing them away.

"We leave them here," the Sergeant told her. "Someone can come collect them when this is all over."

"We don't have to worry about them being disturbed by animals," pointed out Jeffcott. "There's nothing alive in here. They're as safe as if they were on the moon."

"It just doesn't seem right," said Robinson, though, frowning unhappily.

"You can say some words over them if you like," the Sergeant told her. "You've got fifteen minutes."

The soldiers whose hands had been zip-tied had all been released. Now that they were back in their right minds they were, hopefully, no longer any danger to anyone and the people guarding them were just as likely to be the next ones affected. Brent looked distraught, though. As the man who'd killed Dennings he was carrying a burden of guilt that Jeffcott couldn't imagine. The other soldiers were avoiding him, he saw, and he gathered that he'd never been the most popular of them even before this had happened. Having nothing else to do for the time being, therefore, Jeffcott went over to speak to him.

Brent saw him coming, though, and cut him off before he could speak. "You don't have to say it," he said. "Nothing you say can make me feel any worse."

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"You were suffering an anomaly effect," Jeffcott reminded him. "Dennings herself warned all of us that it could happen. She'd be the last one to blame you."

"You think that makes me feel any better?"

"I suppose not, but any of us could have been the one that killed her. I've been suffearing the effects as well." He looked down at his blistered fingertips

"I know. I saw, but you're a civilian. When you see something that scares you, you run. I'm a soldier. Trained to kill enemies, not run from them."

"They're soldiers as well," said Jeffcott, waving a hand at what was left of their expedition. "I saw the Sergeant try to shoot you. if his gun worked you'd be dead. Did you see what he was like just after? He knows what you're going through."

"I sincerely doubt that." When Jeffcott tried to say something else the soldier held a hand up to stop him. "I appreciate what you're trying to do, but I'd like to be left alone now. Please."

Jeffcott nodded, but he put a hand on the other man's shoulder before returning to where the others were gathered. He saw the Sergeant and angled towards him. "The anomaly is affecting our ability to tell friends from enemies," he said.

"You noticed did you?" said the Sergeant acidly. "What was your first clue? Was it those three corpses over there?"

"I'm wondering whether we still need the weapons," said Jeffcott, letting the other man's hostility wash over him. "They were so we could defend ourselves against locals driven crazy by the anomaly but with weapons in our hands we're more of a danger to ourselves than any number of locals. I'm wondering whether you had considered leaving our weapons here."

"And what bloody use is a soldier without a weapon?"

"Without our knives and spears, a man that goes crazy can only punch and kick someone he suddenly thinks is a monster. The others can physically restrain him until he's back in his right mind."

"And what if we come across a large force of locals armed with bladed weapons, or with crossbows? Our job is to protect you, to get you to Kensington Labs safely."

"There's nothing to protect us from. Everyone for miles around is dead."

"We don't know that..."

"Yes we do," insisted Jeffcott. "The greatest threat we face is you."

"I suggest you leave military matters to those trained in them," said the Sergeant, though. "It is my responsibility to protect you and I will do so the way I think best. You are free to leave your weapons behind if you wish, though. It's just as likely to be you eggheads who go crazy and attack us."

The two Privates, meanwhile, had finished setting up the signalling lamp and were standing by it, waiting expectantly. The Sergeant went over to them, took a notepad and pencil from a pocket and began writing a message on it. "Just to let them know that we've suffered casualties but are continuing with the mission," he muttered to himself. "And asking for any new information that may have presented itself since we left." He tore the page out and handed it to Costanzo, who began translating it into morse code.

"Turn on the generator please," he said to Jackson.

The other private did so and soon the generator was roaring to life. "Shade your eyes," Costanzo warned, and then he began sending the message. A couple of minutes later he shut off the lamp, smoking with heat as before, and signalled to Jackson to turn off the generator.

As before, everyone squinted up into the sky, shading their eyes as they looked for an answering signal in the bright, silvery blue. "The satellite should be thirty degrees above the western horizon," said Jackson, consulting the look-up table. "Assuming the clockwork chronometer is telling the right time. Nine forty five." He looked across at Rahul Bhatt, who nodded his agreement.

They gave it the full fifteen minutes but again there was no reply. "They could be having problems with the satellite," said Jeffcott, trying not to sound scared. "Or with the unlink. There are a thousand innocent explanations for them not replying."

"Let's give them more time," said Duffy, though.

The Sergeant, meanwhile, was taking a satellite phone from the equipment wagon. Something included just in case they found a way to get it working again. He flicked switches on it, pushed buttons and swore, but the device was still as lifeless as every other electrical device taken into the anomaly. He threw it back onto the wagon with another muttered oath.

"It's as if there's no-one out there," said Robinson, who was making no attempt to hide her fear. Whether that made her more or less courageous than Jeffcott, he couldn't decide.

"As if we're the last human beings in the whole world," Robinson continued. "Just the seventeen of us, all alone on a dead planet..."

Gruber grabbed her arm. "Snap out of it, Robinson," he said. "It's just an anomaly affect..."

Robinson laughed, though. "No it's not," she replied. "Just my morbid, overactive imagination. I know the rest of the world's still out there. Maybe there's something about the boundary of the anomaly that scatters laser light or something. When the others out there start wondering why we're not replying to their reply they might find another way to contact us. The International Space Station could turn itself so that its solar panels reflect the sun down to us or something."

The Sergeant nodded, looking pleased by the suggestion. "We keep an eye on the sky at all times," he said. "Brent, Seabreeze, you got the first duty. One of you look east, the other west."

"No point looking east," said Rahul Bhatt, though. "The sun'll be behind it. It'd be lost in the glare. If it's in the west we'd have a better chance, but even then..." The Sergeant ignored him.

"If they do use the ISS, it'll take a long time to send each dot and dash," said Jeffcott. "Several minutes at least, but I wouldn't be surprised if they have other assets up there able to send faster flashes." The two Privates raised their hands back to tell him they'd heard.

They packed the lamp away and made ready to move out. The seven experts walked beside the wagon carrying the generator and the soldiers arranged themselves in a rough circle around them, to guard them against threats coming from any direction. Only three of them, including the Sergeant, had horses. The rest walked, looking miserable as they plodded their way along the hot tarmac, deeper into the anomaly and who knew what danger it might contain.