She hesitated, then went to the body lying frozen just up the slope from the tent; it had been torn almost in half by the machine-gun fire. Sharrow pulled the black mask off the figure’s head, remembering Keteo. It was a woman’s face.

Again, she thought at first she didn’t recognise it, then recalled the woman at Roa’s side in Vembyr, during the auction and then afterwards at the docks. It was her. She let the mask snap back and rejoined Miz and Feril.

“Let’s go,” she said.

They set off into the snow-quiet forest under skies like milk.

Feril knew the fastest route; they moved as quickly as they could, uphill through broken boulders and deformed, wind-blasted trees. Sharrow walked until the android saw her stumble and gulp for breath, then offered to carry her.

She said nothing for a moment. She stood breathing heavily, her bandaged hand hanging at one side. For a moment Feril thought it might have mistimed its offer, but then she nodded.

Feril picked her up easily and strode off through the trees. Miz struggled to keep up; the air was like freezing water in his throat, his legs weak and shaky with hunger and fatigue.

They were fifteen hundred metres away when they heard the firing up ahead.

They stopped for a moment and Sharrow got down from the android’s arms. Machine-gun fire crackled and laser fire snapped; there were sharp explosions that might have been grenade or mortar rounds, and a booming ripple of fire that could have been a cluster munition. Trees around them reacted to the shuddering air, loosing powdery falls of snow.

“What,” Miz wheezed, “was all that?” His breath smoked in front of his face. “The Solipsists… couldn’t have had… ordnance that heavy… could they?”

“I believe I heard jet motors,” Feril said.

The gunfire and explosions died away, the echoes fading slowly to silence amongst the mountains.

They listened a while longer, then Sharrow shrugged. “Only one way to find out.” She looked back the way they had come, as if trying to see the tent. She let herself be lifted when Feril offered her the cradle of its arms again.

A few minutes later they saw the smoke rising above the trees ahead, piling silently up to the calm skies, spreading and fanning in the shining space above the peaks.

They came to the tower quarter of an hour later.

The trees ended four hundred metres from the tower; the slope descended to a delta of tall rushes. The stone square containing the shallow-walled circle with the stubby tower at its centre was just as the android had described it, near the straight edge of the fjord’s end with the braided river delta beyond.

They looked out onto devastation. The whole small estu-ary around the stone square and the tower was dotted with smouldering fires, bodies and wrecked vehicles. The decaying superstructures of a couple of long-foundered boats rested above their still images in the quiet waters of the calm fjord.

It was hard, at first, to distinguish ancient wreckage from fresh carnage, then the android pointed to the trail of bodies that led from a break in the trees on the far side of the river delta and stretched towards the tower. Smoke still rose from several of the corpses.

“Those the Solipsists?” Miz asked it. Most of the bodies were too blackened for any colours to be visible.

The android took a moment to reply.

“Yes,” it said eventually.

They could see the two parachutists the Solipsists had dropped; they must have been hit again, because both their bodies were burning, too. Sharrow caught the smell of the individual pyres on the breeze and felt sick. There was just one other gaudily uniformed figure visible, sprawled at the corner of the stone square nearest them.

“Who did all this?” Sharrow said. “Was this all the tower defences?”

The android lifted a hand, pointing towards the forested valley behind the small estuary, then seemed to droop.

“I believe…” it began, its voice small, then it fell over slackly, thumping into the ground and rolling a little way downhill, limbs flopping.

“What-?” Miz said, stumbling after the android with Sharrow.

They lifted Feril’s head.

“Fate,” Sharrow said. “How do you bring one of these things round?”

“Can’t see any switches,” Miz said. “Think this was natural? You know; just a fault in the android, maybe? No?”

She looked around the silent mountains, the valley and the river delta. “No,” she said. “No, I don’t think so.”

They gazed at each other. Miz’s face looked strained and grey. Sharrow had never seen him look so old and careworn. She wanted to take his head in her hands and kiss his poor face better.

“I don’t like this, kid,” he said. “This isn’t good.” He glanced at the tower, pulling his hunting jacket closer around him. “This isn’t a good place.”

She unhitched the machine gun from the android’s shoulder, pulled it free and handed it to Miz.

“I know what you mean,” she said. “But there’s nowhere else to go, is there?” She looked across at the tower. “Not if we’re going to get Zef out of here.”

Miz took the machine gun and checked it. He shook his head. “I hate it when you’re right.”

She readied the HandCannon, holding it awkwardly in her right hand, then they left Feril where it had fallen and walked down towards the stone square and the tower; a rough stone stump capped with black.

They passed ancient burned-out tanks and rusting All-Terrains and motor-bikes, wrecked helicopters and the hulks of small ACVs. The bodies were mostly long-decayed, reduced to bleached bones and faded rags that had been clothes and uniforms, all gone to tatters.

They crossed the field of chin-high rushes, their boots crunch-ing through shallow, ice-dried pools. Miz hauled himself up onto the plinth of the stone square near one corner; he reached down and hauled Sharrow up after him.

They walked through the flat expanse of snow to one of the small stone posts set in a corner of the square. It was like a tiny model of the central stone tower; a stump rising to a black hemisphere.

A garishly coloured, motley-uniformed body lay in front of it, face Jown, limbs spread; the snow here was pitted with neat holes that ended in shallow, blackened craters in the flagstones. Miz turned the body over with one foot, keeping the gun trained on it.

Elson Roa’s dead face stared up at the sky. His chest had been opened and burned by a laser. He looked surprised.

Miz looked at Sharrow, but she just shook her head.

He pushed Roa’s body off the edge of the stone square, down into the rushes beneath.

The pitted metal cover on top of the post swung back easily. It was on a spring; Sharrow held it back with her bandaged hand. The double-sided hand-print was there, just as Feril had said.

Sharrow gave the HandCannon to Miz, took the glove off her right hand using her teeth, then-after a look at the hand-print there, and the cryptic legend-put her hand down firmly on the slick chill of the plastic template.

Nothing happened for a few moments. Then the plastic under her hand lit up and glowed softly; a four-by-five grid of little bright dots appeared on a panel above Sharrow’s middle finger and started to disappear at one per second.

Miz and Sharrow looked at each other, then round the estuary, feeling exposed and vulnerable. A wind came out of the valley and ruffled the tops of the trees, scattering snow.

The last of the dots disappeared.

There was a grinding noise behind them; they turned quickly to see two shining metal shell-doors sliding up out of the tower, gradually covering the black hemisphere at the summit of the squat structure and meeting with a hollow clunk.

Another grinding noise came, from the side of the tower facing away from the fjord. Sharrow took her glove out of her mouth and threw it over the low stone wall into the circle. The glove landed unharmed in the snow. She shrugged, stepped over the knee-high wall and started walking to the tower.