She could recall nothing of those final minutes, and nothing of the crash itself, as the piece of wreckage containing her buried itself inside a snow-wave, one of the thousands migrating across the surface of the planet’s equatorial snow-fields like sand dunes across a desert.

A crawler carrying mining supplies had been within a couple of kilometres. The crew had found her, a few minutes before it would have been too late, crushed and folded inside the steaming, radiation-contaminated wreckage of the ship, buried two hundred metres under the surface of the snow-wave at the end of a collapsed tunnel of ice and snow.

The crawler’s crew had cut her out; the medics at First Cut mine had treated the physical injuries, while specialist war-embargoed systems were brought in from Trench City, the planet’s capital, to treat the radiation sickness that had brought her even closer to death.

It had been two months before they’d even thought it worthwhile restoring her to consciousness. When she awoke the war had been over for a month and the military standard interface wafer buried at the back of her skull had been removed. The effects of the synchroneurobonding virus were irreversible, while the nanotechnology and tissue-cloning techniques that repaired the ravages of the radiation pulse were only withdrawn after the course of treatment had finished.

And-perhaps-something else had been added; the crystal virus that had grown over the years and then lain dormant within her skull until a few weeks ago, when she’d been running with the others through the dried-up tank of the ancient oil-carrier, in the Log-Jam.

Her memories of the hospital in the mine complex were hazy. She remembered the Tenaus military prison hospital much better; gradually recovering, waiting for the final peace deal to be worked out, beginning to exercise her body in the gym to restore her lost fitness, and exercising her brain whenever she could, remembering-obsessively, the prison psychologist had worried-every detail she could dredge from her memory from the age of five onwards, because she’d been terrified that the treatment had altered her, made her somebody different by destroying some of her memories.

She wanted to recall everything, and to try to assess if the memories she found buried in herself were the ones she could remember from before; it seemed like a check on the kind of alteration she feared that the act of recalling a memory itself left a memory, and that that could be compared with the experience of remembering in the present.

In the end there was no sure way of telling, but she found no obvious holes in her memory. When she’d been allowed to send and receive communications, the people who wrote to her seemed to relate to her the way she remembered. Nobody seemed to notice any change; certainly they didn’t mention any.

They had to write to her because visits were not allowed and the light-delay from Tenaus Habitat to almost anywhere else was too long for real-time conversations. She had had one phone call with Miz, calling from HomeAtLast, in orbit above Miykenns. In a way it had been the best phone conversation of her life; the minutes-long gaps while the signal carrying the words you had just spoken travelled to their destination meant that you just had to sit there looking at the screen and the other person. Calling anybody else, she’d have watched screen or read something in between, but with Miz she just sat and stared at his face. They’d had an hour; it had only really been ten minutes and had seemed like one.

Had they put the crystal virus into her there, in Tenaus? Nachtel’s Ghost seemed like the more obvious place, while she’d been hovering close to death in a state more like suspended animation than anything else, beyond stimulus, sensation or dreams… but perhaps it had been done in Tenaus. Why would a Tax-neutral mining company want to implant a transceiver virus in a near-dead crashed military pilot?

But then, she thought, why would somebody in a military prison hospital want to do that either?

Why would anybody?

A cold, keen wind cut out of a sky the colour of verdigris. The sun dangled like a hopeless bauble dispensing thin amounts of light. Leeward, the dark train of a departing storm trailed its snowy skirts high into the swivelling tides of light. The snow-cliff at her back reared like an enormous wave, poised ready to break on the sloped black beach of the shield volcano’s flanks.

The crawler which had brought her here rumbled back on its tracks, over the clinker and the wind-drifted ramps of ash, reversing into the snow-tunnel. She watched its glinting metal carapace and maser-nostrilled snout slide back into the base of the snow-cliff and trundle back and up until the slope of the tunnel removed it from her view.

She turned and looked up the barely discernible slope of the volcano through veils of lifting steam and vapour towards the tumbled remains of the old geothermal station buildings, a set of fractured concrete blocks strewn haphazardly across the darkly gleaming lava field. Snow-covered pools dotted depressions in the lava, and in the distance-maybe twenty kilometres away the latest of the volcano’s vents piled white steam and smoke into the sky. She looked straight up. Overhead, the gas giant Nachtel hung hemispheric, pale gold and hazy orange in the sky, filling a quarter of it.

She pulled the hood of her jacket tighter against the thin, freezing wind, and set off across the fractured, grey-black lava field towards the ruined concrete buildings up the slope, clutching the empty book to her chest.

She was breathing hard when she got to the smashed blockhouses; the atmosphere was desperately thin, even though comparatively little effort was required to walk in the Ghost’s weak gravity. Agoraphobia was endemic in visitors to the planet-moon who ventured into the open; the air felt so thin and Nachtel could loom so huge above that it seemed each floating step must send the walker bounding away from the surface altogether, swept away into the green, subliming sky.

“Hello?” she called.

Her voice echoed round the concrete walls of the first collapsed concrete building. Quakes had left all the thick-walled, windowless structures canted and listing, and the concrete apron they had been built upon had split and sundered, leaving jagged chunks of material sticking up like broken teeth, their rusted reinforcing rods tangling or torn out like failed brace-work.

She held the book to her chest and walked over the tilted slabs of concrete from building to building, having to stoop and use her free hand in places where the fractured geography of the ruins made walking, even in that low gravity, impossible.

The building furthest upslope was the largest in the complex; she stepped over the fallen lintel of its broad doorway.

Though the structure’s walls were intact, its roof had folded in the middle, then caved in and fallen to produce a shallow “V” of concrete which slanted down into an ice-rimmed pool of standing water, which-perhaps still connected to the network of abandoned thermal pipe-work buried in the volcano-was warm enough to produce lazy strokes of steam in the calm, sub-zero air.

There was a narrow beach of black clinker gathered in one corner of the ruin, against the far wall.

There were two men there. She recognised them.

They were dressed only in swimming trunks and sat in the same two deck-chairs she remembered from the tanker. A flowery parasol stuck at a jaunty angle out of the black beach behind them, and between their seats there was a small folding-table holding bottles and glasses.

The one on the right stood up and waved to her.

“Delighted you could join us!” he called, then took a couple of steps forward to the water and dived lithely in with barely a splash. The waves looked tall and odd as they moved across the pool.