Ilen must have still been mostly unconscious because she didn’t even scream as she fell, so that they heard her body hit the strip of vanes far below, long seconds later, and might even have felt the impact through the fabric of the ship.

Fassin had closed his eyes. Let Sal be right, let this not be happening. He tried to grip the edge of the hole again, to take the weight off the straps.

Taince just hung there for a while. “Lost her,” she said quietly, and the way she said it Fassin was suddenly terrified that she was going to let go too and drop after Ilen, but she didn’t. She just said, “Coming back up now. Hold on.”

She climbed up and over him and helped him out. They looked down but couldn’t see the body. They spent a few moments sitting side by side, breathing hard, with their backs against one of the stalagmites, a bit like they’d sat earlier, back at the flier. Taince untied her fatigues and put them on. She took the gun out.

Fassin looked at it as she stood up. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

She looked down at him. “Not kill the fuck, if that’s what you’re thinking.” She sounded calm now. She nudged one of his feet with her boot. “We should get back.”

He stood up, a little shaky, and she held him by one arm. “Did our best, Fass,” she told him. “Both of us did. We can grieve for Ilen later. What we do now is we go back to the flier, try to find Sal, see if we can get comms, get the fuck out of here and tell the authorities.”

They turned away from the hole.

“Why have you still got the gun out?” Fassin asked.

“Sal,” Taince said. “He’s never been this humiliated. Never let himself down like this. Not to my knowledge. Grief and guilt. Does things to people.” She was doing some sort of breathing-exercise thing, taking quick breaths, holding them. “Faint chance he’ll think… if no one ever knows what happened here…’ She shrugged. “He’s got a gun. He might wish us harm.”

Fassin looked at her, unbelieving. “You think? Seriously?”

Taince nodded. “I know the guy,” she told him. “And don’t be surprised if the flier’s gone.”

It was gone.

They walked out to the gap in the hull and found the flier there in the faint light of a false dawn coming from one thick sliver of sun-struck Nasqueron. Sal was sitting looking out at the chill expanse of desert. Before they approached, Taince checked her military transceiver again and found that she had signal. She called the nearest Navarchy unit and gave a brief report, then they walked across the sand to the flier. Their phones were still out.

Saluus looked round at them. “Did she fall?” he asked.

“We nearly got her,” Taince said. “Very nearly.” She was still holding her gun. Sal put one hand over his face for a while. In his other hand he was gripping a thin, twisted, half-melted-looking piece of metal, and when he took his hand away from his face he started turning the metal fragment over and over in both hands. His gun lay with his jacket, on the back seat. “Got through to the military,” Taince told him. “Alert’s over. Just wait where we are. There’s a ship on its way.” She got in the back, behind Sal.

“We were never going to save her, Tain,” he told her. “Fass,” he said as the other man got into the other front seat beside him, “we were just never going to save her. We’d only have got ourselves killed too.”

“Find the rope?” Fassin asked. He had a sudden image of taking the twisted piece of metal that Sal was playing with and sticking it into his eye.

Sal just shook his head. He looked dazed more than anything else. “Went over on my ankle,” he said. “Think it might be sprained. Barely made it back. Thought I could use the flier, get it through the stuff hanging above us and find a way over the top of all that wreckage, back to where it all happened, but the hanging stuff was more solid than it looked; came out here to try and signal.” The piece of twisted metal kept going round and round in his hands.

“What is that?” Fassin asked after a while.

Sal looked down at it. He shrugged. “From the ship. Just something I found.”

Taince reached round from behind him, wrenched the piece of metal from his hands and threw it away across the sand.

They sat there in silence until a Navarchy suborb showed up. When Taince went out to meet it, Sal got out of the flier and went, limping, to retrieve the fragment.

TWO:

DESTRUCTIVE RECALL

I was born in a water moon. Some people, especially its inhabitants, called it a planet, but as it was only a little over two hundred kilometres in diameter “moon’ seems the more accurate term. The moon was made entirely of water, by which I mean it was a globe that not only had no land, but no rock either, a sphere with no solid core at all, just liquid water, all the way down to the very centre of the globe.

If it had been much bigger the moon would have had a core of ice, for water, though supposedly incompressible, is not entirely so, and will change under extremes of pressure to become ice. (If you are used to living on a planet where ice floats on the surface of water, this seems odd and even wrong, but nevertheless it is the case.) This moon was not quite of a size for an ice core to form, and therefore one could, if one was sufficiently hardy, and adequately proof against the water pressure, make one’s way down, through the increasing weight of water above, to the very centre of the moon. Where a strange thing happened.

For here, at the very centre of this watery globe, there seemed to be no gravity. There was colossal pressure, certainly, pressing in from every side, but one was in effect weightless (on the outside of a planet, moon or other body, watery or not, one is always being pulled towards its centre; once at its centre one is being pulled equally in all directions), and indeed the pressure around one was, for the same reason, not quite as great as one might have expected it to be, given the mass of water that the moon was made up from. This was, of course,

I was born in a water moon. Some people, especially its inhabitants, called it a planet, but as it was only a little—

The captain broke off there, exponentially scrolling some of the rest across the screen, then stopping to read a line: “Where a strange thing happened.” He flicked further on, stopping again: “I was born in a water moon. Some people, especially its”

All like this? he asked his Number Three.

All the same, it is believed, sir. It appears to repeat precisely the same few hundred words, time after time. About twelve to the seventeen times. That is all that is left of its memory. Even the base operating system and instruction sets have been overwritten. This is a standard abominatory technique known as destructive recall.

It leaves no trace of what might have been there before?

Trace is left, but that too reveals a short repetitive. Tech begs suggest this is merely the last of many iterative over-writes. No trace remains of the machine’s true memories before it realised capture or destruction was inevitable.

Indeed.

The Voehn captain tapped a control to take the display through to the end. The screen froze for an appreciable moment, then displayed: “I was born—”

This is the very last section of memory?

Yes, sir.

An expression another Voehn would have recognised as a smile crossed the captain’s face, and his back-spines flexed briefly.

This has been checked, Number Three? There is no other content, are no hidden messages?

It is being checked, sir. The totality of the data exceeds our ship’s memory capacity and is being processed in blocks. What you see here is technically an abstraction.

Time to accomplish?

Another twenty minutes.

Any other media capable of supporting significant stored information load?