She tried to get to Va, who sat with blood dripping down his chin. Finally the Arab managed to push her none too gently back into a bulkhead and pin her there. Alessandra stopped her from clawing at his eyes by grabbing her wrists.

Elenya raged for a few moments more, then seemed to fold in on herself. Said risked letting her go, and put his hand to his face. Alessandra was more reluctant to release her grip, but in the end she felt she ought.

Elenya would not meet anyone’s gaze. She found her way to the door, still looking down. It slid aside and closed after she had gone.

Benzamir put his head down on the table, feeling the damp coolness in his forehead.

‘Master?’ asked Wahir. ‘We will not desert you.’

‘You promised you’d leave the magicians to me. I’m going to hold you to that.’

‘I’m not a coward,’ Wahir said. ‘I want to fight with you.’

Said rested his knuckles on the table. ‘I’ll stand with you too. It’s my duty, my right. I will not step back when something so – so important needs completing.’

‘And me. Everything you’ve said just makes it more vital that you have our help.’ Alessandra wiped a line of blood from her arm. ‘I made you no promise, and you are not the only one on this ship.’

Benzamir got up abruptly and swept everything in front of him onto the floor. It fell, it bounced, it broke, it spilled. Into the silence he hissed: ‘I will not allow it! How could I live on knowing that you were dead?’ He limped to the exit. ‘Ari? Call them. Call the rebels. If they answer, we can talk. If they don’t, then I’ll have to dig them out from whichever stone they’re hiding under.’

He left, and he had never felt so wretched in his life.

CHAPTER 39

HE SAT BROODING in the pilot’s chair, waiting for something to happen and going over everything he had said.

‘Where are they?’

‘They don’t answer.’

‘Is it likely that they’ve got the narrowcast?’

‘Yes.’

Benzamir tutted. ‘What of the unmaker’s transponder?’

‘The information was degraded. I couldn’t get anything useful off it.’

‘I thought we could use it. I even took time to get it.’

‘I know,’ said Ariadne. ‘The initial co-ordinates it gave were just wrong. I have to distrust all the tracking data stored thereafter.’

‘Show me.’

‘But—’

‘Humour me, Ari.’

She showed him the metric co-ordinates, based on the usual Tribal conventions. She offered him the image that those co-ordinates represented. There was nothing there but black rock and white ice.

He studied the scene. ‘Why the hell would they land in Antarctica?’

‘I can only surmise that they didn’t, and we have to search the rest of the world.’ Ariadne took away the picture and carried on hunting with her pattern-recognition software for something that resembled a spaceship on the ground.

‘Bring it back up again.’ Benzamir sat forward, then climbed out of his seat and stood on the edge of the display. ‘Zoom in.’

‘You don’t mind if I continue the proper work, do you?’

‘No, no,’ he said absently. ‘Carry on.’

He stared at the holographic image for a long time, examining it from every angle. It was spring in the northern hemisphere. Ice that had formed over the winter was beginning to melt, leaving the continent as a ragged, lake-pocked desert. The only mark on his map was for New Swabia, and the area had been called that for a thousand years.

He looked and looked again, then ducked under the floating picture to study its underneath.

‘Ari, take us down.’ He pointed to a hill a little way from the coast, just above a broad lake still sealed with ice. ‘Just there.’

‘Can I remind you that you said we didn’t even have time to fix your leg?’

He walked slowly back to the pilot’s chair, and sat rubbing his knee as Ariadne abandoned her methodical search for his wild-goose chase. He felt gravity shift subtly as she killed her orbital speed and began to fall.

‘Give me the outside view.’

‘What am I going to find?’ she asked. ‘There is literally nothing there. No people, no buildings, no debris, nothing more complex than sea-birds, no plant life higher than moss.’

When Benzamir didn’t answer, Ariadne threw herself at the Earth, and her underside glowed with white heat. A tremor rattled the ship, and another, as air was crushed and thrown aside by her passing. Then it came constantly, a quivering high-pitched squeal almost too high to register. Benzamir’s view flickered with orange light.

Wahir and Said drifted onto the flight deck.

‘Master, what’s happening?’

‘Aero-braking. Up among the stars, speed is a trivial thing. But we’re moving so fast, even the air is like a wall we have to batter our way through.’

‘Is that real fire?’ asked Wahir. He walked forward until he was within the projection, his legs disappearing under the shelf of land. He looked around him, dipped his hand down and poked the image.

‘Real fire.’ Benzamir sat upright. ‘If there were people down below, they would hear distant thunder and look up. They’d see us as a streak of light pointing down towards the ground and they’d wonder. But here there’s no one to see us. There never were any witnesses when it happened the first time, and there won’t be now.’

‘The first time?’ said Said.

‘I asked everywhere I went. Have you seen anything strange in the sky? Something falling to the ground in a fireball? But they hadn’t.’ He was distracted by Wahir’s cavorting through the display as the boy ducked down and up again, as if he was a swimmer in a strange, luminous sea. ‘It turns out we were asking in all the wrong places.’

Benzamir, despite his aches, crouched forward, as if watching Wahir but staring into the dark around him. The light-show ended, and with it the trembling of the hull. Settling in thick air, Ariadne dropped her front and took control of flying the course to their landing point.

They circled once, and it looked no different to how it had looked from orbit. Black rock, sharp and brittle, smudged with lichen where the freezing Antarctic wind didn’t tear quite as fiercely. White ice, broken at the margins into misshapen slabs, polished at the centre, gleaming like a mirror in the low-angled light.

Then they landed, and Benzamir walked back through the ship to the cargo hold. Said and Wahir trailed after him, and Va met them inside.

‘The ship has stopped,’ he said nasally. Two wads of linen were rammed in his nostrils.

‘I’m going on a little field trip.’ Benzamir looked at the men. ‘Looks like a boys only expedition.’

He opened a locker and threw out three thick all-in-ones before getting one for himself. He showed them how to step into them, seal them up and activate the heating circuits.

Said’s was too small. Wahir’s drowned him. Va’s fitted best of all, and he just looked ridiculous, with his habit riding up inside and making the overall bulge in unseemly places.

‘By any scale of measurement you want to use, it’s really cold outside. You’ll need to put up your hood, and please, don’t lick anything metal.’ Benzamir collected a tool like a thick, hollow pipe and stepped over to the iris in the floor. It spun open, and the heat stole from the room. He jumped down. His boots crunched against the rock, and he ducked down to clear the last of Ariadne’s hull.

The others emerged, one by one, blinking in the daylight. Va nodded approvingly.

‘A good place. Lakes and hills. It reminds me of Finnland.’ He looked around. ‘Where are the trees?’

Benzamir adjusted Wahir’s suit so that he could see out. ‘Give it another thousand years, Brother, and there might be soil enough. When my people were last here, it was covered in ice all the way up to the tops of those mountains.’ He pointed to a distant range.