The interior flashed once, then an instant later blazed white, blindingly, unbearably. His eyes closed instinctively, and a burning yellow light came through his eyelids. His helmet speakers made a sudden, piercing, inhuman noise, like a machine screaming, then cut out altogether. The light faded slowly. He opened his eyes.

The shuttle interior was still brightly lit, but it was smouldering now, too. In the turbulent air whirling in from the open rear doors, wisps of smoke were tugged from scorched seats, singed straps and webbing, and the crisped black skin on Lenipobra's exposed face. Shadows seemed to be burnt onto the bulkhead in front.

Horza's fingers, one by one, came to the edge of the ramp.

My God, he thought, looking at the scorch marks and the smoke, that maniac had a nuke after all. Then the shock wave hit.

It slapped him forward, over the ramp and into the shuttle, just before it hit the machine itself, throwing it bucking and bouncing about the sky like a tiny bird caught in a storm. Horza was rattled about the interior from side to side, trying desperately to grab hold of something to stop himself falling back out through the open rear doors. His hand found some straps and fisted round them with the last of his strength.

Back through the doors, through the mist, a huge rolling fireball was climbing slowly into the sky. A noise like every clap of thunder he had ever heard vibrated through the hot, hazed interior of the fleeing machine. The shuttle banked, throwing Horza against one set of seats. A big tower flashed by the open rear doors, blocking out the fireball as the shuttle continued to turn. The rear doors seemed to try to close, then jammed.

Horza felt heavy and hot inside his suit, as the heat from the bomb's flash seeped through from the surfaces which had been exposed to the initial fireball. His right leg hurt badly, somewhere below the knee. He could smell burning.

As the shuttle steadied and its course straightened, Horza got up and limped forward to the door set in the bulkhead, where the outlines of the seats and Lenipobra's slumped body — now spread-eagled near the rear doors — were burnt in frozen shadows onto the off-white surface of the wall. He opened the door and went through.

Mipp was in the pilot's seat, hunched over the controls. The monitor screens were blank, but the view through the thick, polarised glass of the shuttle's windscreen showed cloud, mist, some towers sliding underneath and open sea beyond, covered with yet more cloud. "Thought you… were dead…" Mipp said thickly, half turning towards Horza. Mipp looked wounded, crouched in his seat, hunchbacked, eyelids drooped. Sweat glistened on his dark brow. There was smoke in the flight deck, acrid and sweet at once.

Horza took his helmet off and fell into the other seat. He looked down at his right leg. A neat, black-rimmed hole about a centimetre across had been punched through the back of the suit calf, matched by a larger and more ragged hole on the side. He flexed the leg and winced; just a muscle burn, already cauterised. He could see no blood.

He looked at Mipp. "You all right?" he asked. He already knew the answer.

Mipp shook his head. "No," he said, in a soft voice. "That lunatic hit me. Leg, and my back somewhere."

Horza looked at the back of Mipp's suit, near where it rested against the seat. A hole in the bowl of the seat led to a long, dark scar on the suit surface. Horza looked down at the flight-deck floor. "Shit," he said. "This thing's full of holes."

The floor was pitted with craters. Two were directly under Mipp's seat; one laser shot had caused that dark scar on the side of the suit, the other must have hit Mipp's body.

"Feels like that bastard shot me right up the ass, Horza," Mipp said, trying to smile. "He did have a nuke, didn't he? That's what went off. Blew all the electrics away… Only the optic controls still working. Useless damn shuttle…"

"Mipp, let me take over," Horza said. They were in cloud now; only a vague coppery light showed through the crystal screen ahead. Mipp shook his head.

"Can't. You couldn't fly this thing… with it in this shape."

"We've got to go back, Mipp. The others might have-"

"Can't. They'll all be dead," Mipp said, shaking his head and gripping the controls tighter, staring through the screen. "God, this thing's dying." He looked round the blank monitors, shaking his head slowly. "I can feel it."

"Shit!" Horza said, feeling helpless. "What about radiation?" he said suddenly. It was a truism that in any properly designed suit, if you survived the flash and blast, you'd survive the radiation; but Horza wasn't sure that his was a properly designed suit. One of the many instruments it lacked was a radiation monitor, and that was a bad sign in itself. Mipp looked at a small screen on the console.

"Radiation…" He shook his head. "Nothing serious," he said. "Low on neutrons…" he grimaced with pain. "Pretty clean bomb; probably not what that bastard wanted at all. He should take it back to the shop…" Mipp gave a small, strangled, despairing laugh.

"We have to go back, Mipp," Horza said. He tried to imagine Yalson, running away from the wreckage with a better start than he and Lamm had had. He told himself she'd have made it, that when the bomb had gone off, she'd have been far enough away not to be injured by it, and that the ship would finally stop, the metal glacier of wreckage slowing and halting. But how would she or any of the others get off the Megaship, if any of them had survived? He tried the shuttle's communicator, but it was as dead as his suit's.

"You won't raise them," Mipp said, shaking his head. "You can't raise the dead. I heard them; they cut off, while they were running. I was trying to tell them-"

"Mipp, they changed channels, that was all. Didn't you hear Kraiklyn? They swapped channels because Lamm was shouting so much."

Mipp crouched in his seat, shaking his head. "I didn't hear that," he said after a moment. "That wasn't what I heard. I was trying to tell them about the ice… the size of it; the height." He shook his head again. "They're dead, Horza."

"They were well away from us, Mipp," Horza said quietly. "At least a kilometre. They probably survived. If they were in shadow, if they'd run when we did… They were further back. They're probably alive, Mipp. We've got to go back and get them."

Mipp shook his head. "Can't, Horza. They must be dead. Even Neisin. Went off for a walk… after you had all gone. Had to leave without him. Couldn't raise him. They must be dead. All of them."

"Mipp," Horza said, "it wasn't a very big nuke."

Mipp laughed, then groaned. He shook his head again. "So what? You didn't see that ice, Horza; it was-"

Just then the shuttle lurched. Horza looked quickly to the screen, but there was only the glowing light of the cloud they were flying through, all around them. "Oh God," Mipp whispered, "we're losing it."

"What's wrong?" Horza asked. Mipp shrugged painfully.

"Everything. I think we're dropping, but I've no altimeter, no airspeed indicator, communicator or nav gear: nothing… Running rough because of all these holes and the doors being open."

"We're losing height?" Horza asked, looking at Mipp.

Mipp nodded. "You want to start throwing things out?" he said. "Well, throw things out. Might get us more height." The shuttle lurched again.

"You're serious," Horza said, starting to get out of the seat. Mipp nodded.

"We're dropping. I'm serious. Damn, even if we did go back we couldn't take this thing over the Edgewall, not even with one or two of us just…" Mipp's voice trailed off.

Horza levered himself painfully out of his seat and through the door.

In the passenger compartment there was smoke, mist and noise. The hazy light streamed through the doors. He tried to tear the seats from the walls, but they wouldn't move. He looked at Lenipobra's broken body and burned face. The shuttle lurched; for a second Horza felt lighter inside his suit. He grabbed Lenipobra's suit by the arm and hauled the dead youth to the ramp. He pushed the corpse over the ramp, and the limp husk fell, vanishing into the mist below. The shuttle banked one way, then the other, almost throwing Horza off his feet.