"I heard," she said. "It was overdue."

Horza stayed looking at her. Balveda didn't take her eyes away. Yalson glanced from one to another. Eventually the drone Unaha-Closp said, "Frankly, none of this inspires confidence. My advice would be to-" It stopped as Horza glared at it. "Hmm," it said, "well, never mind that for now." It floated sideways to the door and went out.

"Seems to be OK," Wubslin said, not apparently addressing anybody in particular. He sat back from the console, nodding to himself. "Yes, ship's back to normal now." He turned round and smiled at the other three.

They came for him. He was in a gamehall playing floatball. He thought he was safe there, surrounded by friends in every direction (they seemed to float like a cloud of flies in front of him for a second, but he laughed that off, caught the ball, threw it and scored a point). But they came for him there. He saw them coming, two of them, from a door set in a narrow chimney of the spherical, ribbed gamehall. They wore cloaks of no colour, and came straight towards him. He tried to float away, but his power harness was dead. He was stuck in mid-air, unable to make progress in any direction. He was trying to swim through the air and struggle out of his harness so that he could throw it at them — perhaps to hit, certainly to send himself off in the other direction — when they caught him.

None of the people around him seemed to notice, and he realised suddenly they were not his friends, that in fact he didn't know any of them. They took his arms and, in an instant, without travelling past or through anything yet somehow making him feel they had turned an invisible corner to a place that was always there but out of sight, they were in an area of darkness. Their no-colour cloaks showed up in the darkness when he looked away. He was powerless, locked in stone, but he could see and breathe.

"Help me!"

"That is not what we are here for.

"Who are you?"

"You know.

"I don't.

"Then we can't tell you.

"What do you want?"

"We want you."

"Why?"

"Why not?"

"But why me?"

"You have no one.

"What?"

"You have no one.

"What do you mean?"

"No family. No friends …"

"… no religion. No belief.

"That's not true!"

"How would you know?"

"I believe in…"

"What?"

"Me!"

"That is not enough.

"Anyway, you'll never find it.

"What? Find what?"

"Enough. Let's do it now.

"Do what?"

"Take your name.

"I-

And they reached together into his skull and took his name.

So he screamed.

"Horza!" Yalson shook his head, bouncing it off the bulkhead at the top of the small bed. He spluttered awake, the whimper dying on his lips, his body tense for an instant, then soft.

He put his hands out and touched the woman's furred skin. She put her hands behind his head and hugged him to her breast. He said nothing, but his heart slowed to the pace of hers. She rocked his body gently with her own, then pushed his head away, bent and kissed his lips.

"I'm all right now," he told her. "Just a nightmare."

"What was it?"

"Nothing," he said. He put his head back to her chest, nestling it between her breasts like a huge, delicate egg.

Horza had his suit on. Wubslin was in his usual seat. Yalson occupied the co-pilot's chair. They were all suited up. Schar's World filled the screen in front of them, the belly sensors of the CAT staring straight down at the sphere of white and grey beneath and magnifying it.

"One more time," Horza said. Wubslin transmitted the recorded message for the third time.

"Maybe they don't use that code any more," Yalson said. She watched the screen with her sharp-browed eyes. She had cropped her hair back to about a centimetre over her skull, hardly thicker than the down which covered her body. The menacing effect jarred with the smallness of her head sticking out from the large neck of the suit.

"It's traditional; more of a ceremonial language than a code," Horza said. "They'll know it if they hear it."

"You're sure we're beaming it at the right place?"

"Yes," Horza said, trying to remain calm. They had been in orbit for less than half an hour, stationary above the continent which held the buried tunnels of the Command System. Almost the whole of the planet was covered in snow. Ice locked the thousand-kilometre peninsula where the tunnel system lay fast into the sea itself. Schar's World had entered another of its periodic ice ages seven thousand years previously, and only in a relatively thin band around the equator — between the slightly wobbling planet's tropics — was there open ocean. It showed as a steely grey belt around the world, occasionally visible through whorls of storm clouds.

They were twenty-five thousand kilometres out from the planet's snow-crusted surface, their communicator beaming down onto a circular area a few tens of kilometres in diameter at a point midway between the two frozen arms of sea which gave the peninsula a slight waist. That was where the entrance to the tunnels lay; that was where the Changers lived. Horza knew he hadn't made a mistake, but there was no answer.

There is death here, he kept thinking. A little of the planet's chill seemed to creep along his bones.

"Nothing," Wubslin said.

"Right," Horza said, taking the manual controls into his gloved hands. "We're going in."

The Clear Air Turbulence teased its warp fields out along the slight curve of the planet's gravity well, carefully edging itself down the slope. Horza cut the motors and let them return to their emergency-ready-only mode. They shouldn't need them now, and would soon be unable to use them as the gravity gradient increased.

The CAT fell with gradually increasing speed towards the planet, fusion motors at the ready. Horza watched displays on the screens until he was satisfied they were on course; then, with the planet seeming to turn a little beneath the craft, he unstrapped and went back to the mess.

Aviger, Neisin and Dorolow sat in their suits, strapped into the mess-room seats. Perosteck Balveda was also strapped in; she wore a thick jacket and matching trousers. Her head was exposed above the soft ruff of a white shirt. The bulky fabric jacket was fastened up to her throat. She had warm boots on, and a pair of hide gloves lay on the table in front of her. The jacket even had a little hood, which hung down her back. Horza wasn't sure whether Balveda had chosen this soft, useless image of a space suit to make a point to him, or unconsciously, out of fear and a need for security.

Unaha-Closp sat in a chair, strapped against its back, pointing straight up at the ceiling. "I trust', it said, "we're not going to have the same sort of flying-circus job we had to endure the last time you flew this heap of debris." Horza ignored it.

"We haven't had any word from Mr Adequate, so it looks like we're all going down," he said. "When we get there, I'll go in by myself to check things out. When I come back, we'll decide what we're going to do."

"That is, you'll decide-" began the drone.

"What if you don't come back?" Aviger said. The drone made a hissing noise but went quiet. Horza looked at the toy-like figure of the old man in his suit.

"I'll come back, Aviger," he said. "I'm sure everybody at the base will be fine. I'll get them to heat up some food for us." He smiled, but knew it wasn't especially convincing. "Anyway," he went on, "in the unlikely event there is anything wrong, I'll come straight back."