'What are Sparkind?' asked Chaline.

Gant's face fell.

Cormac explained, 'Kind of soldier. They have a certain reputation.'

Mika said, "They dealt with the situation on Darnis; twelve of them against a unit of cyborgs and a small army. The name is the same as that of an ancient race of fighters.' Her expression was blank.

Gant's smile returned. 'No, they were called Spartans - and we don't live like them,' he said.

Mika frowned. She obviously did not like to be found wrong.

'How many of you are there on the Hubris?' asked Cormac.

'Just one group,' replied Gant.

Four of them. Not inconsiderable. What was Blegg expecting?

Gant continued. 'The other two are Golem Thirties.' He was still smiling.

Cormac tried not to let his annoyance show. This was information he should have received long ago. Had he been gridlinked, of course, he would have already known. He also reckoned he would have directed things with all the sensitivity he had shown on Cheyne III. Damn Blegg.

Samarkand grew and grew until an arc of it filled the screen; frozen oceans of a sulphurous yellow edged with shores of pure malachite; rolling mountain ranges that seemed made of desert sand. Chaline pointed out a spreading stain of reddish-green across the surface of one ocean. It issued from one point on the shore.

'Heat-sink station,' she said. 'The colouring is from adapted algae. They should survive the freezing process and start oxygenating, once the seas thaw out.'

'That will take a lot of energy,' Cormac observed.

'Well, you've seen how much energy one human body can carry in.'

She looked to the side, where the brown ring at the edge of the blast-site could be seen. It was just coloration to the level ground and over a nearby range of hills, from fallout - from the heat flash. They all knew that nothing could have survived within it. Cormac pursed his lips in thought for a moment, then turned to the two Sparkind.

'What was your brief,' he asked, 'exactly?'

Thorn said, 'Quite simple, my friend, we are here to make sure nothing… military gets in the way of reestablishing runcible link. Beyond that, we were told to do whatever you tell us to do. There was a briefing that, for this initial survey, only Gant and I would be needed, and that further orders from you might be… lacking.'

He gave a crooked grin, to which Cormac could not help but respond.

'Anything else?' he asked.

'Only that the other two were to hold themselves in readiness. I suppose you don't need the big guns yet. Anyway, they were orders that were surprisingly lacking in detail. I hope that what detail there is doesn't conflict.'

'It won't,' said Cormac, and clamped down on his frustration. He had learnt nothing. Only two for the initial survey. Where or when would all four be needed? Cormac cursed Blegg's reticence. It seemed to him now he had only been sent here to learn something which was probably already known, and to be rehabilitated. He did not like playing this sort of game.

A dull droning sound told them they were entering the thin and frigid atmosphere. The droning grew to a roar as cloud whipped against the shutde. The shutde banked and spiralled down towards the planet. This noise precluded speech, but it seemed no time before they were hurding above a mountain range under a sky the colour of old brass, and before the roar became a dull and distant thunder.

'We'll be approaching the station shordy. The weather is very bad. Ground temperature one-seventy Kelvin. You'll need your suit heaters on, and full seal on your masks,' Jane told them.

'Those are the mountains the runcible energy-surplus used to heat. There was a line of big microwave dishes transmitting the surplus energy,' said Chaline. 'On a busy day the rock used to melt. The heat-sink stations at New Sea were intended for the next stage of terraform-ing. They had recently come into operation and were melting the seas.'

'It wasn't just algae they introduced. There were moulds, lichens and planktons round the station, and even adapted angel shrimp. Whoever did this wrecked much more man a runcible,' said Mika.

Yes, Cormac realized, what had happened here must seem doubly painful to someone trained on Circe. Not only had there been a huge loss of human life, but also the loss of a nascent ecology. There had probably been many from the Life-coven working here on Samarkand.

Soon the station came into sight. It had the appearance of an iron cathedral on the shore of the frozen sea. It had spires and arches in its makeup, but none of them were for decoration. The arching structures that clawed into the ground and the sea carried heavy-gauge superconductors and the spires and turrets were microwave receivers that employed field technology rather than the bulky dishes used heretofore. Jane guided the shuttle close over the structure itself, then down into the cleared area that ringed it. Here were parked private AGCs, and to one side was the wreck of a carrier. Perhaps it had just been landing or taking off when the blastwave hit. They all saw it, and made no comment. Without a doubt it contained bodies; but a fraction of the total dead.

The shutde settled a hundred metres from the doors of the station. As the rest of them unstrapped from their seats, Cormac remained where he was and stared thoughtfully at the carrier. It occurred to him then that the cold would not have returned here immediately. When Jane came up beside him he caught hold of her arm. Through his gloves it felt like any other arm.

'How long would it have taken?' he asked.

She looked at him with a quizzical expression.

'The cold. How long to get down to say… minus fifty?'

'Three solstan days.'

'That quick?'

'Yes, the installation here, all of it, might be equated to a very small speck of warm sand on an ice cube.'

'I see,' said Cormac, and then studied her closely. 'I realize I've been a prat.'

'It is something we all realize at one time or another.'

Yeah, like you'd ever do anything foolish.

'Let me put it another way then,' he continued. 'I miscalculated. Unless you feel you might be needed out here you can stay with the shutde.'

Jane smiled at him. 'I think I might as well come along. I might be of use.'

Cormac nodded and let her continue to the exit. Before he followed, he removed his shuriken holster from within his sleeve and strapped it on outside. He had already practised using it whilst wearing a thermal mask and gloves. Blegg might have expected little danger here at first, but that did not mean he should consider the place safe. When his life was at risk, Cormac never liked to rely on the judgement of others, even an immortal Japanese demigod. He placed his mask over his face and closed the seals that connected it to his hood. He knew it was fully sealed when a small

LED went off just at the edge of his vision. Once that light disappeared, he allowed himself a small smile.

Outside it was like a harsh winter on Earth, only the snow blowing past them consisted of carbon-dioxide crystals, and the ice under their feet was water-ice as hard as iron. Cormac felt no hint of the cold. Had he done so, it would probably mean his suit was failing and that he would shortly be dead. Jane stood brushing the snow from her hair, as if it was flower blossom dropping on a spring day. In this setting, dressed in her thin bodysuit, she did look unhuman. There was no billowing cloud of vapour as she breathed. She did not flush, nor did she shiver.

They trudged through the snow to the main entrance. Off to one side Cormac observed the huge super-conductor ducts that led to heat-sinks under the frozen sea. From the shutde these ducts had appeared to be the thickness of old oaks. Here, now, he could see they were large enough to run a motorway along. There the surplus energy, converted from microwave beams transmitted from the runcible buffers, was conducted as electrical energy to the heat-sinks, where it was converted into terraforming heat. Fifteen months ago much of this sea had not been frozen, and, as Mika had said, angel shrimps had been introduced.