Nigel turned to frown at her. ‘Of course.’

‘I mean: is it a Faller?’

‘Oh. Hard to tell. There’s not much left to do a biochemical analysis on. And, in any case, I still need to get my hands on a Faller to find out exactly what their biochemistry is.’

Kysandra shuddered. Who else but Nigel could casually say: I still need to get my hands on a Faller? She gave the metal hill a pensive glance. It was closer now, just over eight kilometres away. They’d determined its size, too: u-shadows working it out as five hundred metres wide at the base, and two hundred and sixty three metres high at the precarious-looking apex.

Nigel and Fergus turned the body over. Its arm broke off with a dull crack. Kysandra flinched and clamped her jaw together. Come on, you can do this. Don’t be weak, not now.

‘Female,’ Fergus proclaimed. He ran a scanner over the skull with its empty eye sockets. Heavily creased lips ringed a wide-open mouth, making Kysandra think the woman had died screaming – a last action steadfastly preserved by the desert environment.

‘Picking up traces. She had biononics. Commonwealth citizen, then.’ He gave Kysandra a reassuring grin. ‘Human.’

Russell opened one of the boxes. The lid crumbled out of his fingers. ‘Nothing much in here. Metal bottles and some dust.’

‘Food and water,’ Fergus said. ‘Too bad she didn’t make it very far.’

Nigel knelt beside the rickety cart, his eyes closed as he reviewed data from the modules he’d placed on the body. ‘Crud. She’s been out here for three thousand years. Whatever happened here, happened when the colony ships arrived.’ He stood up and faced the hill, squinting against the dying sunlight. ‘What the hell is that thing?’

Fergus ran his hand over the hatch/cart, tracing the broken hinges. ‘This is from some kind of space vehicle. A shuttle? Exopod, maybe?’

Kysandra saw it, actually saw the shock flare on Nigel’s face. She’d never seen that before. It was hard to believe he could be shocked. As if that wasn’t bad enough, his shell weakened enough to let out a corresponding pulse of dismay. He stood up slowly and pulled his goggles down to stare at the hill. ‘Oh crap,’ he said quietly. ‘The profile. Look at the profile. It’s segmented. That isn’t some geological rock spike, it’s a pile.’

Fergus made no attempt to hide his flinch. ‘It can’t be. That size? There’d be . . .’

‘If it’s solid,’ Nigel said. ‘Well over a million of them. Which means the fabric is all parachutes – not tents. It fits, dammit! Where the hell did a million exopods come from? The Commonwealth never manufactured that many.’

‘What?’ Kysandra shouted. ‘What are you two talking about?’ The way they were sharing thoughts, how weirdly unified they were, frightened her. Because they so clearly knew something was wrong. Very, very wrong. ‘Tell me!’

‘Jymoar was mistaken,’ Nigel said sombrely. ‘It’s not ten thousand bodies out here. There’s going to be more, a lot more. You need to be ready for that.’

They found the next body ten minutes later. Female again. It was on a cart almost the same as the first: identical hatch, but with different improvised wheels. There was no sign of them; they’d flaked away to dust down the millennia.

Over the following kilometre they encountered another eight of the carts with bodies. Those were just the ones lying along their path. Retina zoom showed them similar carts scattered across the desert.

‘All female,’ Fergus announced as he examined the sixth. ‘And they all have the same severe damage to their right ankle. The fracture patterns match perfectly, which is absurdly odd.’

There were few carts after that. Now the desert sand was littered with the same identical female body. She’d crawled along through the sand and pointed stones with her ruined ankle, always hauling along a box or bag. And how desperate would you have to be to do that? Often, the woman had died with her arms outstretched, as if reaching for something. Many were curled up. In defeat?

Kysandra cried quietly to herself for a couple of kilometres as the sun went down. The night obscured all the bodies lying away from their direct route, but the horses were having to weave about constantly to avoid stepping on the desiccated carcasses.

So she rode on in silence, her tears all dried up. She was completely numb, her feelings banished to somewhere deep in her mind. This much death was impossible to grasp. Instead she ignored it, and focused only on following Nigel’s horse as it picked its way across this pitiless land of corpses. In front of her, the metal hill grew steadily closer. She imagined this was what it must be like for a soul arriving at Uracus itself. Eternal anguish was unavoidable. You could watch it coming, and there was nothing you could do to stop it. Nothing.

With the nebulas shimmering sweetly in the clear air above, they halted the horses five hundred metres from the base of the hill. The bodies were lying so close together now that the animals would be unable to avoid walking on them.

‘Wait here,’ Nigel said kindly.

‘I’m staying with you,’ she replied firmly.

So she and Nigel and Fergus walked the remaining distance to the hill, treading round the bodies where they could. As they grew closer, they couldn’t avoid stepping on the limbs any more, they were packed so close together. She felt them crunch and crumble beneath her boots. The baked three-thousand-year-old bodies were tragically brittle, shattering at the slightest touch.

Soon they were trying to dodge venerable, deteriorating pieces of equipment as well as corpses. The ground was jamming up with survival equipment cases, their contents of bottles and tools and cracked powercells and wisps of clothing and tarnished axes and ragged photovoltaic sheets spilling out, amalgamating to form a rigid hardware stratum for the bodies to sprawl across.

They stopped before they reached the base, where the bodies were piled up on top of each other, producing an embankment five or six times her own height. Here the majority had clearly fallen to their death from the tricky slopes of the hill above, to be mummified in contorted positions, legs and arms snapped and bent in grotesque angles, necks and spines broken. Every awful lonely death perfectly preserved by the desert.

Kysandra lifted her gaze above the gruesome mound of desiccated skin and bone that was melding together, up to the metallic structure of the hill itself. It was a stack made up from spheres about three metres in diameter, though it was difficult to distinguish them. This close to the base, the weight of the spheres above had crushed and squeezed the lower layers out of shape. But like the female body they’d brought to this world, they were all the same, all with a single bulging oval window at the front, a circular hatch that hung open, and inert clusters of disturbing tentacles that Kysandra’s implanted memories identified as electromuscle. Her ex-sight probed into a few of the artefacts, finding a maze of wires and pipes, the heat-wrecked hardware of complex systems.

‘What are these things?’ she asked.

‘They’re exopods,’ Nigel told her. ‘Larger spaceships carry them to perform maintenance work outside. In an emergency, they can aerobrake into an atmosphere, and land.’

‘So they all landed here together?’ Kysandra asked, desperate to understand. If she understood, she knew she wouldn’t be so afraid. ‘Why did they all bring the same woman? Is she . . . ?’ Her memory implants held the concept, one she’d never bothered to consider, it was so . . . so, Commonwealth. ‘A clone? Did she clone herself?’

‘I don’t know,’ Nigel said as his shoulders sagged in defeat. ‘I don’t understand any of this.’

6

They made camp half a kilometre from the hill of exopods. Fergus and Russell cleared an area of the dissolving bodies as best they could, creating an unpleasant cloud of gritty dust in the process. Once that was done, Kysandra actually welcomed the distraction that came from setting up the awning and the tents. It was familiar, something useful she could abandon herself to.