He skidded to a stop on the cold hard floor of the hangar fifty metres from the wrecked doors, blood oozing then freezing around his wounds. The cold and the utter silence closed in; he felt his lungs collapse and something bubbled in his throat; his head ached as if his brain were about to burst out of his nose, eyes and ears, and his every tissue and bone seemed to ring with brief, stunning pain before going numb.

He looked into the enveloping darkness and up at the towering, heedless heights of the bizarrely patterned ships.

Then the ice crystals forming in his eyes fractured the view and made it splinter and multiply as though seen through a prism, before it all went dim and then black. He was trying to shout, to cry out, but there was only a terrible choking coldness in his throat. In a moment, he couldn’t even move, frozen there on the floor of the vast space, immobile in his fear and confusion.

The cold killed him, finally, shutting off his brain in concentric stages, freezing the higher functions first, then the lower mammal brain, then finally the primitive, near-reptilian centre. His last thoughts were that he would never see his model sea ships again, nor know why the warships in the cold, dark halls were patterned so.

Victory! Commander Risingmoon Parchseason IV of the Farsight tribe nudged the suit forward, floating out through the torn doors of the airlock and into the hangar space. The ships were there. Gangster class. His gaze swept their ranks. Sixty-four of them. He had, privately, thought it might all be a hoax, some Culture trick.

At his side, his weapons officer steered his suit across the floor - over the body of the human - and up towards the nearest of the ships. The other suited figure, the Affronter Commander’s personal guard, rotated, watching.

‘If you’d waited another minute,’ the voice of the Culture ship said tiredly through the suit’s communicator, ‘I could have opened the airlock doors for you.’

‘I’m sure you could,’ the Commander said. ‘Is the Mind quite under your control?’

‘Entirely. Touchingly naïve, in the end.’

‘And the ships?’

‘Quiescent; undisturbed; asleep. They will believe whatever they are told.’

‘Good,’ the Commander said. ‘Begin the process of waking them.’

‘It is already under way.’

‘Nobody else here,’ his security officer said over the communicator. He had gone on into the rest of the human accommodation section when they had made their way to the airlock doors.

‘Anything of interest?’ the Commander asked, following his weapons officer towards the nearest warship. He had to try to keep the excitement out of his voice. They had them! They had them! He had to brake the suit hard; in his enthusiasm he almost collided with his weapons officer.