As he got to the others, the strain on the trapped drag line - still being pulled by the winch engine - proved too much. The steel hawser parted somewhere down inside the bowl of mist with a noise like a shot. The steel cable came hissing and sizzing up through the air, snaking and wriggling as it ripped up the slope towards the lip, loosing most of its grisly cargo from its hooks as it came, like drops of ice off a whip.

He screamed to the men at the top of the inclined plane, and tripped, falling onto his face in the snow.

Only one of the engineers dropped in time.

Most of the rest were cut neatly in half by the scything hawser, falling slowly to the snow in bloody sprays. Loops of the hawser smacked off the railway engine with a thunderous clanging noise and wrapped themselves around the winch housing as though with relief; other coils thumped heavily to the snow.

Something hit his upper leg with the force of a fully swung sledgehammer, breaking his bones in a cataclysm of pain. The impact rolled him over and over in the snow while the bones ground and dug and pierced; it went on for what felt like half a day. He came to rest in the snow, screaming. He was face-to-face with the thing that had hit him.

It was one of the bodies the drag line had flicked off as it tore up the slope, another corpse they had hacked and loosened and pulled like a rotten tooth from the new face of the glacier that morning, a dead witness that it was their duty to discover and remove with all dispatch and secrecy to the charnel wagons in the valley below to be turned from an accusatory body to innocent smoke and ash. What had hit him and shattered his leg was one of the bodies which had been dumped in the glacier half a generation ago, when the enemies of the Race had been expunged from the newly conquered territories.

The scream forced its way out of his lungs like something desperate to be born to the freezing air, like something aching to join the screams he could hear spread around him near the lip of the inclined plane.

The commandant’s breath was gone; he stared into the rock-hard face of the body that had hit him and he sobbed for breath to scream again. It was a child’s face; a girl’s.

The snow burned his face. His breath would not come back. His leg was a burning brand of pain lighting up his whole body.

But not his eyes. The view began to dim.

Why is this happening to me? Why won’t it stop? Why can’t I stop it? Why can’t I wake up? What makes me re-live these terrible memories?