Amorphia wandered amongst the dead and dying of Hill 4. The battle had by this time moved on; the few defenders who’d survived and repelled the initial rush had been ordered to pull back just as the next wave of opposing troops had appeared out of the cannon smoke and fallen upon them; they had been slaughtered almost to a man and the victors had swept on to the next redoubt across the shallow valley beyond. Shattered palisades, lines of stakes and bunkers had been chewed up by the initial bombardment and later by the hooves of the cavalry. Bodies lay scattered like twisted, shredded leaves amongst the torn-up grassland and the rich brown-red soil. The blood of men and animals saturated the grass in places, making it thick and glossy, and collected in little hollows like pools of dark ink.

The sun was high in the cloudless sky; the only cover was the wispy remnants of cannon smoke. Already a few carrion birds - no longer too concerned by the noise of the battle near by - had landed and started to investigate the corpses and the shattered bodies of the wounded.

The soldiers wore brightly coloured, cheery-looking uniforms with lots of metal buckle-work and very tall hats. Their guns were long, simple-looking things; their pikes, swords and bayonets lay glittering in the sunlight. The animals lying tangled amongst the traces of the smashed cannon trains were big, thick-set beasts, almost unadorned; the cavalry mounts were almost as gaily decorated as their riders. They all lay together, some with the collapsed shapelessness of death, some in a pool of their own internal organs, some missing limbs, some in a posture appropriate to a still vital suffering, caught in expressions appropriate to their agony, thrashing or writhing or - in the case of some of the soldiers - supporting themselves on one limb and reaching out to plead for help, or water, or a coup de grâce to end their torment.

It was all quite still, frozen like a three-dimensional photograph, and it all lay, spread out like some military society’s model scene made real, in General Bay Three Inner of the GSV Sleeper Service.

The ship’s avatar achieved the top of the low hill and looked out over the battle-scene beyond. It stretched for kilometres in all directions across the sunlit rolling downland; a grand confusion of posed men, dashing mounts, cavalry charges, cannons and smoke and shadows.

Getting the smoke right had been the hardest part. The landscape was simplicity itself; a covering of artificial flora on a thin layer of sterilised soil lying on a structure of foametal. The great majority of the animals were simply very good sculptures the ship had created. The people were real, of course, though the ones who’d been disembowelled or particularly severely mutilated were generally sculptures too.