He checked the wall clock: ten hours, and not many of them sleep. Feeling only slightly guilty he got out of bed and headed directly for his shower. Ten minutes later he was dressed in trousers and shirt, shuriken snug to his wrist, and heading for Downlink Com, which was the nearest Hubris had to a bridge or operations room.

The room was long, with a large circular chamber at its end from where the probes were dispatched. Its longest walls were packed with screens and other instrumentation. Before five consoles sat people clothed in the distinctive blue coveralls of runcible technicians. Some of them were auged in: optic cables plugged directly from their augs. These technicians remained still; all their activity was between their ears and in the various subminds of Hubris. Chaline was squatting on the floor, below one of the consoles, with a panel open before her and instruments and chips scattered all around. Cormac squatted beside her. She looked up, smiled at him, and he found himself unable to respond.

‘Anomalies, you said.’

Her smile faded to puzzlement, then she shrugged and gestured with a debonding torch at a flashing light on the console above her.

‘That’s a contamination warning,’ she said.

‘The probe is at the blast-site,’ he replied.

‘We programmed it to ignore isotopes. We knew it was going to be hot down there, so the warning isn’t about that.’

With a thoughtful expression on her face she laid the torch beside her and began plugging chips back into the panel. He could see she was pissed off by his lack of acknowledgement, but this was business; he couldn’t let last night get in the way, could he? Emotion must not be allowed to interfere.

‘I thought we might have a problem that diagnostics couldn’t trace. Hubris ran a check as well. Everything seems all right here. The problem is with the probe.’ She looked up at the ceiling. ‘Hubris, have you finished running that check on the probe?’

‘I am still checking. The probe seems to be developing structural weaknesses,’ said the ship AI.

‘You used the present tense,’ said Cormac.

‘The process is continuing. Initially the weaknesses were in its sampling arms, now more weaknesses have appeared.’

Cormac turned to Chaline. ‘I know this is not my territory, but it might be an idea to get the probe into orbit or at least out of the blast-site, if that’s still possible.’

‘We’ll want it back for study, you mean,’ she said.

He nodded and she continued to look at him. After a moment she gave him a slow nod in reply, and a look that meant ‘later’, then she addressed the AI. ‘Hubris, how far gone is the probe’s integrity?’

‘It is still capable of taking high G. The weaknesses seem to be developing only in the ceramal components. The probe has a foamed alloy skeleton.’

‘What could cause that? The cold?’ Cormac asked.