In the glare from the flares they could see a gleaming arc of something. It seemed too large to be the creature’s torso. There was movement; a play of shadows. One of the flares went out. Thorn shot two more flares in as the three of them detached from their lines and dropped through the entrance. They landed on a curved metallic surface. It was frictionless and they slid to the floor. The creature charged, slipping on what remained of Gant. Thorn and Aiden began firing immediately, their weapons on full power. Cormac threw his shuriken, its chainglass blades out to their fullest extent. The creature slammed to a halt in a wall of fire, then the shuriken struck. There was a whining scream and a flare of sparks. A piece of the creature’s body fell away, the shuriken bounced off, hovered, struck again. A clump of legs shattered, and the creature fell to one side. The shuriken struck again, then again. CO2 vapour filled the chamber. Thorn and Aiden were firing blind. Cormac could hear the creature scrabbling to get away and the repetitive scream of each of the shuriken’s strikes. The scrabbling soon ceased. Thorn and Aiden put up their weapons.

‘Dead?’ wondered Thorn.

‘If it was ever alive,’ said Cormac.

His shuriken continued to strike until he hit the recall. It came out of the fog, retracting its blades and shrugging away pieces of something green and frozen, like shards of emerald. Cormac held up his arm as if to a falcon, and it snicked itself away in its holster. About them the fog refroze and snowed from the air.

The creature lay in pieces in a frozen green pool. Ignoring it, Thorn walked forwards amongst Gant. The soldier had been ripped to pieces. Cormac shook his head and stared down at a hand frozen to the floor before him.

‘A Tenkian,’ said Aiden at Cormac’s side.

‘Yeah,’ said Cormac, watching Thorn. Thorn had found Gant’s head and pulled it from the floor with a disc of frozen blood attached to it.

‘I don’t hold out much hope for his recovery,’ Thorn said.

The joke was macabre in the extreme. Thorn wandered off to the side of the chamber, still holding his comrade’s head.

‘He will be all right,’ said Aiden on the comunit’s personal mode. ‘Thorn knows the risks and is most philosophical about death. He will toast Gant on Hubris, then drink himself into a stupor. Then he will carry on. Gant would have done the same.’

Cormac inspected the Golem Thirty and wondered if it had any actual feeling of sympathy, or was just good at emulating it. It was a question that had bothered humankind for a couple of centuries now.

‘Carn, you can come down now,’ he said, and then walked past the dismembered guardian towards the artefact they had come to see.