She turned to him. ‘If I hadn’t known the shaft had been made by melting and rock-compression, I would have said that creature hollowed it out somehow; that it was its natural home before the temperature dropped. The shaft is perfectly designed to accommodate it. But for the ice, it would have moved up much faster.’

‘And you are saying?’

‘The reverse: the creature was specially designed for the shaft. It was a guardian created for that place.’

She walked past him to a bench on which were laid the pieces of the creature which Thorn had brought back. She picked up the end of one silvered leg.

‘There is no real defence against energy weapons, but what defence there is this creature had: reflective skin and an effective method of heat dispersal. It was also armoured enough to deal with most projectile weapons.’ She pointed at the screen. ‘Its dimensions were perfect for the shaft.’

‘Machine or living thing,’ said Cormac, remembering a previous conversation, ‘it didn’t evolve.’

‘No, it has no means of reproduction. It was definitely made.’ She glanced at him again. ‘And its construction is strikingly similar to that of the dracomen. It does not have DNA; it used protein replication.’

Cormac thought about that for a moment.

Dragon again?

‘You just said, “Its natural home before the temperature dropped.” What did you mean by that?’

Mika put down the silvered leg and picked up another piece of the creature: a flattened ovoid with ribs along one side. ‘This is one of its feet. It’s very like one of the toes of such lizards as the gecko on Earth or the srank on Circe. It would have been perfectly designed for gripping onto the rock of that shaft if there was no ice there.’ She dropped the foot. ‘Also, from what I have discovered thus far, it was reaching the edge of its survivability. Had the temperature gone below one-sixty Kelvin it would have become somnolent. Much lower than that and it would have died.’

‘But the dracomen were managing,’ said Cormac.

Mika gazed at her collection of body parts. ‘This creature was not so complex as them. It did not have the ability to adapt . . .’

‘Questions occur,’ said Cormac, looking back at the screen. ‘Why was that artefact being guarded? And what put the guard there? Whatever did, it did not know the temperature was going to drop. The creature was placed there before the runcible went down. Yet, the dracomen . . . Were they sent here to retrieve the artefact? Was that Dragon’s purpose?’ He shook his head. ‘If so, why was the runcible destroyed?’

‘I believe some other alien is involved,’ said Mika.

Cormac turned to her. ‘Why?’