They cut down a side path to a secondary aisle and crouched there behind troughs of frozen hydroponics fluid containing tomato plants, which would shatter at a touch. Both Gant and Thorn held their weapons ready. Cormac moved his hand close to his shuriken.

‘Close to you now, about a hundred metres,’ Jane told them.

They waited in tense silence.

‘Fifty metres.’

‘OK,’ said Cormac. ‘Radio silence until I say otherwise.’ He wished he had thought of that earlier. If whoever was coming had a radio he knew where they were.

The figure that clumped down the main aisle appeared to be a human heavily wrapped in whatever materials it could find. Unless there was a coldsuit of some kind underneath all that material, Cormac realized it was not human. The material itself was some kind of plastic mesh: probably the only stuff the figure could find that had not become frangible with cold. Ordinary cloth would shatter at these temperatures. He continued to watch for any signs that they had been spotted, but the figure plodded on slowly, facing straight ahead. As it passed the cross-aisle in which they hid, Cormac’s suspicion was confirmed. The figure’s knees were higher up than a human’s and bent in the opposite direction. It walked like a bird.

Where . . . ?

Once past them, it soon reached the pile of corpses. With a crackle of breaking flesh, it hoisted one of the corpses onto its shoulder as if it was made of thin balsa, then turned and began to trudge back again.

‘It has no radio, then,’ said Cormac.

‘What the hell was that?’ asked Gant. A genuine question this time.

Cormac tried to track down an aberrant memory. Where had he seen a creature that walked like that? ‘I don’t know, but it’s a sure bet it had something to do with the runcible breakdown. We’ll follow it. Try not to make too much noise. It might not have a radio, but it’s probably got ears.’

They moved after the creature once it was twenty metres ahead of them.

‘A description would be nice,’ said Jane.

Mika replied, ‘Manlike, but with lower inverted knee-joints.’

‘What are they doing with the bodies?’ asked Chaline.

Cormac glanced in her direction. She had not figured it out, and he was not about to start spouting theories just yet. He wondered what it was like to have that kind of naivety.

They followed the creature to an area where any troughs had been pushed back against the walls. There it dropped the corpse to the ground. Chaline gagged when an arm flew off and its fingers shattered like porcelain. The creature squatted down and picked up a device with the appearance of a builder’s trowel. A high-pitched whining came over their comunits as it used the device to cut the arm into sections.

‘Oh my God,’ said Chaline, and was ignored.