It had been like seeing a ghost. This world of death might be full of ghosts. I should be scared, she thought. But I’m walking away from a volcanic eruption and a flitter crash. One thing at a time, Minda. Clumsily she clambered through the crash-distorted hatchway.

She found herself standing in a drift of loose, feathery snow that came up to her knees. Beneath the snow was a harder surface: perhaps water ice, even bare rock. Where her suit touched the snow, vapour billowed around her.

To her left that volcano loomed above the horizon, belching foul black fast-moving plumes that obscured the stars. And to her right, in a shallow valley, she made out structures - low, broken walls, perhaps a gridwork of streets. Everything was crystal clear: no mist to spoil the view on this world, where every molecule of atmosphere lay as frost on the ground. The sky was black and without a sun - yet it was far more crowded than the sky of Earth, for here, at the edge of the great interstellar void known as the Local Bubble, the hot young stars of Scorpio were close and dazzling.

The landscape was wonderful, what she had borrowed the flitter to come see. And yet it was lethal: every wisp of gas around her feet was a monument to more lost heat. Her fingers and toes were already numb, painful when she flexed them.

She walked around the crash site. The flitter had dug itself a trench. And as it crashed the flitter had let itself implode, giving up its structural integrity to protect the life bubble at its heart - to protect her. The craft had finished up as a rough, crumpled sphere. Now it had nothing left to give her.

Her suit would expire after no more than a few hours. She had no way to tell Bryn where she was - they probably hadn’t even missed her yet. And she and her flitter made no more than a metallic pinprick in the hide of a world as large as Earth.

She was, she thought wonderingly, going to die here. She spoke it out loud, trying to make it real. ‘I’m going to die.’ But she was Minda. How could she die? Would history go on after her? Would mankind sweep on, outward from the Earth, an irresistible colonising wave that would crest far beyond this lonely outpost, with her name no more than a minor footnote, the first human to die on the new world? ‘I haven’t done anything yet. I haven’t even had sex properly—’

A vast, silvered epidermis ballooned before her, and a voice spoke neutrally in her ear.

‘Nor, as it happens, have I.’

It was the silver ghost.

She screamed and fell back in the snow.