A bauble, silvered, perhaps two metres across, hovered a metre above the ground, like a huge droplet of mercury. It was so perfectly reflective that it was as if she couldn’t see it at all: only a fish-eye reflection of the flitter wreck and her own sprawled self, as if a piece of the world had been cut out and folded over.

And this silvery, ghostly, not-really-there creature was talking to her.

‘Native life forms are emerging from dormancy,’ said a flat, machine-generated voice in her earpieces. ‘Your heat is feeding them. To them you are a brief, unlikely summer. How fascinating.’

Clumsy in her thick protective suit, bombarded by shocks and strangeness, she twisted her head to see.

The snow was melting all around her, gushing up in thin clouds of vapour that quickly refroze and fell back, so that she was lying in the centre of a spreading crater dug out of the soft snow. And in that crater there was movement. Colours spread over the ice, all around her: green and purple and even red, patches of it like lichen, widening as she watched. A clutch of what looked like worms wriggled in fractured ice. She even saw a tiny flower push out of a mound of frozen air, widening a crimson mouth.

Struck with revulsion, she stumbled to her feet. With her heat gone the life forms dwindled back. The colours leached out of the lichen-like patches, and that single flower closed, as if regretfully.

‘A strange scene,’ said the silver ghost. ‘But it is a common tactic. The living things here must endure centuries in stillness and silence, waiting a chance benison of heat - from volcanic activity, perhaps even a cometary impact. And in those rare, precious moments, they live and die, propagate and breed. Perhaps they even dream of better times in the past.’

Though she had endured orientation exercises run by the Commission for Historical Truth, Minda had never encountered an alien before. She bunched her fists. ‘Are you a Qax?’

‘. . . No,’ it replied, after some hesitation. ‘Not a Qax.’

‘Then what?’

Again that hesitation. ‘Our kinds have never met before. You have no name for me. What are you?’

‘I’m a human being,’ she said defiantly. She pushed out her chest; her suit was emblazoned with a green tetrahedron. ‘And this is our planet. You’ll see, when we get it sorted out. These things, these flowers and worms, cannot compete with us.’

The ghost hovered, impassive. ‘Compete?’

She swivelled her head to confront the hovering ghost. ‘All life forms compete. It is the way of things.’ But it was as if her skull was full of a sloshing liquid; she felt herself stumbling forward.

‘Try to stay upright,’ the ghost said, its voice free of inflection. ‘Your insulation is imperfect. To reduce heat loss, you must minimise your surface contact with the ice.’