Cossont felt sore all over. She tipped her head as best she could, neck muscles complaining, trying to see the button that would release her straps. She couldn’t twist her head that much; some sort of thick necklace thing was stopping her. She felt for the button, but that hurt too, even though her arms and hands were hanging in that direction anyway.

Like almost all Gzilt people she had been born with a sophisticated pain-management system genetically grafted on top of the ancient, genuinely stupid-sore raw animal nerve-based sense, and she understood enough about how the whole process worked to know that if you were doing something and it hurt, you should stop doing it. So she stopped.

“Could you help me?” she asked the android.

He approached her, crouched. Even upside-down, his body looked too big, bursting out of the colonel’s jacket he wore. It had ripped in places.

“How may I help you?” he asked.

“Help me down. Catch me. Please.”

“Certainly.” He reached under her head, something clicked and she fell a few centimetres before the android’s arms caught her round the waist. He turned her the right way up and positioned her sitting on the floor that had been the ceiling.

“Thank you,” she told him.

“My pleasure.” He smiled like a child. “You have four arms,” he observed.

“Yes, I have,” she agreed, rubbing them gingerly and wincing. She looked at the trooper hanging unmoving above and across from her, seeing her own face distorted in his armour. “Did you say he’s dead?”

“I think he is,” the android said.

“But how? He was the only one wearing armour. How—?”

“I think it was his armoured suit that killed him,” the android said matter-of-factly. “In the same way that the shuttle tried to destroy itself, and us.” He paused, then smiled and said, “In—”

“If it’s safe,” Pyan’s faint voice said from inside the elevenstring’s case, “could I be let out now, please?”

The android looked at her. “The artificial construct,” he said. “Is it yours?”

“Yes,” she answered. “Where are we? What happened?” She remembered being on the asteroid moon Fzan-Juym, General Reikl storming about … then nothing. Nothing until she woke up here, in what looked like a very small upside-down military transport.

“We are somewhere on the surface of the Sculpt planet Eshri, in sim. What happened—”

“‘In sim’?” she asked.

“Yes,” the android said brightly. “In sim. This is said to indicate that this is not reality but rather a simulation.” He frowned. “I am admittedly confused by aspects of the currently running simulation and have yet to work out their likely utility, though this puzzle might itself be part of the utility of the sim, for training purposes.”

She stared at him.

“Can you hear me out there?” Pyan said; its voice was somewhere between petulant and plaintive.

“This is not a sim,” Cossont told the android.

“Mm-hmm,” the android said, nodding.