Consider Phlebas

She shook her head, smiling. 'You just don't look,' she chided.

He put out one hand and scooped the insect into his palm, before she could stop him. 'Oh, Horza…' she said, her breath catching on a tiny hook of despair.

He looked, uncomprehending, at her stricken expression, while the snow-creature died from the warmth of his hand.

The Clear Air Turbulence dropped towards the planet, circling its ice-bright layers of atmosphere from day to night and back again, tipping over the equator and tropics as it spiralled in.

Gradually it encountered that atmosphere — ions and gases, ozone and air. It swooped through the world's thin wrapping with a voice of fire, flashing like a large, steady meteorite across the night sky, then across the dawn terminator, over steel-grey seas, tabular bergs, ice tables, floes and shelves, frozen coasts, glaciers, mountain ranges, permafrost tundra, more crushed pack ice and, finally, as it bellied down on its pillars of flame, land again: land on a thousand-kilometre peninsula sticking out into a frozen sea like some monstrous fractured limb set in plaster.

'There it is,' Wubslin said, watching the mass-sensor screen. A bright, winking light tracked slowly across the display. Horza looked over.

'The Mind?' he asked. Wubslin nodded.

'Right density. Five kilometres deep…' He punched some buttons and squinted at figures scrolling across the screen. 'On the far side of the system from the entrance… and moving.' The pinpoint of light on the screen disappeared. Wubslin adjusted the controls, then sat back, shaking his head. 'Sensor needs an overhaul; its range is right down.' The engineer scratched his chest and sighed. 'Sorry about the engines, too, Horza.' The Changer shrugged. Had the motors been working properly, or had the mass sensor's range been adequate, somebody could have remained on the CAT, flying it if necessary, and relaying the Mind's position to the others in the tunnels. Wubslin seemed to feel guilty that none of the repairs he'd tried to effect had significantly improved the performance of either motors or sensor.

'Never mind,' Horza said, watching the waste of ice and snow passing beneath them. 'At least now we know the thing's in there.'

The ship guided them to the right area, though Horza recognised it anyway from the times he had flown the single small flyer the base was allowed. He looked for the flyer as they made their final approach, in case somebody happened to be using it.

The snow-covered plain was ringed by mountains; the Clear Air Turbulence swept over a pass between two peaks, shattering the silence, tearing dusty snow from the jagged ridges and crags of the barren rocks on either side. It slowed further, coming in nose-up on its tripod of fusion fire. The snow on the plain beneath picked itself up and stirred as though uneasy at first. Then as the craft dropped lower and lower the snow was blown, then ripped, from the frozen ground beneath and thrown away in vast swirling rolls of heated air mixing snow and water, steam and plasma particles, in a howling blizzard which swept across the plain, gathering strength as the vessel dropped.

Horza had the CAT on manual. He watched the screen ahead, saw the false, created wind of stormy snow and steam in front, and beyond it, the entrance to the Command System.

It was a black hole set in a rugged promontory of rock which fluted down from the higher cliffs behind like a piece of solidified scree. The snowstorm broiled round the dark entrance like mist. The storm was turning brown as the fusion flame heated the frozen ground of the plain itself, melting it and plucking it out in an earthy spray.

With hardly a bump, and only a little settling as the legs sank into the now soggy surface of the swept plain, the CAT touched the surface of Schar's World.

Horza looked straight ahead at the tunnel entrance. It was like a deep dark eye, staring back.

The motors died; the steam drifted. Disturbed snow fell back, and some new flakes formed as the suspended water in the air froze once more. The CAT clicked and creaked as it cooled from the heat produced by both the friction of re-entry and its own plasma jets. Water gurgled, turning to slush, over the scoured surface of the plain.

Horza switched the CAT's bow laser to standby. There was no movement or sign from the tunnel. The view was clear now, the snow and steam gone. It was a bright, sunny, windless day.

'Well, here we are,' Horza said, and immediately felt foolish. Yalson nodded, still staring at the screen.

'Yup,' Wubslin said, checking screens, nodding. 'Feet have sunk in half a metre or so. We'll have to remember to run the motors for a while before we try to lift off, when we leave. They'll freeze solid in half an hour.'

'Hmm,' Horza said. He watched the screen. Nothing moved. There were no clouds in the light blue sky, no wind to move the snows. The sun wasn't warm enough to melt the ice and snow so there was no running water, not even any avalanches in the distant mountains.

With the exception of the seas — which still contained fish, but no longer any mammals — the only things which moved on Schar's World were a few hundred species of small insects, slow spreading lichen on rocks near the equator, and the glaciers. The humanoids' war, or the ice age, had wiped everything else out.

Horza tried the coded message once more. There was no reply.

'Right,' he said, getting up from his seat. 'I'll step out and take a look.' Wubslin nodded. Horza turned to Yalson. 'You're very quiet,' he said.

Yalson didn't look at him. She was staring at the screen and the unblinking eye of the tunnel entrance. 'Be careful,' she said. She looked at him. 'Just be careful, all right?'

Horza smiled at her, picked up Kraiklyn's laser rifle from the floor, then went through to the mess.

'We're down,' he said as he went through.

'See?' Dorolow said to Aviger. Neisin drank from his hip flask. Balveda gave the Changer a thin smile as he went from one door to the other. Unaha-Closp resisted the temptation to say anything, and wriggled out of the seat straps.

Horza descended to the hangar. He felt light as he walked; they had switched to ambient gravity on their way over the mountains, and Schar's World produced less pull than the standard-G used on the CAT. Horza rode the hangar's descending floor to the now refreezing marsh, where the breeze was fresh and sharp and clean.

'Hope everything's all right,' Wubslin said as he and Yalson watched the small figure wade through the snow towards the rocky promontory ahead. Yalson said nothing but watched the screen with unblinking eyes. The figure stopped, touched its wrist, then rose in the air and floated slowly across the snows.

'Ha,' Wubslin said, laughing a little. 'I'd forgotten we could use AG here. Too long on that damn O.'

'Won't be much use in those fucking tunnels,' Yalson muttered.

Horza landed just to the side of the tunnel entrance. From the readings he had already taken while flying over the snow, he knew the tunnel door field was off. Normally it kept the tunnel within shielded from the snow and the cold air outside, but there was no field there, and he could see that a little snow had blown into the tunnel and now lay in a fan shape on its floor. The tunnel was cold inside, not warm as it should be, and its black, deep eye seemed more like a huge mouth, now that he was close to it.

He looked back at the CAT, facing him from two hundred metres away, a shining metal interruption on the white expanse, squatting in a blast-mark of brown.

'I'm going inside,' he told the ship, aiming a tight beam at it rather than broadcasting the signal.

'OK,' Wubslin said in his ear.

'You don't want somebody there to cover you?' Yalson said.

'No,' Horza replied.

He walked down the tunnel, keeping close to the wall. In the first equipment bay were some ice sleds and rescue gear, tracking apparatus and signalling beacons. It was all much as he recalled it.

In the second bay, where the flyer should have been, there was nothing. He went on to the next one: more equipment. He was about forty metres inside the tunnel now, ten metres shy of the right-angled turn which led into the larger, segmented gallery where the living accommodation of the base lay.

The mouth of the tunnel was a white hole when he turned back to face it. He set the tight beam on wide aperture. 'Nothing yet. I'm about to look into the accommodation section. Bleep but don't reply otherwise.' The helmet speakers bleeped.