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It came rattling and groaning along its shaft, squealing and protesting. Kanu supposed that they were lucky the elevator was working at all, after the impact the craft had sustained. But he would have welcomed any excuse to abandon the search and return to the flier.
    The ambassadors entered the elevator, followed by Swift, and the car began to ascend, bucking and jerking as it hit some obstruction.
    ‘It is not easy to see what these Reclamationists were hoping to achieve,’ Swift said, as if he felt an obligation to make conversation.
    ‘It might be a symbolic gesture,’ Kanu said. ‘Reclaiming a piece of Mars, if only for a few days.’
    ‘With their corpses?’ Swift asked.
    ‘Maybe they hoped to survive long enough to issue some kind of statement, a declaration of sovereignty or suchlike.’
    ‘I still fail to see the logic. What use is this dry, airless world to you?’
    ‘No practical use at all,’ Kanu said as the elevator halted and the doors opened. ‘But we can’t bear the thought of someone else having it.’
    The control deck was a semicircular room with passages branching off it and a wide armoured window occupying one arc of the curved wall. Some of the console displays were still active, and Korsakov was confident enough to start flipping the heavy manual control switches. With a clunk and whine, the window’s armoured shuttering began to retract.
    They were higher on Mars now than when they landed, a good twenty levels up, and from this elevation – surveying the oddly tilted landscape – Kanu could easily make out the luminous, pastel-shaded anthills of three distant robot cities. Even closer, one of their connecting tentacles formed a distinct glowing ridge-line, like the spine of a half-buried sea-monster. He watched, partly mesmerised, as lights raced along the spine with the speed of shooting stars.
    ‘Do those cities have names, Swift?’
    ‘I am not sure you would perceive them as “cities”, Kanu. “Nodes” or “hubs” would be more accurate. Functional modules, like your own brain compartmentalisation. But yes, they do have distinct signifiers. Although again, “name” may be stretching things a little—’
    ‘When you’re done chatting,’ Korsakov said, ‘we could begin searching the ship with these internal sensors.’ He was bending over a console, tapping keys. Displays were coming online, showing blueprints and cross sections, and he drew their attention to a couple of them. ‘These areas appear to contain air, and these are where the ship seems to have lost pressure.’
    ‘Given the lack of time available to us,’ Dalal said, ‘it’ll be a token search. But at least we can go home saying we did the best we could.’
    ‘Should my compatriots find organic material,’ Swift said, ‘we would treat it with the utmost respect.’
    ‘Thank you, Swift,’ Kanu said, ‘but I’m not sure being shredded and incorporated into your neural-logic networks is the fate we’d want for our loved ones. Even if you did it respectfully.’
    ‘I can, nonetheless, assist with your search.’
    The ambassadors looked at each other. Korsakov started to say something, but Kanu raised a hand.
    ‘No, it makes sense. One of him can do the work of four of us in about a thousandth of the time.’
    ‘I would not go quite that far,’ Swift said, ‘but I can certainly make a difference, given the time you have remaining.’
    ‘Yevgeny,’ said Dalal, ‘can you call up the sensor search on different consoles?’
    ‘It’s done. Five consoles – four for us and one for the machine. I’m already running a visual and infrared search on decks twelve to eighteen – don’t bother duplicating my efforts.’
    ‘We won’t,’ Kanu said.
    The consoles were simple to use, and it did not take long to run at least a cursory search on each deck. They were looking for the obvious: survivors or bodies, in plain view. If people were hidden away in lockers, out of the reach of the sensors,