1:15

Kaliff sniffs, looking around at the decaying buildings. Takes all sorts, he says. I’ll take this side. He saunters off down one side of the landing pad. The sun is low in the sky. He casts a long shadow.

You watch him go for a moment, and then head in the opposite direction.

It’s hot. The weeds which have burst through the tarmac catch at your boots, and the hissing of leaves as trees and bushes sway in the wind seems to be coming from all around you. You try not to look up, because you know that the open sky is above you, a great sucking emptiness. You’ve been on planets before. Every time you swear you won’t come back.

You duck into the comforting enclosure of a building as soon as you can, a peeling sign indicating that it was once some sort of administrative office for the port. Dead leaves have blown in through an open window and settled against the desk. There is a terminal on it. You try to turn it on. There isn’t any power. A faded poster above the chair reads, New Snowdonia: A Better Place. You thumb idly through some of the paperwork. Import duty on ration packs, fuel tanks, agricultural tools. A signed receipt for a consignment of water purification tablets. Lots of medicines. Antibiotics, antiemetics, beta blockers, statins. It didn’t do any good. You wonder if they knew it was hopeless even then.

You see movement in your periphery. You spin around. A butterfly lands on a sunlit patch of wall. You hear your heavy breathing inside your suit. You take a step closer and it flits back out of the window and away.