The ship played loud music, showed exciting screen holos, and set up a fabulous surrounding holo landscape of lush green and blue, filled with floating bushes and hovering trees where strange, eight-winged birds capered and beyond which a glowing white layer of mist plied by tall, feathery cloudships extended to neck-stretchingly tall cliffs of pastel-shaded rock, set about with further small clouds, draped with blue and sparkling gold waterfalls, and topped by fabulous cities of spires and slender bridges. Ship-slaved soligrams of famous historical figures wandered about the party, adding to the illusion of numbers, and were only too happy to engage the disguised revellers in conversation. More treats and surprises were promised for later.

Sma went as Xeny, Skaffen-Amtiskaw as a model of the Xenophobe, and the ship itself produced yet another remote drone; an aquatic one, still brown and yellow, but looking like a rather fat and large-eyed fish, and floating in a field-held metre-diameter sphere of water which drifted through the party-space like some odd balloon.

"Ais Disgarve, who you've met before," the ship drone said, voice sounding rather bubbly as it introduced Sma to the young man who'd greeted her in the hangar the day before. "And Jetart Hrine."

Sma smiled, nodded at Disgarve — making a mental note to stop thinking of him as Disgarb — and the young woman at his side.

"Hello again. How do you do?"

"Heddo," said Disgarve, dressed as some sort of ancient cold-climate explorer, all swathed in furs.

"Hi," Jetart Hrine said. She was quite short and round, very young looking, and her skin was so black it was almost blue. She wore some ancient — and surprisingly brightly coloured — military uniform, and sported a smooth-bore projectile rifle slung over one shoulder. She sipped from a glass and said. "I know there's no shop talk, Ms Sma, but frankly Ais and I have been wondering why our dest —»

"Aah!" the ship drone said, its water sphere suddenly collapsing. Water crashed all around the feet of Sma, Hrine and Disgarve, all of whom jumped back a little. The fish-drone fell to the red wood deck and flapped around. "Water!" it croaked. Sma picked it up by the tail.

"What happened?" she asked it.

"Field malfunction. Water! Quickly!"

Sma looked at Disgarve and Hrine, both of whom seemed rather bemused. Skaffen-Amtiskaw, in its starship disguise, wound quickly through the party-goers towards them. "Water!" the ship drone repeated, wriggling.

A frown gathered on Sma's brow, inside the brown and yellow suit. She looked at the woman dressed as a soldier. "What were you about to say, Ms Hrine?"

"I was — oof!"

A one-in-five-hundred-and-twelfth scale model of the very fast picket Xenophobe thumped into the woman, making her stagger backwards, dropping her glass.

"Hey!" Disgarve said, pushing the offending Skaffen-Amtiskaw away. Hrine looked annoyed, and rubbed her shoulder.

"Sorry; clumsy me!" Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, loudly.

"Water! Water!" yelped the ship drone, struggling in Sma's furry paw.

"Shut up!" Sma told it. She went close to Jetart Hrine, putting her own body between the woman and Skaffen-Amtiskaw. "Ms Hrine; complete your question, would you?"

"I just wanted to know why…"

The floor shook, the entire landscape around them trembled; light flashed from high above, and as they looked up, they saw the fabulous gleaming cities of the cliff tops far above disappear in vast blooms of light, which slowly faded, leaving falling clouds of debris, crashing towers and disintegrating bridges. The mighty cliffs split asunder and kilometres-high tsunami of seething lava and boiling grey-black clouds of smoke and ash burst out, exploding over the quivering landscape below, where the cloudships were sinking and the eight-winged birds were spinning so fast their wings were coming off, sending them spinning into the blue-green shrubbery in squawking explosions of feathers and leaves.

Jetart Hrine stared in disbelief. Sma grabbed the woman's collar with one paw and shook her. "It's trying to distract you!" she yelled. She turned to the fish-drone in her other paw. "Cut it out!" she screamed at it. She shook the woman again, while Disgarve tried to pry her paw away from the woman. Sma shook his hand off. "What were you trying to say?"

"Why don't we know where we're going?" Hrine shouted into Sma's face, over the noise of the earth splitting open in a gout of flame. A huge black shape reared from the chasm, red-eyed.

"We're going to Crastalier!" Sma yelled. A vast silver human baby appeared in the sky, shining, beatific and be-rayed, spun about with glowing figures.

"So what?" Hrine bellowed, as lightning zapped from mega-baby to earth-beast and thunder assaulted the ears. "Crastalier's an Open Cluster; there must be half a million stars in it!"

Sma froze.

The holos went back to the way they had been before the cataclysms. The music resumed, but it was quieter now, and very soothing. The ship's crew stood around, looking mystified. There was much shrugging.

The piscine ship-drone and Skaffen-Amtiskaw exchanged looks. The ship drone, still held in Sma's paw, suddenly became the holo of a fish skeleton. Skaffen-Amtiskaw projected the model of the Xenophobe tumbling disintegrating and trailing smoke to the deck. They both flashed back to their previous disguises as Sma turned slowly and looked at them both.

"An… Open… Cluster?" she said, and took off the brown and yellow head of the fancy-dress suit.

Sma's mouth was in the shape of a smile. It was not an expression Skaffen-Amtiskaw had learned to view with anything other than extreme trepidation.

— Oh shit.

— I think we are in the presence of one annoyed human female, Skaffen-Amtiskaw.

— You don't say. Any ideas?

— None whatsoever. You can field this; my fish-like ass is out of here.

— Ship! You can't do this to me!

— Can and am. This is your prototype. Talk to me later. Bye.

The fish-drone went limp in Sma's paw. She let it drop to the water-slicked floor.

The drone dispensed with the warship disguise; it floated in front of her, fields on clear. It dipped its front a little, held it there. "Sma," it said quietly. "I'm sorry. I didn't lie but I did deceive."

"My cabin," Sma said calmly, after a brief pause. "Excuse us," she said to Disgarve and Hrine, and walked away, followed by the drone.

She floated on the bed in the lotus position, naked but for the shorts, the Xeny suit discarded on the floor. She was glanding calm and she looked more sad than furious. Skaffen-Amtiskaw — expecting a fight — was feeling awful, faced with such measured disappointment.

"I thought if I told you, you wouldn't come."

"Drone; this is my job."

"I know, but you were so reluctant to leave…"

"After three years, with no warning, what do you expect? But how long did I actually hold out? Even knowing about the stand-in? Come on, drone; you told me what the situation was and I accepted. There was no need to keep quiet about Zakalwe giving us the slip."

"I'm sorry," the drone said, very quietly. "This is inadequate, I know, but I really am sorry. Please say you might be able to forgive me one day."

"Oh, don't take the contrition bit too far. Just tell me things in future."

"All right."

Sma let her head drop for a moment, then brought it back up. "You can start by telling me how Zakalwe got away. What did we have trailing him?"

"A knife missile."

"A knife missile?" Sma looked suitably amazed. She rubbed her chin with one hand.

"Quite a late model, too," the drone said. "Nanoguns, mono-filament warps, effector; point seven value brain."

"And Zakalwe got away from this beast?" Sma was almost laughing.

"Not just away; he wasted it."