She smiled uncertainly. He laughed loudly, turned and bumped into the bar stool. "Whoops!" he said.

"This way, Mr Sherad," the first one said. "Yeah; yeah; just wherever."

He'd hoped they'd take him into the crew-only section, but when they got into the small lift, they pressed for the lowest deck; stores, non-vacuum luggage, and the brig.

"I think I'm going to be sick," he said, as soon as the doors closed. He bent over, retched, forcing out the last few drinks.

One jumped out of the way, to keep his shiny boots clean; the other, he sensed, was bending down, putting one hand to his back.

He stopped throwing up, slammed one elbow up into the man's nose; he crashed back into the elevator's rear doors. The second man hadn't quite recovered his balance. He straightened and punched him straight in the face. The second one folded, knees then backside hammering into the floor. The lift chimed, stopped between decks, its weight-limit alarm triggered by all the commotion. He thumped the topmost button and the lift started up.

He took the guns from the two unconscious officers; neural stunners. He shook his head. The elevator chimed again. The floor they'd left. He stepped forward, stuffing the two stun guns into his jacket as he braced his feet in the far corners of the small space, straddling the two men, and pressed his hands against the doors. He grunted with the effort of holding the doors closed, but eventually the elevator gave up the struggle. Still holding the doors with both hands, he twisted his body until he got his head to the topmost button, and pressed it with his forehead. The lift hummed upwards again.

When the doors opened, three people stood outside, on the private lounge level. They looked at the two unconscious guards and the small watery pool of vomit. Then he zapped them with the stun guns, and they fell. He pulled one of the officers half out of the elevator so the lift couldn't close its doors, and used a stun gun on both men too.

The Starlight Lounge door was closed. He pressed the button, looking back down the corridor, where the lift doors pulsed gently against the fallen officer's body like some unsubtle lover. There was a distant chime, and a voice said, "Please clear the doors. Please clear the doors."

"Yes?" said the door to the Starlight Lounge.

"Stap; it's Sherad. I changed my mind."

"Excellent!" The door opened.

He went quickly inside, hit the shut button. The modest lounge was full of drug smoke, low light, and mutilated people. Music played, and all eyes — not all of them in their sockets — turned to him. The doctor's tall grey machine was over near the bar, where a couple of people were serving.

He got the doctor between him and the others, stuck the stun gun under the little man's chin. "Bad news, Stap. These things can be fatal at close range, and this one's on maximum. I need your machine. I'd prefer to have your co-operation, too, but I can get by without it. I'm very serious, and in a terrible hurry, so what's it to be?"

Stap made a gurgling noise.

"Three," he said, pressing the stun gun a little harder into the little doctor's neck. "Two…."

"All right! This way!"

He let him go, following Stap across the floor to the tall machine he used for his strange trade. He kept his hands together, stun pistols hidden up each sleeve; he nodded to a few people as they passed. He spotted a clear line of fire to somebody on the far side of the room, just for an instant. He zapped them; they fell spectacularly onto a laden table. While everybody was looking there, he and Stap — prodded once to keep going when the crash came from the distant table — got to the machine.

"Excuse me," he said to one of the bar girls. "Would you help the doctor?" He nodded behind the bar. "He wants to move the machine through there, don't you, Doc?"

They entered the small store room behind the bar. He thanked the girl outside, closed the door, locked it, and shifted a pile of containers in front of it. He smiled at the alarmed-looking doctor.

"See that wall behind you, Stap?"

The doctor's gaze flicked that way.

"We're going through it, Doc, with your machine."

"You can't! You…"

He put the stun gun against the man's forehead. Stap closed his eyes. A corner of handkerchief, protruding from a breast pocket, trembled.

"Stap; I think I know how that machine must work to do what it does. I want a cutting field; a slicer that'll take molecular bonds apart. If you won't do it, and right now, I'll put you out and try it myself, and if I get it wrong and fuse the fucker, you're going to have some very, very unhappy customers out there; they might even do what you've done to them, but without the old machine here, hmm?"

Stap swallowed. "Mm…" he began. One of his hands moved slowly towards his jacket. "Mmm… mmm… my t-t-tool k-kit."

He took the wallet of tools out, turned shakily to the machine and opened a panel.

The door behind them chimed. He found some sort of chromed bar utensil on a shelf, moved the containers in front of the door aside — Stap looked round, but saw the gun was still pointed at him, and turned back — and jammed the piece of metal into the gap between the sliding door and its housing. The door gave an outraged chirp, and a red light blinked urgently on the open/close button. He slid the containers back again.

"Hurry up, Stap," he said.

"I'm doing all I can!" the little doctor yelped. The machine made a deep buzzing noise. Blue light played around a cylindrical section about a metre from the floor.

He looked at the section, eyes narrowing.

"What are you hoping to do?" the doctor said, voice shaking.

"Just keep working, Doc; you have half a minute before I try doing it myself." He looked over the doctor's shoulder, saw him fiddling with a circular control mapped out in degrees.

All he could hope to do was get the machine going and then attack whatever parts of the ship he could. Disable it, somehow. All ships tended to be complicated, and, to a degree, the cruder a ship was, paradoxically the more complicated it was too. He just had to hope he could hit something vital without blowing the thing up.

"Nearly ready," the doctor said. He looked nervously backwards, one shaking finger going towards a small red button.

"Okay, Doc," he told the trembling man, looking suspiciously at the blue light playing round the cylindrical section. He squatted down level with the doctor. "Go on," he nodded.

"Um…" The doctor swallowed. "It might be better if you stood back, over there."

"No. Let's just try it, eh?" He hit the little red button. A hemi-disc of blue light shot out over their heads from the cylindrical section of the machine and sliced through the containers he had stacked against the door; fluids spurted out of them. The shelves to one side collapsed, supports severed by the humming blue disc. He grinned at the wreckage; if he'd still been standing, the blue field would have cut him in half.

"Nice try, Doc," he said. The little doctor slumped to the floor like a pile of wet sand as the stun pistol hummed. Snack packets and drink cartons showered onto the floor from the demolished shelves; the ones falling through the blue beam hit the floor shredded; drink poured from the punctured containers in front of the door. There was a thumping noise coming from behind the containers.

He rather appreciated the heady smell of alcohol filling the store room, but hoped there weren't enough spirits involved to cause a fire. He spun the machine around, splashing through the drink gradually collecting on the floor of the small store room; the flickering blue half-disc cut through more shelves before sinking into the bulkhead opposite the door.

The machine shook; the air filled with a teeth-cracking whine, and black smoke spun round against the wrecked shelves as though propelled by the cutting blue light and then fell quickly to the surface of the sloshing drink filling the bottom decimetre of the store room, where it collected like a tiny dark fogbank. He started manipulating the controls on the machine; a little holo screen showed the shape of the field; he found a couple of tiny joysticks that altered it, producing an elliptical field. The machine thumped harder; the noise rose in pitch and black smoke poured out around him.