“Oh, and my regards to my old friend Seer-Chief Chyne, of the Favrial,” Slovius said as they crossed to the Navarchy craft. “Should you see him. Oh, and most especially to Braam Ganscerel, of Sept Tonderon, naturally.”

“I’ll try to say hello to all who know you, uncle.”

“I should have come with you,” Slovius said absently. “No, maybe not.”

A grey-uniformed figure appeared from a drop-platform under the black ship and walked towards them. The officer, a fresh-faced, cheery-looking woman, took off her cap, bowed to Slovius, and to Fassin said, “Major Taak?”

Fassin stood looking at her for a moment, before recalling that officially he was now a major in the Shrievalty Ocula. “Ah, yes,” he said.

“First Officer Oon Dicogra, NMS 3304,” the young woman said. “Welcome. Please follow me.”

Slovius held out one flippery hand. “I shall try to remain alive until your return, Major Nephew.” He made a wheezing noise that was probably a laugh.

Fassin gripped Slovius’s finger stubs awkwardly. “I’m rather hoping this is a false alarm and I’ll be back in a few days.”

“In any event, take care. Goodbye, Fassin.”

“I shall. Goodbye.” He kissed the still-sleeping Zab lightly on the cheek, avoiding waking her, then followed the Navarchy officer to the platform, stepped up onto it and waved as the curve-bottomed slab raised them into the ship.

“We’ll be pulling about 5.2 Earth gees most of the way,” Dicogra said as Fassin’s robe and his luggage were secured in a brace-cabinet. “Are you happy with that? The physio profile we got on you says yes, but we have to check.”

Fassin looked at her. “To Pirrintipiti?” he asked. The local shuttles and suborbs accelerated a lot less sharply than that, and they did the trip in less than an hour. How tight was this schedule?

“No, to Borquille city,” Dicogra said. “Going straight there.”

“Oh,” Fassin said, surprised. “No, 5.2 is fine.”

The planet-moon ’glantine’s gravity was about a tenth of that, but Fassin was used to more. He thought about pointing out that his day job involved spending years at a time in a gravity field of over six Earth gees, but of course that was in a Dwellerine arrowship, pickled in shock-gel, and didn’t really count.

First Officer Dicogra smiled, wrinkled her nose and said, “Good for you. That physio report said you were quite a toughie. Still, we’ll spend nearly twenty hours at that acceleration, with only a few minutes weightless right in the middle, so do you need to visit the heads? You know, the toilet?”

“No, I’m fine.”

She gestured at his groin, where a bulge like a sports box was the only place on his body where the grey, centimetre-thick gee-suit didn’t hug the contours of his flesh. “Any attachments required?” she asked, smiling.

“No, thanks.”

“Drugs to let you sleep?”

“Not necessary.”

The ship’s captain was a whule, a species that always looked to Fassin like a cross between a giant grey bat and an even more scaled-up praying mantis. She greeted Fassin briefly via a screen from the bridge and he was settled into a steep-sided, semi-reclined couch in a gimballed ball pod near the centre of the ship by First Officer Dicogra and a fragile-seeming but dexterous whule rating who smelled, to the human nose, of almonds. The whule rating levered himself out with a snapping sound of wing membranes and Dicogra settled into the only other couch in the pod. Her preparations for a day of five gees continuous consisted of tossing her cap into a locker and adjusting her uniform underneath her.

The ship lifted slowly at first and Fassin watched on a screen on the curved wall opposite as the port’s circular landing ground fell away, the little figures there lifting their heads as the Navarchy craft rose. Zab might have waved one tiny arm, then the haze of clouds intervened, the view tilted and swung and the ship accelerated — the gimballed pod keeping him and Dicogra level in their seats — towards space.

* * *

Was that screaming? His eyes flicked open. His neck hairs were standing on end, his mouth was dry. Dark. Still inside the ruined alien ship, his back resting against the dimly lit flier. Taince gone, away to the gap to check for comms reception. Oh shit, those were screams, from behind. Maybe shouting, too. He scrambled to his feet, looking around. Little to see; just the faint traces of the warped landscape of destruction and collapse that was the interior of the wrecked ship, the tilted decks and bulkheads, the huge hanging strips of whatever-the-hell hanging from the invisibly dark and distant ceiling. The screams were coming from forward, from the interior, from the direction that Saluus and Ilen had walked in. He stood staring into that darkness, holding his breath to listen better. Sudden silence, then maybe a voice — Sal’s shouting, the words indistinct. Help? Taince? Fass?

What do I do? Run to help? Wait for Taince? Look for another torch, another gun if there is one?

A clattering noise behind him made him spin round.

Taince, bounding down from one gnarled level of the buckled wall. “You okay?”

“Yes, but—”

“Stay with me. Keep a few steps behind. Say if you can’t keep up.” She went past him at a slow run, her gun high in one hand. Later, he would remember that there was a grim sort of smile on her face.

They ran up the shallow slope leading deeper into the ship, over increasingly large ripples in the material beneath their feet until they were leaping from ridge to ridge, then jumped down through a tear in the floor and ran slightly uphill on a half-giving surface like thin rubber over iron, vaulting one-handed over enormous, thigh-high cables strung in an irregular net across the space. Fassin followed Taince as best he could, guided by the glow patches on her fatigues. She ran and leapt more fluidly with one hand filled with pistol than he did pumping both arms. The floor pitched up more steeply, then down.

“Taince! Fassin!” Sal shouted, somewhere ahead.

“Duck!” Taince yelled, suddenly running doubled-up.

Fassin got down just in time; his hair touched the hard fold of ink-black material above. They slowed down, Taince feeling her way one-handed along the dark ceiling, then slipping sideways through a narrow gap.

Fassin followed, the cold press of ungiving material on either side making him shiver.

Light ahead. A dim confusion of tilted floor and a half-open chaos of girders and tubes forming a ceiling, spikes like stalagmites and stalactites, thin hanging cables, a frozen downward explosion of some red substance like an enormous inverted flower. And there, crouching on a narrow ledge by a jagged, vaguely triangular hole in the floor a couple of metres across, staring into it, lit by the glow patches stuck to his jacket, was Sal.

He looked up. “Len!” he shouted. “She fell!”

“Sal,” Taince said sharply, “that floor safe for us?”

He looked confused, frightened. “Think so.”

Taince tested the way ahead with one foot, then knelt by the triangular hole, right at one apex. She motioned Fassin to stay back, lay on her front and stuck her head into the hole, then, muttering something about the edges being braced, signalled Fassin to the side of the hole opposite Saluus. There was more room on that side. He lay and looked in and down.

The triangle opened out into a darkly cavernous space beneath them, just vague glints of edged surfaces visible below; stepped collections of what looked like huge cooling fins. Fassin’s head seemed to swim, recognising how much of the wrecked ship was beneath the level they were on now. He remembered the flier climbing from the desert floor before entering the giant ship. How far had they climbed? A hundred metres? A little less? Plus the journey from the flier to here had been mostly uphill.