I grabbed the side of the cab with both hands, and leant out for a better look. The huge yellow dragon was already turning around and heading back for another attack. I drew the Colt Repeater again, aimed carefully, and shot out the dragon’s glowing eyes, one after another. The terrible jaws stretched even wider in a howl of rage and pain I could sense, even if I couldn’t hear it. It was like fingernails down the blackboard of my soul. The dragon shook its head back and forth, as though trying to shake off the sudden pain and blindness, but still it kept coming, heading right for us. It just kept getting bigger and bigger, blocking off the view ahead, until its great yellow form filled the view before us.

And then Molly leaned right out over her side of the cab, stabbed a single finger at the dragon, and pronounced several very unpleasant Words of Power. The awful sound of the Words seemed to echo endlessly on the quiet, and the dragon suddenly didn’t seem quite so big or imposing. In sharp jerks and shudders, it shrank rapidly in size, becoming smaller and smaller, until by the time it reached Ivor’s cab it was no bigger than an insect. It fluttered around our heads, buzzing angrily, until Molly reached out and crushed it between two fingertips. And that was that.

Molly wiped her hand on her hip and smiled sweetly at me. “You should have remembered,” she said. “In space, all size is relative.”

“You scare me sometimes,” I said.

We carried on, through the space that wasn’t space, and saw many strange and wondrous things. Planets came and went all around us. One planet opened like an eye and stared at us coldly as we passed. Another had a dozen rings spinning around it, all circling madly at different speeds and in different directions. It looked like a great clockwork toy set in motion at the beginning of the universe, slowly winding down. Another planet suddenly opened up like a flower, and hundreds of long tentacles burst out of it, groping and grasping at Ivor, trying to lock on and pull us in. Tony sent Ivor plunging this way and that, with judicial use of his long steel levers, and skilfully evaded every tentacle that tried to curl around us. A few slapped harmlessly against Ivor’s sides, and Ivor seemed to shudder at the touch. But we soon left the planet behind, and it closed slowly up again, sulkily pulling its feeding tentacles back inside.

Another planet disappeared entirely as we approached, only reappearing after we were safely past.