He stiffened. “There was a little more to it than that.”

“I’m sure.” I turned to the door. “Well, come on then, if you’re coming.”

I stepped over the threshold, from the relative confines of the station’s corridors to the echoing vault of the maintenance bay. The walls to the left and right of me were each half a kilometre distant, and the far wall, which housed the main doors, twice that distance. Overhead, the lights in the ceiling were like stars in the sky.

The Trouble Dog hung in the horizontal and vertical centre of the room. The air shimmered beneath her. Spotlights threw bright circles across her prickling bronze-coloured hide. From where I stood, I could make out the silhouettes of various disabled systems, and the empty weapon flats where the more offensive ordnance had been removed. Behind me, Preston Menderes paused and shaded his eyes as he looked up at the projectile-shaped fuselage.

“Christ,” he breathed. “What an antique.”

I gave him a sharp glance.

“Careful,” I said. “She has feelings.”

We walked into the shadow of the Trouble Dog, to where a platform waited for us.

“Hold the rail,” I advised Preston, knowing the Trouble Dog’s penchant for the theatrical. Not to mention its partiality for revenging slights.

As it happened, though, we were ferried up into the belly of the brute without so much as a single jolt. I looked across at the kid’s disdainful expression and thought, Sneer while you can. I knew this ship, and I knew she couldn’t let his comment pass. She’d get even with a prank of some kind; I just didn’t know how, or where, it would happen.

* * *

Aside from a few access panels, crawlways and maintenance hatches, the majority of the human-habitable portions of the Dog lay in a torus wrapped around her thickest point. Sensors and armament filled the tip of her pointed nose; engines the rest, from just behind the bow to the end of her gently tapering and flat-edged stern. The human quarters were like an inflatable rubber ring caught around the waist of a shark.

We came in via the embarkation lounge. As we entered the ship’s internal gravity field, my stomach did its customary flip. No matter where you were on the Dog, once you were inside the hull, “up” always lay in the direction of the ship’s core. In the main corridor, the floor seemed to slope upwards ahead and behind you, as if you were at the lowest point of a gentle valley.