We didn’t talk much, saving our breath for the effort of walking. Beside me, Adam trudged with his face down, looking at his feet. However battered I felt as I thumped one exhausted foot in front of the other, I knew his suffering was worse. After all, I’d already experienced my share of horror. He had just seen his home, the ship on which he’d been born, destroyed, and the majority of her inhabitants killed. Everything familiar had been torn from him. His friends and family were either missing or dead, and he had been left stumbling through a surreal maze, beneath walls two kilometres high, with the ever-present threat of his own violent demise itching at his back.

No wonder he didn’t feel like talking.

For my own part, my thoughts were preoccupied with questions. Firstly, I wondered who had been responsible for the torpedo assault on the ’dam, and what could have motivated such an attack against a civilian liner. Granted, we had been cruising through a disputed system, but such naked aggression could only lead to further and more acrimonious dispute. And what of the ’dam itself? Those torpedoes should never have been allowed to get close enough to detonate. Even civilian liners carried defensive cannons. The ship should have deployed them the instant it identified the incoming warheads. Instead, it seemed the vessel’s consciousness had been asleep at the helm. I could only hope it had managed to send a distress signal before powering down.

Secondly, I wanted to know why the attackers had bothered to follow us down to the surface of this ridiculous, planet-sized bauble? They could just as easily have finished us from orbit, using more torpedoes to destroy the wreck instead of going to the trouble of coming down here to shoot the survivors individually.

Unless they are looking for one survivor in particular…

The thought brought a chill of paranoia. Were these unknown assailants after me? Had they seen through my assumed name and restructured face? I hunched into the warmth of the tight suit, and decided it didn’t really matter. When all was said and done, the reasons why you were being killed were largely irrelevant. They only mattered to the people doing the killing. To the victim, a bullet to the head would always have the same result, no matter the gunman’s motives.

I thought back to last night. We had been sipping red wine at one of the balcony restaurants overlooking the ’dam’s central airshaft. A string quartet played. Vines and creepers dangled from higher balconies, their pink and white blossoms scenting the air. Butterflies flapped and swayed. Glasses clinked and, for a delicious interval, basking in Adam’s adoration, I had managed to forget my past. The weight of my chains had loosened and, for the briefest of moments, I’d been allowed to enjoy the simple anticipatory pleasures of seduction.

How far away that now seemed.