Now, three years after that first meeting, I stretched back in the same chair and looked out at the town of Northfield. We were still wedged in the main thoroughfare, and I could see the hunched figure of Mulch, his weight resting painfully on the rail at the front of the saloon, the gun still in his hand. Most of the rest of the inhabitants had turned out behind him. They stood in the street or on their porches, their angry, novelty-starved faces like flowers seeking nourishment from the sun. Sad to say, but this far off the beaten track, on a planet most people avoided because of the prolonged and vicious civil war on its southern continent, our visit had probably been the most interesting thing to happen here in months.

“Okay,” I said. Nod had stopped battering beneath the main console, and was now tidying away its tools and muttering to itself. “Let’s give them a show.”

* * *

Riding the upward thrust of her AG units, the Trouble Dog rose into the evening sky. She went up, as my dad would have said, like prices at Christmas. Then, at five hundred metres, she paused, giving me a view of the entire settlement, right out to the end of the main street, where the houses simply petered out into the prairie lands. With deliberate slowness, she tipped back onto her stern, and pointed her tapering nose at the zenith.

“Why are they travelling together?” Alva Clay asked, still talking about our two new passengers.

“They both want to see the wreck.”

“Yeah, but one’s Conglom’ and the other’s an Outwarder. And it was an Outward liner that went down. What happens if Childe finds out Petrushka’s side sabotaged it?”

“I have no idea.”

Her face grew conspiratorial. “Do you think they’re doing it?”

“What?”

“Having sex.” Clay grinned. “It would explain why they’re together.”

Via the secondary screens on the bridge, I watched the town continue to dwindle away beneath us, shrinking until its lights were distant embers in the gathering twilight.

On the main screen, the Trouble Dog spoke. “Nineteen kilometres,” she said.

We were just high enough to engage our primary drives without causing damage to the buildings on the ground.

I smiled.

Look out, Mr Mulch.

On my order, the main fusion motors cut in. Although the AG field protected us from most of the effects of the thrust, I fancied I felt the ship flex. A split second later, the view below flared white, the cameras washed out by the glare reflected back from the rock and snow. To those on the ground, we would be roaring like an angry new star in the firmament, bright enough to sear unwary retinae, hot enough to burn unprotected skin.