“Yes.” I put my own hand to the wall. The stone felt cold through my glove, and impossibly smooth to the touch. “But there’s more to it than that. Moonlight has its own quality, its own texture.” I struggled to find the words to convey the childhood magic of being out at night with the moon riding high and proud like a galleon in the sky. How I wished I could be back there now, standing at the door of that humble little cottage with the valley picked out before me in silver and shadow, and be adolescent and blameless again, unencumbered by the burdens of adulthood and able to look ahead with neither guilt nor trepidation. I opened my mouth to say something. Before I could speak, the first echoes reached us. Voices from above; the clatter of armour and weapons.

We looked at each other, eyes wide with alarm.

We had been found.

Thirty-Three: Sal Konstanz

THIRTY-THREE

SAL KONSTANZ

Preston stepped back.

“It’s fine, I think. At least, the skin’s not broken. You’re probably going to have some bruising.”

He wouldn’t meet my eye. I was sitting on the edge of one of the galley tables. I pulled my jumpsuit closed and zipped it up to the neck. “Thank you.”

I looked down at Ashton Childe’s comatose form. Nod had done a good job with the welding torch, and now fat blobs of solder held the man in a spread-eagled cruciform, with his closed eyes and slack mouth facing the strip lights on the galley’s ceiling. According to Preston, he’d taken enough methamphetamine to give a platoon insomnia, and it would be several hours before it could all be purged from his system.

“Call me when he wakes up.”

Alva Clay still had the wrench dangling from her fingers. “Why, where are you going?” she asked.

I pushed away from the table and stood up. “To talk to the boss.”

I could feel her gaze on my back as I left the galley. I walked around the circular corridor to the nearest elevator. When the doors opened, I stepped inside and let it whisk me “up” to the ship’s bridge, close to the centre of the vessel.

Lit only by the light of its display screens, the bridge felt like a secure cave at the heart of the ship. The room was armoured, could be sealed off from the rest of the ship, and had its own emergency air supply. Even if enemy fire penetrated the main hull, the command crew would still have some level of protection. They would be able to keep fighting, even as the rest of the ship was blown away around them; and, in defeat, they would be among the last of its crew to die.

Feeling stiff and battered after having first been shot in the arm and then thrown across a table, I carefully lowered myself into the command chair.