Just then something hit the upper atmosphere with a dull thud. Sprays of ionisation  flickered like heat lightning  in the clouds. Alyssia Fignall sighed. She knew this one too. Everyone did. A warm wind filled the square, and with it the K-ship Uptown Six, out of New Venusport  on grey ops for EMC’s crack Levy Flight. At that time there was no greyer op in the Halo than R.I. Gaines. A mere two hundred  feet long yet ten thousand tonnes unloaded, its matt-grey  hull profuse  with power bulges and  ram  intakes, Uptown  Six dipped  its blunt  nose  into  the  square.  Reeking of stealth coatings, strange physics and the exotically dense matter laid in wafers between the poisonous  composites  of its hull, it hung outside the café door in a nose-down  atttitude,  like a bad dream, full of the intelligence of its captain, a thirteen-year-old self-harmer called Carlo who would live the rest of his life in a tank of fluid somewhere near the stern.

‘Here’s your boyfriend,’ Alyssia said.

‘Behave yourself,’ he said. He put his arms round her. ‘It’s just a ride.’

‘Promise to come back soon, Rig.’

He promised.  They hugged a long time, then  Gaines let her go. Before he had taken three paces he was already part  of the darkness. The ship seemed to suck him in without  opening any part of itself: though something caused its transformation  optics to discharge briefly, distorting Alyssia’s perception of the hull into a silvery yet glutinous foetal shape, through patches of which she could see the buildings on the other side of the square.

‘You love this,’ she called after him bitterly, tilting her head to watch the sheet-lightning in the clouds.

Ten minutes into the voyage, they were bounced.

‘Incoming,’ Carlo said matter-of-factly.  It was less a warning than a courtesy; the action was over before he framed the last syllable. Two middleweight cruisers, their emissions heavily blocked, had  slipped like eels into  his ten-dimensional  parsec-on-a-side cube of awareness and despatched assets up to and including the substrate  disrupter  known  to  K-captains  as a ‘bump’. Finding their  target absent  by a millisecond  or more,  a long-gone  trail of turbulence  in the local quantum  foam, they had backtracked hastily: only to encounter  Uptown Six, its mathematics  sorting a billion or so tactical and navigational possibilities a nanosecond, already waiting for them.

‘Guys,’ Carlo said, ‘you thought  you could hide. But wherever you go, here I am.’

He released an asset of his own. ‘Be sure and have a nice day now.’

To Gaines he added: ‘We seem to be at war.’ He couldn’t say who with; by then he had lost interest anyway.