Life in quarantine: a hundred yards away, someone in an eva suit could be seen welding steel plates over a hatch; further in, pSi engines fired up as two or three hulks worked to phase-lock with the local flow. In the brief strobing flashes, Liv made out the skeleton of a pipeliner, two centuries old, three miles long. She allowed the ship to drift further in, then out again. Renoko’s next load awaited them only a few hundred miles beneath. As they departed, a K-ship nosed out from between the hulks and followed them down, at one point fitting itself so closely into the curves of the old freighter’s hull that they could feel waste heat radiating from the internal processes it made no attempt to mask. Its signals traffic alone could have cooked a city. It wanted them to know it was there. It wanted them to know that they were a question it could answer if it wanted to; anything it wanted, it could have. It matched them through one and a half cycles of their aerobrake program, then became interested in something else and spun away. Liv, who had felt the K-captain crawling in and out of her brain through the wires in her mouth, shuddered.

‘I hate those things,’ she said.

There was a silence. Then a faint voice, already four lights down the Beach, whispered:

‘Well I’ve never said an unkind word about you, sweetie.’

New Venusport South Hemisphere, 3am: Madame Shen’s old premises, a three-acre strip of cement between the sea and the rocket yards. For a minute or two after the Nova Swing came down there was silence. Then the night sounds returned, bustle from the yards, chain link fences rattling in the offshore breeze. Fat Antoyne Messner stood on the loading platform, looking across a thin layer of marine fog doped with pollution from the yards. It would clear rapidly with the approach of dawn; meanwhile the motors ticked and cooled, and Antoyne relished the damp air in his face. The curve of the bay was lined with clapboard beach motels, blind pigs and empty sex joints – Ivy Mike’s, Deleuze Motel, The Palmer Lounge – their cinder lots full of drifted sand. Waves rumbled in from the horizon.

‘Look!’ Liv Hula said. ‘No, there!’

A figure was making its way along the line of buildings, silhouetted against the faint luminescence of the waves: female, tall, full of the unresolved tensions of the heavily-tailored. Faceless and quiet, she leaned for a moment on the siding of the Deleuze Motel, one arm straight out from the shoulder, palm flat against the wall. The wind smelled of chemicals. She raised her head to it like a dog, looking out to sea, then sat down at the edge of the concrete apron and began pouring sand from one cupped hand to the other: someone who, arriving too late for a meeting, regrets having come at all.