MP Renoko, aka Ronostar Productions, aka Dek Echidna, had begun stripping the assets of Madame Shen’s circus late in 2400, after five consecutive quarters of mixed results. Thereafter you could follow the paper trail across the Halo from South Hemisphere, New Venusport. It led to FUGA-Orthogen – once a thriving EMC subsidiary with interests in mining and recovery, now a single empty Lost & Found office on a badlands planet in the long tail of niche tourism – then trickled away into meaningless local eddies. It was commerce at the edge of viscosity, until Renoko quietly began buying items back. Now he was moving them around under junk certification, using the same ship that had hauled the Halo’s favourite travelling entertainment from planet to planet.

‘So what are we looking at?’ she asked the shadow operators.

They were unable to say at this time.

The assistant, who had expected nothing more, took herself off to New Venusport. The travel lounges were rammed with people trying to get home. War had upped the ante on their lives.

South Hemisphere, NV: underlit smoke poured all night from cheap-and-dirty chemical launchers humping payload into secure EMC orbits. Particle jockeys sweated out their radiation meds under the blackened hulls of K-ships. In the breakers’ yards, indentured New Men – without benefit of a pair of leather gloves, let alone a lead suit – crawled by the thousand over scrapped Alcubiere warpers the size of small towns. Everywhere you looked, you saw machines which would, if their science was turned off for a second, revert instantly to a slurry of nanotech and a few collapsing magnetic fields. Ionisation flickered through clouds of sulphur dioxide and radioactive steam.

What remained of Sandra Shen’s Observatorium & Native Karma Plant – aka The Circus of Pathet Lao – could be found on three acres of fenced-off cement between the rocket pits and the sea. Yard machinery rose up on one side, rippling with bad physics; on the other it was sand dunes steadily absorbing an encrustation of abandoned cabana units, beach bars and hotels – Ivy Mike’s, Deleuze Motel, The Palmer Lounge. The fences dripped with condensation, rattling in an offshore wind. Beneath the chemical signature of the yards, the assistant smelled only salt and dust. Her tailoring, attentive to every breeze, picked up particle dogs, scrambled EMC traffic, low-grade electromagnetic haze from unshielded operations. Otherwise, nothing. Then a K-ship ripped towards the marshalling orbit at Mach 40, its line of fusion product lighting everything in the near ultraviolet: a few alien poppies were revealed growing in the earth at the base of a gate, their crumpled metallic flowerheads nodding in the disturbed air. Life at the circus, NV style. Over in a distant corner of the field stood a three-fin short-hauler, stubby and used-looking, its image still rippling with the heat of a recent re-entry. Nova Swing!