When she woke up it was still night. The tide was a little further out. She was alone. The smell of burnt rocket fuel blew over the dunes and for a moment she interpreted that, too, as synaesthesia from some cortical fuck-up they had done to her. Best to lie in the marram, fitting and retching while the self-repair kits crawled dispassionately over her brain. She felt worse than at any time since she came out of the chopshop tank in Preter Coeur with her new career and her specialised arm. Eventually she got to her feet and staggered into the Deleuze Motel, where she found a ballroom full of drifted sand. Two low-wattage bulbs alive in the chandelier. At the back, by the bar, three old men in white flat caps and polyester trousers, staring at her. They were playing dice. They had a crate of alcopops and two or three bottles of Black Heart barrel proof rum, which they were drinking on its own, no ice.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ the assistant said. ‘If you know what’s good for you you’ll give me some of that.’

Impasse van Sant had come down the Carling Line as just another speck in fifty tonnes of deep-frozen trade gametes. Sperm and egg futures were declining: passed hand to hand for two hundred years, often as a sweetener in some more interesting deal, van Sant was finally thawed out as farmworker potential. After that he couldn’t seem to settle. It was a common enough syndrome in the Halo. Dedicated before birth to the gods of irreversible flight and determined-but-unpredictable motion, Imps now stared into empty space and whispered:

‘Are you out there?’

No answer. Then a momentary flicker, very quick and faint. In response, the research vessel sorted quantum events. Software injected the system with wide-band noise, pumping it by stochastic resonance into the story of some brief imbalance in the vacuum energy. Data built suddenly, crested, fell away fast. The number of objects in local space had suddenly doubled. Half a parsec towards the Core, something banked like a white wing, caught tilted up against the dark as if on some other errand. He didn’t know how many times she had slipped away from him like this before he had time to speak, a huge frail orphan in the substrate of the universe. There were days when he couldn’t bear the possibility. Today was one of them. Whatever shit he shot with Rig Gaines over beer and table tennis, Imps knew he was kidding himself when he thought he could get by in outer space on his own. He worked feverishly to reel her in, his expression suddenly soft and desperate in the old-fashioned glow of the control panel.

‘Hello?’ he called into the dark. ‘Hello?’

‘Hello.’

His heart raced. He tried to think of some way to extend their previous conversations; something certain to keep her attention.