‘They’re all the same. Scoliosis. Pseudo-polio. Half the organs gone, wires everywhere.’ And when Antoyne wondered what unimaginable forces had blown this one out of his ship: ‘Don’t assume it’s male. More than half of them sign up as girls. It’s the thinking twelve-year-old’s alternative to anorexia.’

Antoyne moved the inspection lamp around. It was like a wreck under water in there. Fine silt fell through the beam.

‘Is it dead yet?’ Irene the mona called from the crew quarters.

They were thirty lights from anywhere, in the voids by the Tract itself. The big argument they had, which went back and forth while Antoyne screwed the porthole cover back on, was if they had come upon the tank by accident, or whether it was another item on MP Renoko’s cargo manifest. It was a measure of how weird their sense of reality had got, Liv Hula insisted, that they couldn’t decide. They stood there for a time, arguing back and forth, then left the hold.As soon as the bulkhead door closed behind them, bursts of high-speed code issued from the K-tank – chirps and stutters, odd runs of simple calculus, fragments of ordinary language mysterious yet emphatic – as if the occupant was trying to make contact but couldn’t remember how. The other items in the hold were inappropriately excited by this, flashing and winking in return, humming with subsonics, emitting brief flashes of ionising radiation. After perhaps an hour – its baroque ribs and lumps of melted inlet pipe making it look like a child’s coffin decorated with mouldings of elves, unicorns and dragons – the newcomer seemed to calm down.

‘We should dump it in the nearest sun,’ said Liv.