The Nova Swing chewed a long hole between the stars, her doomed crew staring out so that sometimes their faces appeared at the portholes together, sometimes apart. The police were after her on several worlds. The beef: artefact smuggling. Possible Quarantine infringement. Wanted in connection with the death of a Saudade factor going by ‘Toni Reno’. She sneaked from world to world across the Beach. Since she took aboard the crippled K-tank, she had dropped in quietly at Goat’s Eye and the Inverted Swan; fallen across the empty spaces between Radio Bay and the Tract itself; drifted seventy-four hours, all systems powered down, at heavily coded co-ordinates in the notorious dXVII-Channing Oort cloud. MP Renoko was a no-show at all those venues. Then, just when they had given up on him, he poked his head through the crew quarters wall and said to Fat Antoyne, as if continuing a conversation they had started in The East Ural Nature reserve on Vera Rubin’s World:

‘Everyone their own evolutionary project, Fat Antoyne!’

Antoyne said, ‘Jesus.’

‘Who’s this little old cunt?’ Irene wanted to know. She looked Renoko over, her irises dark with satire. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said. ‘Antoyne, get off me.’ It was not Renoko’s chinbeard she hated; or even his 1960s paedophile look, which she admitted was chic enough. It was the sense she had that he was always keeping something of himself in reserve. Or not even something: everything. ‘Come in,’ she invited, resettling on her hips some items of dress: ‘We got your cargo of meaningless toys.’

‘You’ve done very well,’ Renoko said.

‘That won’t work here, Renoko. The only thing that will work here is this—’ making the universal sign for money ‘—then you go, taking the rusty pipework with you.’ If you were driven by unknown forces, her body language implied, best not be around Irene.

Antoyne put his hand on her arm. ‘Why kill Toni Reno?’ he asked Renoko. ‘I don’t get it.’

Renoko looked puzzled.

‘We didn’t do that,’ he said.

Irene held out her hand again, palm up. She said, ‘Well it wasn’t us either.’

‘Thanks for the information,’ Renoko said. ‘I’ll make arrangements,’ he told Antoyne.

He winked, and his face went back through the wall. He didn’t mean money, but Antoyne wasn’t to know that. Just before his face vanished it added, ‘You might have some communications problems in the next hour or so. Don’t panic.’ Down in the main hold where he next materialised, he found the charred man working on one of the mortsafes with a pulsed-spray welding set four hundred years old. Sparks flew everywhere. In their heat and light, this shabby enclosed space seemed like the very forge of God. Renoko watched for a minute or two in an impressed way and then said, ‘Is that Metal Active Gas?’

The charred man pushed back his goggles and shook his head.