When things returned, she was seeing them via an exterior camera-swarm. Autorepair media raced along the brass-coloured hull like dust down a hot street. The stern assembly pulsed in and out of view. Outriggers, fusion pods, the tubby avocado-shaped bulge housing the Dynaflow drive: you could see the stars through them. From a source down there, where the holds and motors had once been, intermittent, washy-looking streams of plasma curved out into the dark, already an AU long and curved like scimitars. Liv felt sick. With the connector a lump of gold wire half-fused into the tissue of her soft palate, she was reduced to flicking switches. ‘Antoyne? Hello?’ No one responded. Inside the ship, engine rooms, holds, companionways, ventilator shafts, stairwells, winked out one by one. Go through the wrong door, who knew what you’d see? Liv was aware but blind. If you could blueprint grey on grey, that’s what filled the control room screens – a kind of luminous darkness where her spaceship had been. There was nothing there, but it had a strong sense of order.

‘Jesus, Antoyne,’ she said. ‘What are you fucking around with now?’

No one heard her.

Antoyne was enjoying a shit. Irene, who trusted Renoko as far as she could throw him, had zipped herself into a lightweight white eva suit, grabbed her favourite Fukushima Hi-Lite Autoloader from the weapons bar and, with a transparent bubble helmet under one arm, was making her way from the crew quarters to the main hold. Latticed stairways leaned at expressionist angles against the moody emergency light; in the rear companionways the ship’s gravity had become undependable. Communications were nonexistent. It was hard to tell which way was up. Irene, though, looked good with her close-fit suit, her determined expression and her flossy blond hair. ‘It’s hot as hell down here,’ she said. ‘Hello?’

She put her ear to the main hold doors.

‘Wow,’ she said. ‘Liv? Antoyne? I hear something!’ Setting helmet and Hi-Lite on the floor, she opened the door and stepped through.

Just as Liv heard Irene’s strange cries, the missing sections of the ship returned. Antoyne never knew any part of it had been gone. He appeared in the control room pulling up his trousers and together he and Liv ran through the Nova Swing, throwing themselves down stairwells as they tried to avoid pockets of deteriorating physics. The ship self-reassembled around them. Its hull rang and rang. The door to the main hold slid open on a vertical slice of lemon-yellow light: inside, some unacceptable transition was partially complete. There were oblique shadows, noises like sacred music, sparks on everything, a voice saying, ‘Fuck!’ Antoyne looked determinedly away from it all and at the same time reached in with one arm. It was a stretch, and he had to feel around aimlessly for a time, but eventually he got hold of Irene by one ankle and pulled her out.