Rig and Emil and Fedy von Gang, hacking busily away at the mysteries in Radio Bay; Ed Chianese who, it was rumoured, had himself plugged into a K-ship and fired into the Tract itself, as dumb a thing as anyone had ever done. The entradistas, the sky-pilots like Billy Anker and Liv Hula. People who called their ship Blind by Light, or Hidden Light, or 500% Light, or anything with Light in it. People who left a note by the bed, a message in the parking orbit: Torched out, catch you later. Who were wired up wrong from the first. Whose engines cooked with hard X-rays. Who went out unassuagable and came back rich or mad, towing a derelict starship from another galaxy. Rocket jockeys the Halo knew by their first names. Imps shrugged. He excused himself and got a beer. When he came back to his seat she was still there, and he said: ‘Out here thirty years, and I find I was never like them. Whoa! What’s this? Imps, you want to go back, find your home? Stop looking in the dark for stuff no one’s ever going to understand?’

‘You came too far,’ she mused.

Van Sant didn’t know if she was agreeing with him, or what. When he looked up at the monitor again, she had vanished.

She was gone two days, and when she returned it was only so that they could regard one another in a kind of continuing puzzlement – honest on his side, Imps thought, angry on hers.

‘What?’ he said.

Another screen came to life and began generating images of the war. Naked bodies in vacuum, rows of K-craft so long they vanished in blackness. An entire planet with a hole through it. Chaotic scenes of the displaced. Tourists who had passed this way a week ago, off to make fuck-footage in the twilight zone of Kunene, who now found themselves dirty and sleepless on the concourse of the very terminal which had promised so much. Or were pictured, still dressed in the easy to wear greige stylings of the moment, anxiously disembarking from a chartered shorthaul flight a hundred light years from their point of origin, to be bussed into temporary cities already crammed with refugees, media, aid-agency reps and dysfunctional gap-year adolescents drawn to the inferno for reasons they didn’t understand.

‘All over the Halo people are losing their way of life,’ van Sant whispered. He meant: ‘How lucky is that?’

She took it some other way.

‘I remember all these atrocities you’re looking at,’ she said. Then: ‘I’ve done worse.’ And finally: ‘Is it right to think so much about yourself?’