A few hours before, these cockleshells with alien engines had been toppling through the France Chance chromosphere (filmed in perfect rights-reserved imagery by virtual hydrogen-alpha filter). Now the boys who flew them were determined to be the first human beings to scrub off more than twenty thousand kilometres an hour at less than five hundred feet above sea level. And the frail, utter certainty of it was: you had done that too, and you still couldn’t get enough of it, and you would do it again and again until you couldn’t do it any more. Later, you found your lovely pilot was the legendary Ed Chianese, and that the two of you were in competition for the Stupidest Achievement of That Year award.

It was from the perspective of this dream that Liv, waking transfixed, understood where she had seen the occupant of the K-tank before. She dialled up Antoyne, who, refusing to leave the crew quarters for three days, played Ya Skaju Tebe on infinite repeat and ate raspberry ice cream with his hands.

‘Fat Antoyne, listen. We have to go into the hold.’

But Antoyne wouldn’t budge.

Walls blacked with graffiti flower shapes; armoured bulkheads deformed not by blast, or even melting, but by enforced transition through unnatural physical states; autorepair media busy over everything: someone, Liv thought, had pressed the wrong switch down there.

A section of the hull remained transparent. It was a wall of nothing. Eerie light from a corner of the Tract lengthened out the main hold so that it seemed more like an exterior than an interior. This illusion was increased by the disarray of the mortsafes. They were hard to count now. They lay tumbled on one another into a kind of distance, like corroded boilers in a scrapyard. Repair work was going on among them, but you couldn’t quite see where. A sputtering sound filled the air. Sparks flew up and rained back down, cutting gold curves on the watching eye, bouncing off the deck as they cooled to dark cherry. Big shadows danced over the bulkheads.

Everything smelled of mould on bread, and of MP Renoko, who slumped like a traditional wood puppet in the unremitting yet unreliable glare of the welding arc, his clothes blackened, his left arm resting at an odd angle in his lap. One side of his face had dripped into the hollow of his clavicle, where it produced a finish resembling melted plastic; the other side boasted a sceptical grin, an appreciative glint in the eye, as if Renoko had only just died – or as if he was still alive, choosing for some reason to remain incommunicado. In this environment even a dead human being was a comfort. Liv stood next to him and peered into the fountain of sparks.

‘You can come out now, Ed,’ she called.

‘Liv? Liv Hula?’