Liv Hula, a passenger in her own ship, dozed in the acceleration chair while, outside, the Halo streamed past, broken into futuristic dazzle patterns by physics and war. The news remained bad. Ed drifted in and out at unpredictable times of day, and hung there staring at the exterior screens. This exasperated her.

‘Can’t you sit down or something?’

‘The day you first came aboard this ship,’ he said, ‘you found surplus code in the navigational system. You couldn’t work out what it did.’

She stared at him. ‘How do you know that?’

He shrugged.

She remembered the first time she sat in the chair. After all the years away from piloting, she felt so free, even if it was just to swallow the nanofibres and take the ship’s inventory:

Electronic infrastructure. Propulsion architecture. Communications schematics, including an ageing FTL uplinker which showed, for reasons unclear, realtime images of selected quarantine orbits from three to a thousand lights along the Beach. Otherwise it was navigation fakebooks, cargo manifests, agency fuel purchases and parking stamps. She remembered advising Fat Antoyne, ‘You got fifty years of guano in there. Also they used the code to run something my chops don’t get.’

She looked speculatively at Ed. ‘I fenced it off,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want it crawling up someone’s rectum at night. Especially mine.’

Ed brought up internal views.

‘See that junk you collected in the hold?’ he said. ‘It’s an engine. The Nova Swing’s the only ship in the Galaxy with the software to run it. That was what you found.’

She sighed impatiently.

‘Just tell me why you’re back, Ed. Maybe I can help.’

‘I came to free the people,’ Ed said, making a gesture which, perhaps hoping to take in the whole galaxy, explained nothing. ‘Things are going to get bad out here.’ This war, he said, was the big one. ‘They’ve been working up to it for a hundred and fifty years.’ It would mean a substantial collapse of EMC infrastructure. It would mean that no one had a right to expect endless progress any more. Quite the reverse. In the long term, that might in itself be good for the boys from Earth. ‘They can start from the ground up, with a more interesting take on things.’ Meanwhile it would get worse before it got better.

‘Thanks a lot for that prophecy, Ed.’

‘I was a prophet once,’ he said, ‘but I left all that behind.’ For a moment he watched the dynaflow medium streaming past. ‘I wish I could talk to Fat Anthony?’ he said suddenly. ‘But he avoids me.’