Ruby Dip was a short, broad, muscular woman fifty years old, whose skin not only told the whole story of life in the Halo through tattoos reading ‘Tienes mi corazon’ and ‘They Came from Planet E!’, but also featured treasure maps; fragments of secret code which, interpreted freely, could show any man the way home; and smart red worms of light that propagated across her substantial tits and into her armpits like the embers at the edge of a piece of burnt paper. Though she had her passions, Ruby liked the continual entertainment that was the rocket jockey’s life, and saw no reason to want much else. Her hair was cadmium yellow stubble. She favoured cropped and faded denim, smelled of the Pocket Rocket, and collected antique Spanish tambourines stuck all over with deep red roses and bits of sheet music and lighted from the inside, several examples of which now lay scattered across the cheap furniture or hung from the walls.

‘But have you ever seen inside a hulk?’ said Fat Antoyne, who if nothing else knew how to persist at the wrong moment.

Ruby confessed herself puzzled.

‘Honey,’ she said. ‘I just push them around.’ She looked up at him. ‘Now come on and push me around, Fat Antoyne, don’t wait!’ Besides which, she said, after they finished gasping and grunting at one another and Ruby rolled away to look at the ceiling, where did he get these ideas? She climbed up on the sink in the corner, sat there for a while, then got off again impatiently. She wouldn’t piss now for half an hour, she said, as if that was Antoyne’s fault.

‘Ruby, at least run the water.’

‘I never saw anyone less like a human being than MP Renoko.’

If you wanted Ruby’s opinion, he was a Shadow Boy. He was one of those mysterious, almost metaphysical entities whose reign in the Halo predated that of the Earth people, and whose motives remained, even now, opaque. ‘If indeed they have motives the way we do.’

‘Or if they even existed,’ Antoyne reminded her.

Ruby Dip waved this away.

‘Wait ’til you owe those boys money,’ she said, ‘you’ll find they exist! You’ll owe them half your brain as well! One day they pull you in and collect,’ she promised him. ‘They’re the gangsters, they’re the cops: fact is, you don’t know who they are. Don’t you get it? They look just like you and me!’

Antoyne shrugged. ‘Hey, no problems.’

If that was the way Ruby Dip wanted it, he said, that was OK with him. By then they were back on the bed again.

‘No this is the way I want it,’ Ruby Dip said.