Toni Reno’s paper trail – chiefly bills of lading, along with some transcripts of FTL uplinker calls – led to a ship called the Nova Swing, a crew-owned HS-SE shorthauler well known to the Port Authority as what they called in those days a ‘petty mule’. Like all those mules, Nova Swing was seen in every port on the Beach; today, the assistant found her parked on the southern edge of Carver Field waiting on freight from some point of origin two or three lights along. The crew of this brassy old three-finner were familiar to her from the Straint Street bars. More significantly perhaps, as far as the assistant went, they were the small change of Lens Aschemann’s last case: a port whore named Irene, who had adopted the mona package early and done well on it; an ex-smuggler everyone still called Fat Antoyne, though he was slim and fit-looking now, tan from all those distant suns he visited; and Liv Hula, a retired rocket jockey. It was this third crew-member the assistant met with, up in the control room alone and just that moment plugging into the ship’s mathematics.

A thin, grey-haired woman about fifty years old, she lay in the pilot couch stripped to a white cotton singlet and simple boy-leg underpants slightly too large for her, while a two-inch bundle of colour-coded wires forced its way into her mouth. Her head was turned to one side as if to facilitate this. Her eyes looked passively away. The wires pulsed and wriggled, inserting themselves deftly through the soft palate and into the lower architecture of the brain. As they connected, a cascade of busy, shivery movements went up and down her body like the beginning of an orgasm. In response there was a chaotic run of lights across the bakelite and grey-paint control consoles; a smell of hot insulation filled the room. Then, in a startlingly accurate imitation of Liv Hula’s voice, the ship’s speakers said:

‘Really, everyone should try this. The sex never fails.’

‘You could not pay me enough money,’ the assistant said. ‘First it violates your mouth, then it crawls in your ear at night? And you die?’