The Nova Swing had history. Inside, she preserved the sort of worn out light that reminded visitors of a photograph from Old Earth. Her architecture smelled of metal, electricity, animals. There was a lot of time in her for a ship only a hundred years old, the residual time, you felt, of some improbable, uncompleted journey. Even when the dynaflow drivers weren’t running, the plates of her hull reported nauseous low-frequency vibrations, as if the ship were constantly making its way back from somewhere in order that its crew be able to occupy it. Liv Hula felt the same about her life. Early lessons were still working their way through: in consequence, even while she was completing it, an action often felt both tardy and experimental. And then, when you are a pilot, so much of you is externally invested anyway – in the ship, in the dyne fields – and may be increasingly unable to find its way home. ‘Home’ being understood as some secure location of personality in space and time. This sense of displacement, perhaps, is what sensitised her.

Initially it was visible only as disorder in the schematics. At warm-up time, still aware of the thick, used taste of the pilot connexion in her mouth, she received fail reports from minor systems checks. There were fluctuations in power, barely detectible. ‘If we had wires,’ she told Fat Antoyne, ‘there’d be mice in them.’ Later, as she jockeyed the ship out of its parking orbit, she thought she saw someone enter the room behind her – a dark figure, oily and flowing in the way it moved, in and out before she could see who it was, quick but not somehow giving that impression.

‘For fuck’s sake, Antoyne,’ she said absently.

‘What?’ said Antoyne, who was a hundred feet lower down the ship, staring out of a porthole at the Kefahuchi Tract, listening to Irene whisper:

‘I will never get tired of these things we see!’