During the journey it stayed down by the holds. The onboard cameras disclosed a passing shadow in 4 or 6, but Liv was always too late to catch what cast it. There was movement at the top of a companionway, or in the central ventilation shaft. Later, she tracked it to the living quarters, but only as a discoloration of the air or a rubbed-out graffiti left by some bored supercargo forty years ago. These were isolated incidents. Saudade to World X proved to be the usual disorienting trudge. Irene fucked Antoyne. Antoyne fucked Irene. Out beyond the hull, mucoid strings of non-baryonic matter streamed past like Christ’s blood in the firmament. Liv Hula tuned to the Halo media, where the breaking news was never good. Two days out she tipped the ship on its base, put them down neatly less than a hundred yards from the Port Authority building at da Luz Field, and lay there in the pilot couch too tired to disconnect, listening to the fusion engines tick and flex as they cooled.

Half an hour later, she woke up to find herself alone. She gagged ejecting the pilot connexion, threw up a handful of bile, sat disconsolately on the edge of the couch with her arms folded across her stomach. Monitors came to life. The nanocams had caught something in motion in the dark in the junction between two corridors: its appearance was half-finished, as if someone had begun painting a man on the air of the corridor then lost interest. The head, torso and arms were present though in need of work; from there it became notional until, around the navel, only a few shreds and rags of colour remained. It was the right height from the floor to have legs, but they weren’t visible. Not to Liv Hula, anyway. As it began to turn towards her, she saw that the rags and shreds weren’t paint after all but dark hanging strips of flesh. It was real. It was hollow. It was ripped and charred. She ran out of the control room, her arms outstretched in front of her, palms forward, calling, ‘Irene! Antoyne!’ at the top of her voice.

No one heard her, and that gave her time to feel a fool. She stood on the loading platform in the glaring light.