Toni rarely looked at a shipment. Live produce from Perkins Rent or Peterburg, alien cultural items from Port Ferry, cold-stored indentured  cultivars from Silicon New Turk, they were all the same to him. But he was interested to know what would unnerve Enka Mercury, a woman who had seen it all, so he hailed a rickshaw. The rickshaw rattled off down Cobain with Toni in it, then hung a fast right, trailing ambient music and ads that resembled soft-focus moths in shades both pastel and neon. The rain had stopped but to Toni there still seemed to be plenty of water on the road.

He found the cargo where he expected it, in a long, otherwise empty shed down by the port’s south fence.

It was perhaps twelve feet by three, a sealed tube not quite circular in section, with a porthole at one end over which someone had recently welded a thick plug of different material; and a panel of lights, broken. Left to itself, it tended to float waist-height above the dusty concrete floor, the air immediately around it flickering in a way that made Toni nauseous but which didn’t impede him from touching it. He walked around it. Its surface was dull and ablated as if it had spent time in empty space. It struck him as old, rotten, guilty. In the bills of lading – downloaded from an FTL router thirty-five lights along the Beach – it was logged as ‘hard goods’; but the object itself, though unlabelled, had illegal artefact written all over it.

No point of origin was on record.

‘Enka!’ he called. ‘Where the fuck are you?’

He thought he heard a shout from somewhere out on the windy hard standings in the dark, too far away to be an answer, or to be anything to do with him.

Toni Reno’s percentage always generated itself in a financial space far removed from the physical transaction itself. It was a given for everyone in this kind of arrangement that they never knew how their part of it related to any other. In this case, the paperwork advised him, his responsibility ended when the goods were stowed in the hold of a freighter named the Nova Swing. So when he discovered he could move the object just by pushing it, he decided to load it himself.