Fat Antoyne looked at Irene and thought that he loved her. He wished he could be truer to her, and so did she. She said: ‘What they see, it’s beautiful but it’s dark. And there’s no way to know what it is, not even for them.’

Just then, alerts rang softly through  the ship, and Liv Hula’s voice came out of the speakers.

‘We’re here,’ she said.

Although, she added, she didn’t know where here was.

MP Renoko’s co-ordinates,  a skein of figures and symbols compressing eleven dimensions to a single point in the dark interstellar medium,  at  first revealed nothing:  then  an  orphaned  asteroid drifting towards the Tract, into which it would be absorbed after an uneventful journey of less than half a million years. ‘We’ve got a structure  of some sort in orbit around  it,’ Liv Hula was able to confirm. And then: ‘It’s a wreck.’