Fat Antoyne got out of the crew quarters and into the pilot chair without thinking. ‘Accept,’ he told the systems, and then, as the connexion  burrowed  its way up through  his soft palate, causing him to sneeze then vomit without warning, remembered he was a man who had sworn never to fly again. The systems were all over him as soon as they sensed that. For a moment, struggling to shut down the navigational software, he felt as if he was seeing in too many directions at once. His identity was gone. He seemed to be throwing up endlessly. Everything stank of rubber, then – as the ship tried to calm him down – of gag-reflex dampers and some kind of lowgrade norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor it was pumping into him.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ he told it thickly. ‘Just get me alongside.’

pSi engines fired in the dark. At the same time, the vacuum took on an ionised look. Phase-changes rippled through  a smart gas of nanodevices, billions of tiny cameras poured  between the two vessels like milt. Despite that, Fat Antoyne, his connexion still partial and unstabilised, remained blind.

‘Hey, Liv,’ he said. ‘Liv?’

Nothing. Then static in the pipe, and a distant noise like gak gak gak, the sound of the galaxy talking to itself in FTL bursts.

‘Hello? Antoyne?’

‘For fuck’s sake.’

‘Antoyne, I’m sorry. There’s nothing here. I got disoriented.’

Wearily, Antoyne  began to close down  the  pilot connexion.

‘Welcome to the club,’ he told Liv Hula.

‘Antoyne! Bodies! Bodies!’