Liv Hula found herself at a junction  she recognised. The tunnel split into three. MENGER knelt solicitously over SIERPINSKI but  wrote  ‘curvature’, as if he was thinking  of something  else. For her part, SIERPINSKI stared down at the floor as if it had betrayed her. They had died the way every entradista  expected, doing what they wanted to do, and now cast three or four shadows each in this tableau of escalating bad luck. It was, in short, the classic entradista  soul-fuck, which Liv recalled with great contempt. ‘Come on,’ she was heard to urge them, looking back over her shoulder: ‘Everyone is culpable here, guys.’ Then, exactly four minutes  and thirty-two  seconds later: ‘For fuck’s sake, Antoyne, I’m back at the reactor housing.’ She was tired. Her senses were dull. She was running out of air. If she didn’t do something soon, the eva suit would perform an emergency spinal puncture, reduce her metabolic rate by twenty or thirty per cent, set its FTL beacon and  await extraction.  They would find her sitting on the floor, head slumped, legs splayed, HULA stencilled above her faceplate, another identical fuck-up in the house of fun. Behind the reactor she discovered the rest of the salvage team, tumbled  together in a heap. Unlike MENGER &  SIERPINSKI, her head-ups  told her, these bodies had high residual radiation  counts. They were armed with hand-held thermobarics, but seemed to have made no attempt to use them. Backed against the reactor housing, too tired to take any further action, watching a low-grade dosimeter alarm blink on and off in the side of her eye, she tried once more to raise the Nova Swing. ‘Hello? Are you getting this?’ A two-minute  gap, during which she seemed to whisper fractiously to herself before calling out, ‘Christ! The reactor’s heating up again!’ For Liv, yellow light fell through blue. There was a dull buzz, less a sound than a vibration in her central nervous sytem: a moment of vertigo. Then an object half a metre in diameter and two metres long emerged stealthily from the tunnel  wall beside her. It was made of some slick black ceramic. Along its sides, bizarre reflections from the context could be discerned as a calligraphy of dim blue splatters. It slipped out of the wall, two or three feet up, blind-looking but with an air of intelligence. It knew she was there. It was at her elbow. When she looked away, it bumped and pushed at her thigh. Her whole body filled with the taste of metal. She turned her head and tried to puke clear of her faceplate. Nothing  else happened, except that when she left, the artefact followed her attentively out into empty space, its blunt nose never more than ten inches away from her left hip. Comms sorted themselves as soon as she cleared the wreck. The first thing she heard was Antoyne’s voice.