By that time, everyone was in a bad temper  with everything: Liv and Antoyne argued over who should clean up the mess in the control room; Irene, bored and with a far-off look in her blue eyes, crafted for herself outfits in increasingly radical expressions of pink,  which, to  the  consternation  of the  shadow  operators, she wore fifteen minutes  each before weeping inexplicably and throwing  them about. Forty-eight hours  later these three found themselves in the parking orbit of the Scinde Dawk system’s only inhabitable  planet  – the  tidally-locked  Funene  – searching  the twilight zone for an abandoned  factory town dubbed  by Irene, ‘some dump called Mambo Rey’. Liv Hula hit the retros, ran three cursory aerobrake cycles to save fuel, and was bringing them down on the customary tail of green flame when the ship’s instruments picked up surface activity around the Mambo Rey rocket field.

‘Fat Antoyne,’ she said, ‘Something is going on down there.’

Why tell him, Antoyne wanted to know.

‘Don’t sulk! Don’t sulk, Antoyne! I fucking have to work in here! My workplace should not smell of someone else’s puke!’

Antoyne was of the opinion that nothing could smell as bad as the blanket she kept in there.

‘Fuck you, Fat Antoyne.’

‘The truth often hurts.’

‘Antoyne, sometimes you are as big a cunt as Toni Reno.’

A dry laugh came from the crew quarters.

‘No one is as big a cunt as Toni Reno,’ was Irene’s opinion.

‘We all can  feel the  truth  of  that,’ Liv Hula  admitted.  ‘So Antoyne,’ she said, in as placatory a voice as she could manage, ‘help me out here. I don’t know what I’m seeing.’

Antoyne  didn’t know either. A rooster-tail  of disturbed  dust billowed its way between the low hills surrounding  the port. At its head could be made out a fierce mote of energy. Nova Swing’s arrays were detecting short range RF, broad spectrum  FTL transmissions,  and  some  kind  of radar:  nothing  anyone  could understand.  Neither  was there  any logic to the object’s course. It resembled a spark racing along a carelessly-laid fuse, or some weird science particle tangled and looping through invisible fields. Thirty miles into the badlands, it abruptly disappeared. The dust settled slowly. No matter how many times he re-ran the footage, Antoyne couldn’t make out what was going on. The object was too small to be a vehicle. It was too fast to be a human being.

‘I don’t get it,’ he said.