The man dropped his hold-all onto the shiny plastic floor and went forward to heft the white cloudy thing. It felt quite light. Possibly a little damp, unless the suit’s tactiles were getting confused. He pulled a glove-section back and touched the bed-cover thing with his bare skin. Cold. Maybe damp. ~ Module? Genar-Hofoen said. He’d get its opinion on all this.

~ You can’t talk to Scopell-Afranqui directly, remember? the suit said politely.

~ Shit, Genar-Hofoen said. He rubbed the material of the bed-cover between his fingers. ~ This feel damp to you, suit?

~ A little. Do you want me to ask the ship to patch you through to the module?

~ Eh? Oh, no; don’t bother. We moving yet?

~ No.

The man shook his head. ~ Horrible smell, he said. He prodded the bed-cover thing again. He wished now he’d insisted that the module be accommodated on board the ship so that he could live inside it, but the Affronters had said this wasn’t possible; hangar space was at a premium on all three ships. The module had protested, and he’d made supportive noises, but he had been rather entertained by the idea that Scopell-Afranqui would have to stay here while he went zapping off to far-off parts of the galaxy on an important mission. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Now he wasn’t so sure.

There was a distant growling noise and a tremor underfoot; then there came a jerk that almost threw the human off his feet. He staggered to one side and had to sit down on the bed.

It made a squelching sound. He stared at it, aghast.

~ Now we’re moving, said the suit.

V

V

Singing softly to himself, the man tended the little fire he had started on the floor of the hall, beneath and between the stored ships, arrayed in the blackness like the trunks of enormous trees in a silent, petrified forest. Gestra Ishmethit was surveying his charges in the deep-buried darkness that was Pittance.

Pittance was a huge irregular lump of matter, two hundred kilometres across at its narrowest point and ninety-eight per cent iron by volume. It was the remnant of a catastrophe which had occurred over four billion years earlier, when the planet of whose core it had been part had been struck by another large body. Expelled from its own solar system by that cataclysm, it had wandered between the stars for a quarter of the life of the universe, uncaptured by any other gravity well but subtly affected by all it passed anywhere near. It had been discovered drifting in deep space a millennium ago by a GCU taking an eccentrically trajectorial course between two stellar systems, it had been given the brief examination its simple and homogeneous composition deserved and then had been left to glide, noted, effectively tagged, untouched, but given the name Pittance.