She remembered when she was a little girl and had stood on a bridge over a gorge in one of the other Interior Spaces; she had a stone in her hand and her mother had held her up to the bridge parapet so that she could look over the edge and drop the stone into the water below. She’d held the stone - it was about the same size as her little fist - right up to one eye and closed her other eye so that the dark stone had blotted out everything else she could see. Then she’d let it go.

She and Churt Lyne stood in the ship’s tiny hangar area, surrounded by her cases, bags and trunks as well as a deal of plain but somehow menacing-looking bits and pieces of military equipment. The way that stone had fallen towards the dark water then, shrinking and shrinking, was very like the way Phage Rock fell silently away from the old warship now.

This time, of course, there was no splash.

When Phage had entirely disappeared, she switched out of the view her neural lace had imported into her head and turned to the drone, thinking a thought that would have occurred to her a lot earlier, she hoped, if she’d been sober and unimpassioned over the last day.

‘When was this ship sent to Phage, Churt, and from where?’

‘Why don’t you ask it yourself?’ it said, turning to indicate a small drone approaching over the jumble of equipment.

~ Churt? she asked via the neural lace.

~ Yes?

~ Damn; I was hoping the ship’s rep might be a dazzling handsome young man. Instead it’s something that looks like a--

Churt Lyne interrupted:

~ Ulver; you are aware that the ship itself acts as exchange hub for these communications?

~ Oh dear, she thought, and felt herself colour as the little drone approached. She smiled broadly at it.

‘No offence,’ she said.

‘None taken,’ said the little machine as it came to a halt in front of her. It had a reedy but reasonably melodious voice.

‘For the record,’ she said, still smiling, and still blushing, ‘I thought you looked a bit like a jewellery box.’

‘Could have been worse,’ chipped in Churt Lyne. ‘You should hear what she calls me sometimes.’

The little drone’s snout dipped once in a sort of bow. ‘That’s quite all right, Ms Seich,’ it said. ‘Delighted to meet you. Allow me to welcome you aboard the Very Fast Picket Frank Exchange of Views.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, also nodding slowly. ‘I was just asking my friend where you’d come from, and when you’d been dispatched.’

‘I didn’t come from anywhere except Phage,’ the ship told her.

She felt her eyes widen. ‘Really?’