‘That young thing with the four arms?’ Lellius asked, at least one eye twinkling. ‘I did wonder if any other of her anatomical features were also doubled-up.’

‘Your prurience flatters me,’ Leffid said. ‘Ask her nicely and she will probably furnish you with a copy of a recording which proves both our relevant bits were quite singular.’

Lellius chuckled and drank from a strawed flask. ‘Not that, then. What?’

‘Are we alone?’ Leffid asked quietly.

Lellius stared blankly at him for a moment. ‘Yes; my lace is now turned off. There is nothing else I know of watching or listening. What is this thing you saw?’

‘I’ll show you.’ Leffid took a napkin from the table’s slot and from a pocket in his shirt extracted the terminal he was using instead of the neural lace. He looked at the markings on the instrument as though trying to remember something, then shrugged and said, ‘Umm, terminal; become a pen, please.’

Leffid wrote on the napkin, producing a sequence of seven pendant rhombi each composed of eight dots or tiny circles. When he’d finished he turned the napkin towards Lellius, who looked carefully down at it and then equally deliberately up at Leffid.

‘Very pretty,’ he wheezed. ‘What is it?’

Leffid smiled. He tapped the rightmost symbol. ‘First, it’s an Elench signal because it’s base eight and arranged in that pattern. This first symbol is an emergency distress mark. The other six are probably - almost certainly, by convention - a location.’

‘Really?’ Lellius did not sound especially impressed. ‘And the location of this location?’

‘About seventy-three years into the Upper Swirl from here.’

‘Oh,’ Lellius said with a sort of rumbling noise that probably meant he was surprised. ‘Just six digits to define such a precise point?’

‘Base two-five-six; easy,’ Leffid said, shrugging his wings. ‘But what’s interesting is where I saw this signal.’

‘Mm-hmm?’ Lellius said, momentarily distracted by something happening on the race track. He took another drink then returned his attention to the other man.

‘It was on an Affronter light cruiser,’ Leffid said quietly. ‘Burned into its scar-hull. Very lightly, very shallowly; at an angle across the blades--’

‘Blades?’ Lellius asked.

Leffid waved one hand. ‘Decoration. But it was there. If I hadn’t been very close to the ship - in a yacht - as it was approaching Tier I’d never have seen it. And the intriguing possibility exists, of course, that the ship doesn’t know it bears this message.’

Lellius stared at the napkin for a moment. He sat back. ‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Mind if I turn on my lace?’