Gestra nodded. ‘No,’ he said, then stopped to clear his throat a few times. ‘No pattern . . . patterns on it . . . its hull.’

‘That’s right,’ the drone said.

The ship was stopped now, almost filling the screen. The stars wheeled slowly behind it.

‘Well, I--’ the drone said, then stopped. The screen on the far side of the room flickered.

The drone’s aura field flicked off. It fell out of the air, bouncing off the seat beside Gestra and toppling heavily, lifelessly, to the floor.

Gestra stared at it. A voice like a sigh said, ‘. . . sssave yourssselfff . . .’ then the lights dimmed, there was a buzzing noise from all around Gestra, and a tiny tendril of smoke leaked out of the top of the drone’s casing.

Gestra leapt up out of the seat, staring wildly around, then jumped up on the seat, crouching there and staring at the drone. The little wisp of smoke was dissipating. The buzzing noise faded slowly. Gestra squatted, hugging his knees with both arms and looking all about. The buzzing noise stopped; the screen collapsed to a line hanging in the air, then shrank to a dot, then winked out. After a moment, Gestra reached forward with one hand and prodded the drone’s casing with one hand. It felt warm and solid. It didn’t move.

A sequence of thuds from the far side of the room shook the air. Beyond where the screen had hung in the air, four tiny mirror spheres bloated suddenly, growing almost instantly to over three metres in diameter and hovering just above the floor. Gestra jumped off the seat and started back away from the spheres. He rubbed his hands together and glanced back at the corridor to the airlock. The mirror spheres vanished like exploding balloons to reveal complicated things like tiny space-ships, not much smaller than the mirror spheres themselves.

One of them rushed towards Gestra, who turned and ran.

He pelted down the corridor, running as fast as he could, his eyes wide, his face distorted with fear, his fists pumping.

Something rushed up behind him, crashed into him and knocked him over, sending him sprawling and tumbling along the carpeted floor. He came to a stop. His face hurt where it had grazed along the carpet. He looked up, his heart twitching madly in his chest, his whole body shaking. Two of the miniature ship things had followed him into the corridor; each floated a couple of metres away, one on either side of him. There was a strange smell in the air. Frost had formed on various parts of the ship things. The nearer one extended a thing like a long hose and went to take him by the neck. Gestra ducked down and doubled himself up, lying on his side on the carpet, face tucked into his knees, arms hugging his shins.

Something prodded him about the shoulders and rump. He could hear muffled noises coming from the two machines. He whimpered.