“I am not ready for a planet’s gravity,” she says. “I’m aware of my body, more than I ever have been.”

“You’ll get used to it,” says Salvo. She confuses him. Sometimes she is not there at all. Physically. She shares phase space with the Lambers, but Salvo can see them clearly. Why not Joké?

Salvo makes a fire from wood he gathered with Frances the Lupine. He also has an assortment of leaves, ferns, berries, fungi-like growths and moss that might be edible. Rasheed Fin starts to stir and Joké begins to swap oral body fluids with him. Salvo looks away.

He enters the wreck, cobbles some bits together and comes outside with his creation. He activates it and it rises, blinking, ten, fifteen feet. He is unsure of the range, but it’s transmitting on multiple bands, cycling.

“Beacon?” says Michelle Campion.

Salvo had not been aware she was awake. “Affirmative, Captain,” he says.

She sits up, glances at Rasheed Fin and Joké kissing, and turns back to Salvo. “Ragtime?”

“Unresponsive.”

“I want… owww, my head. I want a tracking device. Brisbane was leaking Exotics. I want to track him.”

“Captain, he probably did not come down anywhere near here. He could be on the other side of the planet.”

“I don’t care where he is right now. I think I know where he might want to be, and I need to have adequate warning. Plunder the data from Ragtime and build me a tracker.”

“Yes, Captain.”

Frances comes back from a foray, shaking droplets from his pelt, a fish clamped between his jaws.

“Water!” says Michelle Campion.

The entire human contingent follows the wolf back to what must be a tributary of a river or a streamlet. This does not stop them from stripping off their suits and clothes and jumping into the freezing cold water, screaming and laughing. They drink, they frolic, they swim. Salvo does not think it advisable for people who have had serious physical trauma to jump about, but humans are strange.

When they tire, they sit at the banks while their bodies dry and the sun goes down. Rasheed Fin sings haunting Yoruba tunes and, judging by the response of the others, his voice is pleasing.

Shell

Numbed, Shell lies on her back and stares at the dark sky. It is streaked with re-entry lines of ships – or pods, they can’t be sure – each one a firework celebrating her utter failure as a captain.

Still, she doesn’t feel as crushed as she would have expected. She feels for the passengers who don’t make it, but she also feels free. She can’t possibly fuck up worse than this. No further spaceflights for her. Nobody will ever trust her with a ship. And it’s all because of—

“Salvo,” she says.

“Captain?”

“How far are we from civilisation?”