The Ragtime is like a small town with most of the citizens asleep. The robots are active always, except when they shut down for servicing. Each passenger is in their own pod, similar to Shell’s. Rather than trust sensors, she manually checks and finds thirty-one passengers missing. The pods are not only empty, they are clean – as clean as the day Shell first arrived on the ship a decade earlier. A thousand pods is a lot to check personally, and it takes twenty-two hours, but she can handle boredom. If she couldn’t, she wouldn’t have the job. Repetitive tasks are the norm in space and calming in a crisis.

Double-checking to be sure the empty pods have the same numbers as those in the sensor readings, Shell finds that all thirty-one unaccounted-for pod vacancies match. The occupants of the other pods are as peaceful as stoned university students.

Shell sticks her head into one of the empty pods and inhales. Something chemical, maybe disinfectant? A ghost of a smell. In her visual field, one of the flashing amber lights is waste disposal.

“Ragtime, are there video feeds from the empty pods?”

“Not available.”

“What? Check again.”

“No files found for empty pods, Captain.”

“Feeds for occupied pods?”

“All accounted for.”

There. The detail that tells Shell something or somebody is deliberately giving her a bad day. Her skin crawls, and whatever sense of safety she has begins to fray.

The disposal unit is thirty minutes away. As soon as Shell enters, she sees the problem.

The entire space is filled with the chopped-up bodies of passengers.

She has no memory of how she passed from aft, where the passenger torus is, to fore, Node 1, the bridge, where the waking crew is meant to hang out. Shell has seen the dead before, but not like this. She feels the panic rising like a living thing inside her, bubbling up, starving her of oxygen. She breathes fast, holding on to a handrail and hanging in the low gravity. Nobody trained her for this. Astronaut training anticipates everything one can reasonably expect to come across. A killing spree is not reasonable. A murderer on board is not reasonable.

And the murderer is still on the ship.

Shell can see the dismembered bodies with her eyes closed. It’s the tattoo that bothers her, a patch of skin with a picture intact – a fairy, artfully rendered, surrounded by clouds, hearts and feathers – the layers of cut skin showing subcutaneous fat in a marinade of congealed blood. She gags. The fairy, with veined wings, her tiny naked body revealed through the transparent membranes.

Shell’s mouth and throat feel itchy, paper-dry. It is a few seconds before she realises her breath is raspy.

What the hell, Campion? Contain this.

She runs her beads, controls her breath, counts. She focuses on the smoothness and the moment, getting from one to the next. She closes her eyes.

You trained for this.