“You’re already lost,” Billy Anker said. “I admire that you stole a K-ship,” he went on quickly: “Who wouldn’t? But you’re lost, and you aren’t finding yourself. Anyone can see that. You’re doing the wrong thing. You know?”

“How come you say these things?” she shouted. “How come you make me feel bad like this?”

He couldn’t answer that.

“What’s the right thing to do, Billy Anker? Beach my ship on some shithole and wear two coats that creak? Oh, and be big about how I’m not a refund kind of guy?” She regretted saying this immediately. He looked hurt. From the start he had reminded her of someone. It wasn’t his clothes, or all the rigmarole with the antique consoles and obsolete technology. It was his hair, she thought. Something about his hair. She kept looking at him from different angles, trying to remember who it brought to mind. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I don’t know you well enough to say that.”

“No,” he said.

“I was wrong,” she said, after she had left him a pause which he didn’t fill. “It was wrong of me.”

She had to be content with a shrug.

“So. What then? What should I do? You tell me, you with your emotional intelligence you’re clearly so proud of.”

“Take this ship deep,” he said. “Take it to the Tract.”

“I don’t know why I’m talking to you, Billy Anker.”

He laughed.

“I had to try,” he said. He said, “OK, so this is how I found the package. First, you got to know a little about K-tech.”

She laughed.

“Billy Anker, what can you tell me about that?” He went on anyway.

Two hundred years before, humanity stumbled over the remains of the oldest halo culture of all. It was thinly represented compared to some, scattered across fifty cubic lights and half a dozen planets, with outstations huddled so close to the Tract it soon became known as the Kefahuchi Culture or K-culture. There was no clue what these people looked like, though from their architecture you could tell they were short. The ruins were alive with code, which turned out to be some kind of intelligent machine interface.

Working technological remains, sixty-five million years old.

No one knew what to do with it. The research arm of Earth Military Contracts arrived. They threw a cordon round what they called the “affected area” and, working out of hastily thrown-up colonies of pressurised sheds, modified tools from various strains of shadow operator, which they ran on nano- and biotech substrates. With these they tried to manipulate the code direct. It was a disaster. Conditions in the sheds were brutal. Researchers and experimental subjects alike lived on top of the containment facilities. “Containment” was another meaningless EMC word. There were no firewalls, no masks, nothing above a Class IV cabinet. Evolution ran at virus speeds. There were escapes, unplanned hybrids. Men, women and children, shipped in down the Carling Line from the branded prison hulks orbiting Cor Caroli, accidentally ingested the substrates, then screamed all night and in the morning spoke in tongues. It was like having a wave of luminous insects spill out of the machine, run up your arm and into your mouth before you could stop them. There were outbreaks of behaviour so incomprehensible it had to be an imitation of the religious rituals of the K-culture itself. Dancing. Sex and drugs cults. Anthemic chanting.