He switched on the communicator.

‘Attacking ship! Attacking ship! Stop now!’

They can’t speak, Johnny thought. They’re only a player, they’re not in the game. They can’t speak and they can’t listen.

He found he’d automatically targeted a missile on the approaching dot. But that couldn’t be the only way. Sooner or later you had to talk, even if it was only because you’d run out of things to throw.

The attacker fired a missile. It streaked past Johnny and away, heading on into empty space.

Not real, Johnny thought. You have to think they’re not real. Otherwise you can’t do it.

‘Attacking ship! This is your last chance! Look, I mean it!’

He pressed the button. The ship juddered slightly as a missile took off. The attacker was moving fast. So was the missile. They met and became an expanding red cloud. It drifted around Johnny’s ship like a smoke ring.

Someone, somewhere, was blinking at their screen and probably swearing. He hoped.

The dot was still on the edge of the screen. It was irritating him, like an itch in a place he couldn’t scratch. Because that wasn’t how you were supposed to play. You spotted some aliens and you shot at them. That was what the game was supposed to be about.

Lurking in the distance and just watching made him uneasy. It looked like the kind of thing people would do if they were . . . well . . .

. . . taking it seriously.

The Captain sat in front of her desk, watching the big screen. She was chewing. Anything was better than waterweed, even – she looked at the packet – even Sugar-Frosted Corn Crackles in cold bovine lactation. Sweet and crunchy, but with odd hard bits in . . .

She inserted a claw into her mouth and poked around among her teeth until she found the offending object.

She pulled it out and looked at it.

It was green, and had four arms. Most of them were holding some sort of weapon.

She wondered again what these things were. The Chief Medical Officer had suggested that they were, in fact, some sort of vermin which invaded food sources. There was a theory among the crew that they were things to do with religion. Offerings to food gods, perhaps?

She put it carefully on one side of her desk. In the right light, she thought, it looked a bit like the Gunnery Officer.

Then she opened the little cage beside the bowl and let her birds out.

There had been things very like alligators among the ScreeWee’s distant ancestors, and some habits had been handed down. The Captain opened her mouth fully, which made her lower and upper jaws move apart in a way that would make a human’s eyes water.

The birds hopped in, and began to clean her teeth. One of them found a small piece of plastic ray-gun.

The watching ship was moving, still keeping at a great distance, travelling around the fleet in a wide circle. It had watched one more attacker come in; Johnny had got rid of this one with a missile and some shots, although a flashing red light on the panel was suggesting that something, somewhere, wasn’t working any more. Probably those secondary pumps again.