Aphran thought she must have lost consciousness, for the commander was now standing beside her and she had not seen him rise. Removing her goggles revealed a white-out just beyond the nearest hardfield, and where one of the generators lay in ruins a thick fog rolled through.

‘We should be all right, though we may get a little wet,’ he commented.

She did not understand him until a low wave of boiling water crashed against the hardfield, and foamed through the gap. The hot tide reached them, but only ankle deep, then thankfully flowed quickly away, leaving only steaming pools nearby. A sudden wind picked up as all the hardfields shut down. Warm fog flowed past till eventually, through a break in it, Aphran observed a white-flecked greyness around the curve of the horizon.

‘There went Main Arcology,’ the commander observed, ‘and in its place now, the sea.’

It seemed this world had just acquired a bay 200 miles across.

Sometime later, Aphran collected her meagre belongings from inside the commander’s tank.

‘Where are you heading now?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Aphran replied, ‘and there’s something quite liberating about that.’

And then she set out.

Its chameleonware was better than anything she had seen, if that were not in itself illogical. She wondered if maybe it could be better still, because the effect only just made it invisible to the Polity detectors in this segment—and no more. Orlandine tracked it by the stray gas currents it stirred and the slight feedback effects it caused in gravtech used to hold the Dyson segment together. She observed this phenomenon for hours, and began to think she would learn no more, but then the Polity detectors in one area it occupied abruptly began recycling old images. While this happened, an odd spoon-shaped vessel appeared and descended beside a globular fusion reactor mounted on one of the angled joists.

Now what are you? Orlandine wondered.

While she watched, the ship stuck itself in place with some kind of cilia, then extended a tentacle that snaked across frigid metal to the reactor. It branched all over the reactor’s cowling, and began to penetrate. Recharging itself? No doubt any report of a reactor drain would not be recorded at the Cassius stations, since Orlandine recognized a technology very like that she now studied.

A gift—from an admirer.