‘Another drive pod has cut out.’ L’Eesh sat back, pressing his fists against his softscreen in genteel frustration.

We tipped down, suddenly buffeted by thickening air. A pink-white plasma glow gathered, hiding the stars, the bridge, and the land below.

There was a howling noise. My pressure suit stiffened suddenly. Peering down I saw a hole in the hull, a ragged gash reaching right through the hull’s layers; I stared, fascinated, as fluffy clouds shot past my feet.

L’Eesh turned in his couch. ‘Listen to me, child. We may yet survive this. The flitter is designed to keep us alive, come what may. It should be able to withstand a gliding descent from orbit on a world this size.’

‘But we’re breaking up.’

His grin was feral. ‘Let’s hope the hull ablates slowly enough.’

The blasted landscape flattened out further. The sky above had turned pink-brown. Rocks and craters shot beneath the prow. There was a last instant of calm, of comparative control. I clung to my couch.

The flitter bellied down.

Orange dust flew. The nose crumpled. The inertial suspension failed and I was flung forward. Foam erupted around me. I was trapped, blinded, feeling nothing.

Then the foam popped and burst, quickly evaporating, and I was dropped into rust-red dirt. ... Down, just like that, deposited in silence and stillness and orange-brown light, amid settling debris.

I brushed at the dirt with my gloved hand. There were bits of white embedded in the dust: shards and splinters that crackled, the sound carrying through my suit hood. Bones?

L’Eesh was lying on his back, surrounded by wreckage, peering up at the muddy sky. He barked laughter. ‘What a ride. Lethe, what a ride!’ He lifted his hands over his head, and bits of bone tumbled in the air around him, languidly falling in the low gravity.

When I was a kid, rogue Ghost cruisers still sailed through the less populated sectors of the Expansion. As parties of hunters scoured those great tangles of silvery rope, my mother would send me into Ghost nurseries armed with knives and harpoons. Watch your back, she would call, as I killed. Use your head. There is always an option. I was five years old, six.

That was how I started in this business.

L’Eesh was the most formidable Ghost hunter of his generation. And he was here because he was after what I believed to be rightfully my prey.

Once this system, in the crowded Sagittarius Arm, had been at the heart of the range of the Silver Ghosts. But the Third Expansion had rolled right through here, a wave of human colonisation heading for the centre of the Galaxy. Until a few decades back some Ghost nests survived within the Expansion itself; that fast-moving front left great unexplored voids behind it. My mother, a hunter herself, took part in such actions. She never came back from her last operation, the cleansing of a world called Snowball.