But those nests have long been cleaned out. The last wild Ghosts have retreated to their pits - like the one L’Eesh and I had gotten ourselves stuck in.

I had thought I would be first here. I had been dismayed to find L’Eesh had grabbed a place on the same Spline transport as me. Though I had warily gone along with his proposal that we should pool our resources and split the proceeds, I wasn’t about to submit to him.

Not even in the mess we found ourselves in now.

We dug ourselves out of the dirt.

Our med systems weren’t functioning, so we put each other through brisk checks - limbs, vision, coordination. Then we tested out the equipment. Our pressure suits were lightweight skinsuits, running off backpacks of gen-enged algae. The comms system worked on pale blue bioluminescent glyphs that crawled over each suit’s surface.

I poked around in the dirt. Remnants of struts and hull plates crumbled. The little ship had broken up, sacrificing the last of its integrity to save us as it was designed to, and then it had broken up some more. There was nothing to salvage. We had the suits we wore, and nothing else.

L’Eesh was watching me. His augmented Eyes were like steel balls in his head; when he blinked you could hear the whirr of servomotors. ‘It doesn’t surprise you that your suit works, does it? Even here - it doesn’t occur to you to ask the question.’

I glared back, not wishing to give him any satisfaction.

He dug a weapon out of the scattered wreckage of the flitter; it looked like a starbreaker hand-gun. ‘This is a Ghost pit.’ He crushed the gun like a dead leaf. ‘Stuff like this happens. Pits are pockets of spacetime where nothing works right, where you can’t rely on even the fundamental laws of physics and chemistry. But the Ghosts always arrange it so that living things are conserved - including us, and the little critters that live in our backpacks. You see? We know very little of how all this works. We don’t even know how they could tell what is alive. And all of this is engineered - remember that.’

I knew all this, of course. ‘You’re full of shit, L’Eesh.’

He grinned. At some point in his life his teeth had been replaced by a porcelain sheet. ‘You bet I am. Shit from battlefields a thousand years old.’ He had an air of wealth, control, culture, arrogance; he was effortlessly superior to me. ‘We’re on our own down here. Pohp may be able to see us. But she can’t speak to us, can’t reach us.’ He took a deep breath, as if he could smell the air. ‘What now, Raida?’

There was one obvious place to go. ‘The bridge between the moons.’