The door of Bicansa’s car opened. A creature climbed out cautiously. In a bright orange pressure suit, its body was low-slung, supported by four limbs as thick as tree trunks. Even through the suit Pala could make out immense bones at hips and shoulders, and massive joints along the spine. It lifted its head and looked into the car. Through a thick visor Pala could make out a face - thick-jawed, flattened, but a human face nonetheless. The creature nodded once. Then it turned and, moving heavily, carefully, made its way towards the colony, and its lake of light.

Pala was right that the Xeelee star-cloak was a weapon. One day this strange apparition would return, to haunt human history.

What a pity Bicansa’s people never did find an off-switch.

This was an age when every resource in the Galaxy had to be harnessed to feed the Expansion. So the Missionaries and Assimilators drove on.

But, at the very edge of the human front, they were never very safe vocations.

BREEDING GROUND - AD 10,537

BREEDING GROUND

AD 10,537

The starbreaker pod exploded in her face.

Mari was hurled backwards, landing with a jarring impact against the weapons emplacement’s rear bulkhead. Something gushed over her eyes - something sticky - blood? With sudden terror she scraped at her face.

The emplacement’s calm order had been destroyed in an instant. Alarms howled, insistent. There was screaming all around her, people flailing. The transparent forward bulkhead had buckled inwards, and the row of starbreaker pods behind it, including her own, had been crushed and broken open. Charred shadows still clung to some of the stations, and there was a stink of smoke, of burned meat. She had been lucky to have been thrown back, she realised dully.

But beyond the forward bulkhead the battle was continuing. She saw black extragalactic space laced by cherry-red starbreaker beams, a calm enfilade caging in the bogey, the Snowflake, the misty alien artefact at the centre of this assault. The rest of the flotilla hovered like clouds around the action: Spline ships, fleshy scarred spheres, sisters of the living ship in which she rode, each wielding a huge shield of perfectly reflective Ghost hide.

Then the gravity failed. She drifted away from the wall, stomach lurching. In the misty dark, something collided with her, soft and wet; she flinched.

There was a face in front of her, a bloody mouth screaming through the clamour of the alarm. ‘Gunner!’

That snapped her back into focus. ‘Yes, sir.’

This was Jarn, a sub-lieutenant. She was bloodied, scorched, one arm dangling; she was struggling to pull herself into a pressure cloak. ‘Get yourself a cloak, then help the others. We have to get out of here.’