I had no choice, crisis or not. So we went hurrying after the Commissary.

Away from the spacious calm of the bridge, the corridors of the Kard were a clamour of motion and noise, people running every which way lugging equipment and stores, yelling orders and demanding help.

As we jogged I whispered to Tarco, ‘So where has this bucket come from? Where’s the action right now? SS 433?’

‘Not there,’ Tarco said. ‘Don’t you remember? At SS 433 we suffered no casualties.’

That was true. SS 433, a few hundred light years from 592, is a normal star in orbit around a massive neutron star; gravitationally squeezed, it emits high-energy jets of heavy elements - very useful. A month before, the Xeelee had shown up in an effort to wreck the human processing plants there. But thanks to smart intelligence by the Commission for Historical Truth they had been met by an overwhelming response. It had been a famous victory, the excuse for a lot of celebration.

If a little eerie. Sometimes the Commission’s knowledge of future events was so precise we used to wonder if they had spies among the Xeelee. Or a time machine, maybe. Scary, as I said. But there is a bigger picture here. After fifteen thousand years of the Third Expansion, and eight thousand years of all-out war with the Xeelee, humanity controls around a quarter of the disc of the Galaxy itself, a mighty empire centred on Sol, as well as some outlying territories in the halo clusters. But the Xeelee control the rest, including the Galaxy centre. And, gradually, the slow-burning war between man and Xeelee is intensifying.

So I was glad the Commissaries, with their apparent powers of prophecy, were on my side.

We descended a couple of decks and found ourselves in the corvette’s main loading bay. The big main doors had been opened to reveal a wall of burned and broken flesh. The stink was just overwhelming, and great lakes of yellow-green pus were gathering on the gleaming floor.

The wall was the hull of the injured Spline. The Kard had docked with the Assimilator’s Torch as best she could, and this was the result. The engineers were at work, cutting a usable opening in that wall. It was just a hole in the flesh, another wound. Beyond, a tunnel stretched, organic, less like a corridor than a throat.

I could see figures moving in the tunnel - Torch crew, presumably. Here came two of them labouring to support a third between them. Kard crew rushed forward to take the injured tar. I couldn’t tell if it was a he or a she. That was how bad the burns were. Loops of flesh hung off limbs that were like twigs, and in places you could see down to bone, which itself had been blackened.