‘That wrist,’ Andres said pitilessly, ‘has been bitten through. By teeth, Rusel. And teeth have been at work on those fingers as well. Think about it. With a bit of practice, you could take one of those little morsels between your incisors and just strip off the flesh and muscle—’

‘Shut up! Lethe, Andres, I can see for myself. We always avoided cannibalism. I thought we beat that into their shrinking skulls hard enough.’

‘So we did. But I don’t think this is cannibalism - or rather, whatever did this wasn’t her kind.’

Rusel elevated the viewpoint and cast around. He saw a trail of blood leading away from the woman, smeared along the walls and floor, quite unmistakable, as if something had been dragged away.

Andres said, ‘I think our transients suddenly have a predator.’

‘Not so suddenly,’ Rusel said. A part of his scattered consciousness was checking over the Ship’s logs, long ignored. This kind of incident had been going on for a couple of centuries. ‘It’s been rare before, once or twice a generation. Mostly it was the old who were taken, or the very young - vulnerable, dispensable, or replaceable. But now they seem to be upping the rate.’

‘And making a dent in the transients’ numbers.’

‘Yes. You were right to bring me here.’ This had to be resolved. But to do it, he thought with a deepening dread, he was going to have to confront a horror he had shut out of his awareness for millennia.

‘I’m here with you,’ Andres said gently.

‘No, you’re not,’ he snapped. ‘But I have to deal with this anyhow.’

‘Yes, you do.’

His viewpoint followed the bloody trail as it wound through the corridor-villages of the transients. Broken in places, the trail slinked through shadows or through holes worn in the walls. It was the furtive trail of a hunter, he thought.

At last Rusel came to the bulkhead that cut the Ship in two, marking the limit of his transients’ domain. He had long put out of his mind what lay beyond this wall: in fact, if he could have cut away the Ship’s aft compartment and let the whole mess float off into space he would long ago have done so.

But there was a hole in the bulkhead, just wide enough to admit a slim body.

The bulkhead was a composite of metal and polymer, extremely tough, and a metre thick; the hole was a neat tunnel, not regular but smooth-walled, drilled right through. ‘I can’t believe they have tools,’ he said. ‘So how did they get through?’

‘Teeth,’ Andres said. ‘Teeth and nails - and time, of which they have plenty. Remember what you’re dealing with. Even if the bulkhead was made of diamond they’d have got through eventually.’

‘I hoped they were dead.’