‘Hope! Wishful thinking! That always was your weakness, Rusel. I always said you should have killed them off in the first place. They’re just a drain on the Ship’s resources.’

‘I’m no killer.’

‘Yes, you are—’

‘And they are human, no less than the transients.’

‘No, they’re not. And now, it seems, they are eating our transients.’

His viewpoint drifted before the hole in the wall. Andres seemed to sense his dread; she didn’t say anything.

He passed through the barrier.

He emerged in the upended chamber he still thought of as the amphitheatre, right at the base of the Ship. This was a big, bare volume, a cylinder set on its side. After the spin-up it had been used to pursue larger-scale reconstruction projects necessary to prepare the Ship for its long intergalactic voyage, and mounted on its floor and walls were the relics of heavy engineering, long abandoned: gantries, platforms of metal, immense low-gravity cranes like vast skeletons. Globe lights hovered everywhere, casting a yellow-white light complex with shadows. It was an oddly magnificent sight, Rusel thought, and it stirred memories of brighter, more purposeful days. On the wall of the chamber, which had been its floor, he could even make out the brackets which had held the acceleration couches on launch day.

Now, every exposed surface was corroded. Nothing moved. And that upturned floor, which Andres had turned transparent a mere year after the launch, was caked by what looked like rock. It was a hardened pack of faeces and cloth scraps and dirt, a wall of shit to block out the Galaxy.

At first, in this jungle of engineering, he couldn’t make out anything living. Then, as he allowed the worn-out ambience of the place to wash over him, he learned to see.

They were like shadows, he thought, slim, upright shadows that flitted through the gantries, furtive, cautious. At times they looked human - clearly upright, bipedal, purposeful - though their limbs were spindly, their bellies distended. But then they would collapse to all fours and lope away with a bent gait, and that impression of humanity vanished. They didn’t seem to be wearing clothes, any more than the transients did. But unlike the transients their bodies were coated with a kind of thick hair, dark brown, a fur.

Here and there hovering drones trailed the shambling creatures, carrying food and water. The creatures ignored these emissaries of the Ship that kept them alive.