Futurity licked his lips and looked again at the glowing cube on the Captain’s desk. It was a fish-tank monitor, a Virtual realisation of the interior of the woman’s cabin. Mara sat on her bunk, as still, in her way, as Tahget. She was slim, her head shaved; aged thirty-six, she looked modest, sensible, undemanding. Her small suitcase sat unopened on top of the low dresser that was the cabin’s only other significant piece of furniture. The locked door was blocked by an upturned chair, a trivial barricade.

And before her on the floor was the reason she had been able to impose her will on a starship Captain, hundreds of refugees and at least three interstellar political entities. It was a blocky tangle of metal and polymer, an ugly sculpture quite out of place in the mundane shabbiness of the cabin. You could clearly see where it had been cut out of the weapons pod of some wrecked ship. It was a bomb, a monopole bomb. Dating from the time of the Coalition and their galactic war, it was at least two thousand years old. But the Coalition had built well, and there was no doubt that the bomb could destroy this ship and do a great deal of damage to Base 478 itself.

Futurity didn’t know where the bomb had come from, though after millennia of war 478 was famously riddled with weapons caches. And he had no idea how the bomb had been smuggled on board the Ask Politely, this starship. But the Hierocrat had made it clear that Futurity didn’t need to know any of that; all Futurity had to do was to resolve this messy situation.

‘But she can’t go home,’ he said again feebly. ‘Her home doesn’t exist any more, legally speaking. And soon enough it won’t exist physically either. She’s a refugee.’ Futurity didn’t understand anything about this situation. ‘We’re trying to help her here. Doesn’t she see that?’

‘Evidently not,’ Tahget said dryly. Tahget didn’t move a muscle, but Futurity could sense his growing impatience. ‘Acolyte, none of the politics of the Galaxy, or the geography of the black hole, matter a jot to me.’ He stabbed a finger at the fish-tank. ‘All I care about is getting that woman away from that bomb. We can’t disarm the thing. We can’t force our way into the cabin without—’

‘Without killing the woman?’

‘Oh, I don’t care about that. No, we can’t get in without setting the thing off. Do you need to know the technical details, of Virtual trip-wires, of dead man’s switches? Suffice it to say that force is not an option. And so I turn to you, acolyte. 478 is your church’s world, after all.’

Futurity spread his hands, ‘What can I do?’

Tahget laughed, uncaring. ‘What you priests do best. Talk.’