Jastrabarsk had his own versions of Loftling’s maps, but he had also recovered Rackamore’s equivalent records, and he pressed Prozor and me for all that we could recollect of the Monetta’s first expedition.

‘It went according to plan,’ was the best Prozor could offer. ‘Loftling’s charts couldn’t have been too bad. But then again, Rack had Mattice, and there never was a better Opener.’

But all crews, I was slowly learning, tended to think that they had the best of some particular specialisation. Once in a while there might even have been some truth in it. Jastrabarsk’s expedition had two Openers, two Assessors, and while I was too green to speak with any authority, they seemed confident and competent. On the way down, they had maps and charts all over the launch, and the debate was quick and difficult to follow, like a card game played by seasoned hands.

‘They know their baubles,’ Prozor whispered to me, as the rockets cut in for our final approach. ‘We’ll be golden.’

Now we had nearer to twenty-six hours, but that was still ample time, provided Prozor was right. And once again I forced myself into that state of acceptance that said she would have made no error; that to think otherwise was a kind of disloyalty.

We landed at the same point where Rackamore had put down his own launch. The depressions where its skids had cut into the ground were still visible, and it was only a short distance to the entrance on Loftling’s charts. We finished sealing up our suits, then did a round of double-checking, tugging on lungstuff-lines, watching seals for signs of failure. Squawk channels were tested, weapons, munitions and cutting equipment divided among the party. Jastrabarsk’s crew might have had different suits to Rackamore’s expedition, and some of their equipment was of older or newer vintage, but the methodology was similar. Nothing complicated was to be trusted in the environment of the bauble. They even had a system of sign language to use in case the suit-to-suit squawk became inoperable.

We left the launch and crossed the short stretch of ground to the surface door. From a distance it would have been easy to miss. A ramp led down a sheer-sided trench, with a kind of bulkhead and airlock at the end of it. Controls were set into the side of the bulkhead.

‘You see how new it all looks?’ Jastrabarsk said to me over the squawk. ‘Not a scratch from space debris, cosmic radiation . . . and I doubt more than a hundred hands have touched that panel in ten million years.’