I had no intention of tripping. I was thinking of the story they had told me on the Monetta’s Mourn, about the Fang, about Prozor’s husband, Githlow, about Sheveril who had panicked, about their long screaming fall into the shaft.

I could think of worse ways to die, but not many.

There was a doorway leading off the stairway, back into the sheer wall of the shaft, and from that modest doorway extended an ever-branching series of chambers and sub-shafts, more than we could ever hope to explore in a matter of hours. There was no light beyond that which we provided, but power still trickled through the walls and into some of the doors and their mechanisms. Jastrabarsk’s Openers and Assessors were in babbling dialogue, while Prozor and I mostly kept our gobs shut unless our opinions were sought. Loftling’s charts were turned this way and that, annotations were scribbled onto them in luminous ink.

‘Look at the mess Rackamore left behind him,’ someone grumbled, indicating a pile of tools and cutting equipment left near one of the doors.

‘They meant to return,’ I said. ‘Rack was going in another eight or nine times, that was the plan. Then Bosa jumped us. They only just had time to get back on the launch.’

‘We thank them for the head start,’ Jastrabarsk said, hands on hips as he sized up the litter left behind from the earlier expedition. ‘And the generous donation to our supplies. How much time left to us?’

‘Twenty hours, eleven minutes,’ Prozor said. Then, with a teasing edge: ‘Not getting the shivers yet, are you, Captain?’

‘I get the shivers the moment I see a bauble. Reason I’m still alive. I don’t have to like these places to make an honest profit out of them.’ Then he tapped a fist against the crown of his helmet. ‘Getting some static on squawk. Might be nothing.’

But as we worked through the doors, into the main cache of loot, our suits began breaking down in a hundred small ways. The suit-to-suit squawk was the first thing to turn unreliable, but it didn’t stop there. Torches began to flicker. Recirculation valves began to jam. My glove stiffened up to the point where I could barely move the fingers.

I had already heard the stories from Mattice and the others. This was all part of the normal pattern of things going wrong inside baubles, and not anything that was unusual to this expedition. It was why none of them trusted anything too complicated to begin with. The less you came to rely on, the less you missed when it failed. It was also why – considerations of auguries aside – it was seldom wise to spend too much time in a bauble.

Through a garbled squawk, Prozor said: ‘Something in these places don’t take kindly to visitors. But if it comes on slow and gradual like this, it’s not usually too serious.’