Trusko had his sights on a string of baubles on independent orbits. Chance had brought them into close alignment, each no more than two weeks sail time from the next. The auguries lined up like clockwork, too. They were all due to pop one after the other. Trusko’s sunjammer could visit each in turn, winkle out the loot that was still left in them, and still make it to the next. The windows were nice and safe, and there were good maps of the insides and what was kept in them.

‘We won’t be retiring on these,’ he told the assembled crew, as we gathered in the galley, Prozor and I making a point of sitting at opposite ends of the table. ‘But we can still make an honest return on them, if we go deep enough. No one’s been back to any of these since ’51, and the first of ’em hasn’t had a visit since 1680.’

‘That’s because they’re cleaned out,’ I heard Gathing say, in a not-quite-whisper. He was the Assessor, I knew by then – the equivalent of Trysil on the Monetta. Whether Gathing was as good as Trysil, I had no idea, but the cove certainly had a low opinion of his captain.

‘These shafts went too deep for the 1680 party,’ Trusko carried on, scratching a clean, pink nail down one of his charts. ‘Didn’t have the lungstuff or the rope. But we’ve got more than enough of both, and enough hours to get in and out. Prozor’s double-checked the auguries, too. Says we can rely on ’em.’

‘The question is,’ Gathing said, ‘can we rely on Prozor?’

I had to bite down on the instinct to defend her. Instead I just sat with a look of blank disinterest, taking no sides.

‘You want your loot,’ Prozor said, ‘you’ll need to reach that sub-chamber. I’ll read the surface properly when we haul in, but based on what I know now, you’ll have time to spare. Same goes for the other baubles, provided Drozna’s sails don’t tangle on us.’

‘My sails’ll get us where we need to be,’ the big man said.

A crew was a crew, but, even more than on the Monetta, there was a sharp line between the ones who went into the baubles and the ones who stayed behind on the ’jammer. There was hazard just in being in space – everyone agreed on that, but it was always the bauble teams who took the brunt of it. A ship was a bubbling cauldron, ready to stew up all the resentment you could eat, but somehow Rack had kept a lid on that. Cazaray and Jusquerel had both gone into the bauble when the chance was there. Quoins didn’t have anything to do with it. It was solidarity, comradeship, taking a risk for the sake of your friends.