‘I could look at him for you. I know robots. Most of ’em ain’t got a brain the way we have. It’s distributed. Multiple cognition cores, is what they call ’em. Hyper-parallel threading. But if a robot’s in trouble it can bottle a lot of itself into one of those cores. They just need waking up, sometimes.’

‘I . . .’ But my words dried up. I was torn between gratitude and a nasty, lingering splinter of suspicion.

‘I ain’t one for favours, Fura,’ Surt said, as if I’d been in any danger of thinking otherwise. ‘But there ain’t been many on this ship who’ve read a thousand books, if that isn’t a lie. And if you could teach me a word or two of reading, that’d be fair payment for taking a squint at your robot.’

The launch came back. In keeping with Trusko’s cautious approach, they’d completed one expedition into the bauble and called it a day, even though the window would have allowed another go, and perhaps a third. My thoughts flashed back to Rackamore, bidding farewell to Trysil on the hull of the Monetta when she had the harpoon through her, to the bravery and boldness of his crew, and I thought of Jastrabarsk, who’d taken a gamble on Prozor’s auguries even when his own Bauble Reader had said that the window was too narrow. I ought to have felt contempt for Trusko and his outfit, and on some level I did. But I needed them as well, and however they viewed me, I was now a part of that same crew, and I meant to change them.

Whether they wanted it or not.

We gathered in the galley to see the results of this expedition. If anything, it was an even sorrier haul than the first time, although you wouldn’t have guessed that from the way Trusko tried to talk it up. ‘Handsome, handsome,’ he kept saying, as the goods were pulled out of their boxes and laid out for our collective delectation. ‘A good quoin or two in that, and no mistake.’

‘Yes, a bar at least,’ Gathing said. ‘Almost enough for a round of drinks at Trevenza Reach. Oh, how our fortunes have shifted.’

‘You’re the Assessor,’ Strambli said out of her lopsided face. ‘Can’t blame the rest of us if you don’t find the jubbly.’

‘And I can’t speculate about what might have been behind the doors you couldn’t open,’ Gathing said.

‘Then don’t.’

‘What’s that?’ I asked, as Tindouf lifted a square of cloth out of the box. It was black, absolutely black, so you couldn’t see any folds or creases in it, but it also looked thinner than anything I’d ever seen, almost as if it didn’t have any thickness at all. It rippled in a continuous restless way, like a flag in a stiff breeze.