There were four of us on the launch, as against Trusko’s normal team of three. Trusko and Strambli were the common elements, with Prozor and me substituting for the absent Gathing. We left Drozna, Tindouf and the injured Surt to mind the ship. Through the launch’s little windows I watched as the Queenie grew smaller and smaller, gradually losing itself against the distant stars and the icy thumb smear of the Swirly. It was just a ship, and not much of one, but all ships come to feel like home after a while, and whatever I felt of her crew, the Queenie herself had not let any of us down. Leaving her like that, all alone and at the mercy of the Nightjammer – out there somewhere, whether we could see it or not – I felt a small, silent shame.

But I meant to return.

Trusko took it nice and easy on the descent, spending a whole hour just getting us near the surface, and once we arrived he spent another hour scouting around the bauble, just in case there was something that didn’t square with the charts. We had twenty-six hours left by the time he finally got round to setting us down, and then there was another hour of dithering about how best to move the equipment into the shaft. Prozor and I couldn’t say anything to giddy him along, but when we met eyes the tension in hers was enough to blow a blood vessel.

‘I get it,’ I mouthed back.

The one blessing was there wasn’t any door on the top, just a circular hole in the crust of the bauble. You’d have mistaken it for a deep-shadowed crater, except there weren’t any craters anywhere else on that bony rock. But even up close, it didn’t look like anything special. You had to be almost right over it to see that it was a shaft, going right down – and there didn’t seem to be any bottom to the thing.

The shaft measured a hundred spans side to side, near as mattered. We already knew that from the notebooks, and we’d come prepared. With our suits on, we got the equipment unshipped from the launch and laid it on the ground near the edge of the shaft. The main part of it – most of the bulk – was a hinged frame that folded out into a kind of triangle, so that you could push the sharp end of it out over the hole. The other ends of the frame were counterweighted using fuel from the launch, as well as being secured to the ground with pitons.