I felt fierce, too. And if I wasn’t ready for a war, then I was ready for battle.

No: not a battle, exactly.

Close action.

We started trying on the armour. Just being near the Ghostie stuff was making snakes slither in my gut, and now I had to fit it around me like I was trying on a corset. But the armour wanted to help, in its own queer way. Pieces joined up too easily, or adjusted themselves to fit more snugly. There was something quietly wicked about it, like a cove that whispers in your ear too much, earning your trust. We wanted something of the armour, but I couldn’t help wondering what the armour wanted of us.

The armour wasn’t just invisible when it was laid out on the floor. When you fixed it on, the part of the body it was covering became just as hard to see. The sleeve piece made my flesh forearm disappear below the elbow, so that my elbow became a stump and the hand seemed to be floating in the lungstuff on its own. I could see the smoky outline of my vanished arm, but like the armour it hardly showed at all unless you were looking nearly away from it. I had a thermal glove on my flesh hand, but there was nothing like a glove in the Ghostie armour, just an extended plate that covered the area from the wrist to the finger joints. There were other gaps too, and as I was fixing on my own pieces I wondered what the point was of only being three-quarters invisible, or seven-eighths. It was only when I saw Prozor and Strambli that my doubts were settled. I could see the gaps between their armour, the flesh and fabric of their normal selves, but holding onto the idea of those gaps, and joining up the spaces between them to make a monkey form . . . that was harder than it had any right to be. It was as if the fact of them wearing Ghostie armour was making me forget what a person was meant to look like who wasn’t inside the armour. It was slippery in more ways than just being hard to see. It was getting into our heads, and I didn’t much care for the feeling.

By the time we’d sorted out the armour, we had about ten minutes left until docking. Trusko had been speaking to Drozna on and off, sticking more or less to script. If they had some secret code worked out between them, Prozor and I weren’t smart enough to plumb it. I didn’t think it likely. Captains only come up with secret codes and procedures when they expect to run into trouble, and Trusko’s whole career was built around avoiding it in the first place.

Pity it wasn’t working out too well for him.