‘But there’s no one else out here,’ I said.

Prozor looked back at me. ‘Best you pray there ain’t.’

6

6

I must have passed those black boxes a hundred times without giving them a second glance. If I’d stopped to consider, which I hadn’t, I’d have assumed they held water, compressed lungstuff, spacesuit parts . . .

‘Cap’n’s philosophy is to run light, and that includes armament,’ Prozor said, as she undid straps and slid the topmost box free of the others. ‘But that don’t mean we just lie back and take it.’

She undid catches and creaked open the lid. Inside the box, contained with packing, was a framework, straps, something like a mask.

Prozor dragged the thing out of the box and set it to one side.

‘The Gunner’s Girdle,’ she said. ‘Put it on.’

Prozor opened another three boxes. She took out more girdles and started putting one on herself, doing up a leather strap that went around her waist and then two more that crossed diagonally over her chest. The mask was on a hinged piece, ready to swing down over her head.

She folded down two metal struts like the rests of a chair, with a kind of pistol grip at the end of each strut.

I copied what she was doing. ‘Which part is the gun?’

‘The part that stays outside. This is the part that points and fires. Open those boxes and bring me two more of these.’ Prozor reached over and lowered the mask over my eyes. It was a blank metal plate, curved so that it obscured my vision to the left and right. Prozor touched a stud on the left arm of my harness and the mask seemed to swell to blank out everything around me.

Blackness filled the mask, and then stars peppered that blackness.

‘Now look around. Move your head, your whole body.’

I twitched one way and there was the bauble world, with part of the Monetta looming into view beneath it. I turned some more, and there was the purple-blue shimmer of the Congregation. Swinging out from the hull, exactly following my line of sight, were the muzzles of guns.

‘You feel this trigger?’ Prozor forced my index finger onto a hard metal stud in the pistol grip. ‘One squeeze, that’s all it takes. Works anywhere inside the ship, within reason. Shoots magnetic slugs, five leagues per second. Use ’em sparingly, or you’ll cook the coils before we run out of slugs.’

‘Maybe it would have been an idea to have the firing lesson weeks ago.’

‘Not my problem, girlie. This is what happens when you make Cap’n Rack twitchy.’

‘Fura.’

I lifted up the mask. It was Adrana, working her way back from the bone room. From her expression I could tell the news wasn’t any better than before.

‘No change?’