‘What about me?’ I asked.

‘Drop that visor over your lamps and start looking for anything out there that shouldn’t be.’ Triglav began to shrug himself into one of the same gun harnesses, grunting as he tightened the belly strap under his paunch. ‘Look for a milky haze in the opposite direction from the Old Sun – all the leftovers that didn’t get made into worlds after the forging. If there’s a ship, it’ll stand out against that.’

He scooped down the visor and settled his hands on the pistol grips, ready for action.

‘Triglav? I think I’m frightened.’

I’d become used to the sad-faced man, but the lower half of that face, all that showed beneath the visor, didn’t seem to belong to the same person at all. The set of the mouth was hard, humourless, fierce.

‘Good. Not being frightened, now that would worry me.’

I lowered the visor, then pivoted slowly around.

A grid of lines and little numbers. Ship under me. Congregation at my back. Its shifting purple-blue-red radiance played across the Monetta’s hull, making it squirm and dance like a living thing. The bauble, and the nearing metal bullet of the launch.

Away from that, looking out into the Empty, only two things: stars and blackness, and a lot more of the latter than the former. The stars were impossible little pinpricks, and the black was a cruel, cold slap against the idea of light.

‘Launch is twenty leagues out,’ Adrana called out. ‘Can’t see anything closer than the Iron Courtesan, and she’s too far out to matter. If you see anything nearer, Fura, or think you see anything . . .’

‘Triglav.’

My breath slowed. I had turned my point of view very slightly, sweeping an area that I thought I had already ruled out. I saw a knot of darkness, like a very black rose. I blinked, swung my vision off it, tried to find it again.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. I thought something was there, just for a second . . . but it wasn’t.’

‘Sweep the area again, Arafura.’

‘Wait.’ That knot of darkness against darkness, a black rose on a black field, was back again. It seemed to float both in front of and beneath the plane of the sky. It was there and then it wasn’t.

Its petals were tattered sails, emanating from a central focus.

‘Triglav, I . . .’

‘Where?’

‘Quadrant fifty-five, twelve.’

‘Yes. I see it.’

I heard a click as Triglva worked a trigger. Then, more distantly, the discharge of the magnetic coil-guns. It was like a drum roll, played very fast and hard, cutting off as sharply as it began.

Now I saw a sequence of flashes, clustered very tightly, and lasting about as long as our scatterfire volley.

‘Fire, sir, from the other ship!’

Between the time I registered the flashes, and the time I finished speaking, they were on us.