The Monetta shook again, but this time the shaking was a hundred times as violent.

I lifted the visor, certain I’d done all that I could for now. The drum roll came again, our own guns returning fire. Then another impact, dull-sounding, like a huge bell being struck by a hammer. Feeling a deeper dread than anything I’d known, I went to the window, making out the tiny speck of the launch, willing it closer.

‘We’ve already been hit, haven’t we?’

‘Just softening us up,’ Triglav said. ‘She meant to kill us, we’d know it by now.’

Rackamore’s voice sounded over the squawk. ‘We’re lined up. I see Prozor and Hirtshal inside the bay. Get those nets tight as you can – I’m going to burn off some of this speed at the last moment, but this still isn’t going to be a soft docking. Cazaray wants to know . . .’

He was speaking and then the only thing coming across the squawk was a scream of static, so loud that reflex got me lunging for the console until some circuit or overload broke the connection without any help from me.

‘They’ve been hit,’ Triglav said, flipping up the visor and making his way to the console. He worked the controls, switching through channels. ‘Captain – are you reading us? Prozor! Hirtshal!’

Prozor’s voice came through, ragged and distant. ‘We see ’em. Launch is tumbling pretty bad. Venting gas. They’re veering.’

‘Enough to miss us?’

‘Not sure. Angle’s changing.’ Then her tone altered. ‘Oh, hell. It doesn’t look good, Trig. Got a hole in her side big enough to drive a barge through. Bleedin’ out like a stuck pig.’

In the window the launch was a slowly cartwheeling cylinder, gushing out a glittery spiral of escaping gas. I thought of the people aboard it, the five members of the party, and wondered if a single one of them remained alive. Rackamore, Cazaray, Mattice, Jusquerel, Trysil . . . not exactly friends, yet, but people I’d come to think of as friends-in-waiting.

They couldn’t be dead.

The launch had been lined up for the Monetta’s mouth-like docking bay, but now it was drifting off-course, threatening to do at least as much harm as one of the enemy’s slugs if it struck our unprotected hull. Gas was still squirting out, the angle of drift steepening.

But a figure was emerging into view around the curve of the hull, stomping across the hull plates on magnetic soles. The helmet, with its grilled-over faceplate, caught the light for a moment. I saw a sternly impassive face, cut across by a white moustache.