“Why? What’s wrong with him?”

“No idea. He’s old Colonial, there’s probably a list. He knew exactly what to ask for.”

THE RAIL DROPS us off into noise and patchy fluorescence, crowds of jackets and lines of greasy overalls. Hail and I push through it, carrying our silence with us.

We edge past the chow hall queues and into the service tunnels behind them, following jury-rigged neon to the little hole that hides the con-side bar for Hangar D. If we were full-time, this would be on NorCol’s tab, but we aren’t, so we settle for runoff instead.

Parts of it connect to the mess kitchen, where the bootleggers can borrow some of the company-sanctioned hardware, but most of it creeps into the nexus of cooling ducts deeper in, where the cold helps them distil, and the acoustics hide their rumbling bass.

I don’t even make it to the bartop. “My head’s too heavy for this.”

Hail looks me over and decides not to argue. We edge back into the chow hall proper and stack up behind a queue serving late lunches to the night-shifts.

The crew right ahead of us are all from the same unit; old hands, for the most part. Fatigue is permanently inked into the craters around their eyes, their skins hang loose on rangy muscle, their shoulders all seem to follow the same deep curve. Six of them are standing and muttering as we come in, giving side-eye to the two nuggets between us and them, younger convicts, fresh out of induction. The crew is probably six, seven hours into a long-haul shift, and the old timers are feeling it; the FNGs, not so much. It’s only a matter of time before their elders send them down one of Horizon’s dark canyons, looking for a bottle of bulkhead remover, or a can of aye-dee-ten-tee (says ID10T on the side, about so big; you can’t miss it).

There are a couple of jockeys amongst the mess, but they keep to the corners, sit in ones and twos. If anything needs flying, one of the daylight blocks should get the job, but this is a NorCol boat: for every other jockey that ought to be asleep, there’ll be a fuckup on the rosters, or a wake-side crew that forgets the other half of the ship is in its bunks.

Or they’re like Hail and me, wandering through the night and wishing we could find a way back to sleep. There are soldiers passing through, but they don’t stop to eat. Watch-officers between posts, dropping in for a cup of something warm. There are even a few actual marines, but they keep to their squads, armour piled up against their tables as they eat. Even with the marines counted in, the knuckledraggers outnumber everyone else by three to one. Fighting comes and goes, but maintenance is forever.