A person subject to the weakness of claustrophobia would be screaming in such a situation. This had occurred to the colonel when he had first lain down on the couch in his armoured survival suit and the jaw-like secondary personnel containment machinery had closed around him, clamping him in place. The thought had caused the colonel to smile a little.

Even the minimal facial disturbance of smiling required some accommodation by the gels and foams between his skin and the interior of his armoured helmet, but the colonel found this reassuring. His breathing was similarly constrained, accommodated and allowed for, his suit’s armoured chest and the containment beyond flexing with him, as though breathing with him; as though the ship was breathing with him.

Another, independent system stood ready to flood his lungs with foam and brace them with whatever pressure it took while his blood was oxygenated by machine, should the ship ever need to accelerate, decelerate or manoeuvre so violently that even the current arrangements protecting him might prove insufficient.

Alongside the colonel, less than a metre away – unseen while the colonel stared out through the potentially sense-shattering richness of the ship’s sensor arrays towards the star Izenion – was the combat arbite Uhtryn, the colonel’s sole comrade on this mission, excluding only the 7*Uagren itself.

The arbite’s parallel degree of containment was less necessary than his own; as a pure machine that merely vaguely resembled the human form it required less of the cushioning and protection Agansu did to keep him from excessive harm when the ship changed speed or direction. The arbite could have been welded to a bulkhead inside the ship and survived just as well. Still, the space had been there and the arbite had to be contained somewhere within the vessel, so there it had been placed.

So far it had had nothing to do; its part might come later. The colonel was aware of it at his side, silent, absorbing, storing, calculating.

The 7*Uagren’s crew existed as uploaded entities within a multiply partitioned AI substrate; no longer in any meaningful sense human, they nevertheless retained a degree of individuality and represented that which made Gzilt warships so exceptional – superior, indeed, at least to Gzilt reckoning, to those relying on wholly artificial AIs, or even Minds, as they rather grandly called themselves. Certainly the crew resembled something like their original human forms in their interactions with Agansu, representing themselves as appropriately uniformed figures inside a virtual space modelled on the last physically real bridge on a Gzilt warship, dating from some thousands of years ago.