“Xown, in the Mureite system.”

“What!”

“Oh for goodness’ sake,” Pyan said dramatically, and flopped over backwards, spread out over the bed, lying limp.

“I just fucking left Xown!” Cossont yelled, watching the landscape whip past underneath. “That’s where I started out!”

“Welcome back,” Berdle said, deadpan. “Are you getting dressed yet?”

“Wait a moment …” Cossont was staring at a black line filling the horizon ahead. Entirely filling the horizon ahead, from one extent to the other, like a vast dam across the sky. “Is that the fucking Girdlecity?”

“We’re just a few minutes away. Better get dressed fast.”

She jumped out of bed, started pulling on clothes, muttering and cursing. She stopped, frowned, sniffed, looked carefully at the Lords of Excrement jacket. Everything had been cleaned, and repaired. “Not so much as a by-your-fucking-leave,” she muttered, pulling on freshly polished boots.

She glanced at the screen again. Thin wispy cloud, not far below. Sea beneath. Dark-blue sky above. Still sea beneath. A few filmy wisps of cloud shot past, level.

“Wait a fucking—” she said, just as she’d started pushing her fingers through her unkempt hair. “We’re not even on the fucking ship, are we? It’d never come this far down—”

“No, we’re not,” Berdle said. “We left about five minutes ago.”

“We’re still on the shuttle.”

“Yes.”

She looked round the cabin. “So where are you?”

A double door parted in one wall and Berdle, sat in some sort of complicated seat with a giant screen in front, turned and looked back at her. “Hello.” The avatar waved.

“Why the fuck are we – why am I – back on Xown?” She strode through to what proved to be a flight deck or something and threw herself down in the seat beside Berdle’s. She glared at him as hard as she could but the avatar appeared impervious.

The wrap-screen showed the Girdlecity as a black mass filling most of the view. Spread across the huge, near-vertical cliff confronting them there were hints and slivers of something lighter than its pitch-black surface where patches of dark-blue sky were visible through its filigree of open-work sections.

“We are here,” Berdle told her, “because while you were asleep, more information came in, as information is prone to do, and one particular detail passed on by another ship involved happened to be the Culture full name of your friend Mr QiRia. Which would be Tursensa Ngaroe Hgan QiRia dam Yutton.”

“But I didn’t—!” Cossont started to say, then stopped herself.

Berdle nodded. “No, you didn’t say who the Culture person was you were talking about earlier, but we’d already kind of worked that out.”

“Oh, had you now?” Cossont said, trying to sound defiant, but feeling herself sink a little further into the seat.