“Later.”

“So?” she said. They were back aboard the module. It had met them on a landing platform which cantilevered out from the mass of the Girdlecity like a round tray on an outstretched arm. The craft started to pull away, going astern to avoid some overhanging architecture a few kilometres above.

“Mr Ximenyr has access to some surprisingly sophisticated tech,” Berdle said, lowering himself onto a lounge couch and examining the scout missile. “And some 4D shielding, of course, which is why we had to get in there.”

“Not just prurience, then,” Pyan said, aloud, but was ignored.

“They found and disabled this with embarrassing ease,” Berdle said, rolling the scout missile around on his palm. “Ah!” The little machine suddenly came alive and leapt into the air above his hand. It twisted quickly this way and that, as though confused at having just woken up.

Most of the walls of the module’s living area had seemingly turned transparent, allowing a vertiginous view of the Hzu coast beneath as the module tipped, twisted and then reared suddenly upwards. Ribbons of ochre and jade stitched by slow-spreading breakers of alabaster white, the land and the shallow margins of the sea seemed to sink away beneath them like something dropped; the Girdlecity was a dark wall they climbed magically without touching, hurtling silently back to the stars. Cossont tore her gaze from the view and said, “But did you find anything?”

Berdle frowned. “No. I was rather hoping for some sort of data store with information on Mr Q, something that would be kept close to Ximenyr, but there was nothing relevant anywhere on the airship. I’ve copied everything I found to the ship Mind to see if there’s some really clever cryptography in the storage, but it doesn’t look promising.”

“Nothing in all that stuff round his neck?”

“There was a minimal amount of processing left in the android digit, which was anyway unpowered, there was a dedicated, digital time-to device, functioning and correctly synchronised to the millisecond, but with zero spare capacity, a defunct model of an ancient Waverian Zoehn Dynasty spaceship, itself based on a primitively early form of processor technology called a vacuum tube, again with minimal and extremely crude processing, long burned out, a crystal container holding some animal or vegetable matter– two or three berries or small fruits, I believe – the baculum from a Vimownian Woller with an embedded particle-chip, probably from a hunter’s homing round, and a LastDitch Corp minicollar subsaver, hair-triggered to intervene should any of the gentleman’s hearts give out—”

“Yeah. He said something about starting his last heart.”

“He has four.” The avatar looked thoughtful. “That is a lot of vaso-congestive tissue to support.”

“I suppose.”

“Again, minimal processing involved; just enough to do its job and no more. Everything else was just dumb matter; process-free.”

“So, nothing.”

“Nothing relevant, as far as I can tell.” The avatar smiled at Cossont. “So, onwards and outwards to Ospin and the Dataversities.”