She was floating in some sort of suspensor field, in air, in a human or humanoid body dressed in some clingy but lightly puffed cover-all which left only her feet, hands and head exposed. She was held reclined in the air. It was as though she was sitting in an invisible chair. A boxy ship drone was at eye-level, looking at her. The room around her appeared to be medical unit standard.

“Ms Tefwe?” the drone said.

“Reporting,” she said. She looked at her hand. It looked like her hand, though she knew enough to know that meant almost nothing. “A reverser field, please?”

The drone put a screen in front of her, showing her her own face. She touched the skin on her cheek, pressed her nose one way then the other. Looked like her face.

She remembered talking with the avatoid of the You Call This Clean? in a virtual environment. She remembered waking in reality in the medical facility of the Outstanding Contribution To The Historical Process, and she remembered the journey across the desert on the aphore, to go and talk to the old drone Hassipura Plyn-Frie.

She had stayed with it for a couple of days, calling in a supply drop from the Orbital’s Hub to feed and water the animal at the end of that first day.

The VFP had been annoyed at her dallying but had not zapped her back to it without permission. The important part of its mission had already been carried out; it had transmitted the information on QiRia’s location to the other interested ships. It could afford to let her spend a while with the ancient drone and its sandstreams.

Another ship, another VFP, the Rapid Random Response Unit, had been time-closest to Cethyd and had started out for the planet within a second of the information being picked up. It had started readying one of the handful of humanoid simulacra bodies it carried aboard, instructing the creature’s physiological systems to alter the blank-basic body’s appearance so that it would resemble Tefwe. The transfer of Tefwe’s updated mind-state could wait until the last hour or so before deployment, hence the relaxed attitude the Outstanding … was able to take to Tefwe’s delaying tactics.

The Rapid Random Response Unit’s flight time to Cethyd had been two and a half days; a lucky proximity, Tefwe guessed, given that the place was, as Hassipura had suggested, kind of off the beaten track, in a system called Heluduz in one of the faint tendrils of stars that lay on the very outskirts of the galaxy, spun out from the rim like the exhaust from a spent firework.

The place itself was nothing special; just a biggish rocky world with a thick though transparent oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere and a small majority of land compared to deep ocean.