Eventually she got a kind of backpack that melded itself to the suit, containing some clothes and a few supplies.

“This increases both your mass and bulk,” the ship told her through the drone. “Now I have to re-calibrate and skim even closer to the planet.”

“How close you going?”

“Seventeen-five k.”

“Velocity?”

“Forty per cent Crashed to fifty-seven kilo-lights at closest approach; sub millisecond window.”

Tefwe whistled. “You’re going to scrunch me up into a tiny little ball, aren’t you?”

“If you were properly human, it would break every major bone in your body, and quite a lot of the others. Happily, you’re not. You won’t trauma, will you? I could put you under …”

“Not me. Tough as old space boots. Known for it.”

“Good. The suit will be trying not to use any fields, including AG, so the landing could be a little bumpy.”

“Kinetic.”

“Kinetic?”

“That’s how we used to express it in the old days.”

“Hmm. Kinetic. That too is appropriate.”

The Rapid Random Response Unit performed the start of a crash-stop, then – when it was, for a vanishingly brief moment, within less than a planetary radius of the world – used its heavy-duty Displacer to loose a balled-up Tefwe and a scatter of miniature subsidiary support components towards the planet. Then it continued on its way – slowing, in effect, more slowly – and started a wide turn that would bring it back to the system some hours later for a more stealthy approach to Cethyd.

Tefwe came hurtling out of the sky at a little under the speed of sound. The suit gauged where it was and what was happening to it, saw that it was heading for land with no large body of water available – which was sub-optimal, but never mind – and braked hard by spreading layers of itself like ribboned parachutes, scrubbing off ninety-five per cent of its speed in about half a kilometre of forty-five-degree flight. Tefwe felt herself tumbling, and the deceleration as a tremendous weight – oddly distributed due to the way she was packed, pressed into a contorted, maximally compacted ball that would have killed a basic human. The tumbling decreased. She felt her orientation steady and settle, and then the weight eased too.

She felt the impact as a dull thud on her back and knees, not sore at all, then the suit’s voice said quietly, “Landed.”

Tefwe started to un-ball as the suit unwrapped her, letting her spread herself out to lie looking up at an ochre sky visible between softly swaying stalks of some tall, bronze-coloured grass. She could feel her lungs re-inflating. They’d been collapsed to save volume.

“How we doing?” she asked when she had some breath to spare.

“We are doing well,” the suit said. “No hostile interest detected.”

“That’s nice.” Her conventional pain receptors came back on line, tingling once to confirm, then quieting down.