She could smell the air, and sense the locals, the folds, trying not to stare at her. She was carried on up into the mountains, into the vast echoing kingdom of the Sound, and waited to be allowed in to the hearkenry, then followed the Docent Luzuge, and was, finally, granted her audience with the elusive Mr QiRia.

The eyes – the sockets that now housed ears – came as a shock. That certainly counted as a surprise.

She – her other self – didn’t get long to gawk at the man’s mutilated face. There was some commotion outside, audible over, or at least through, the crushing weight of the Sound.

The door at the rear of the cell was thrown splintering open and some sort of shining, multi-limbed drone, all angles and barbs, came tearing in and halted by QiRia’s seat. It drew itself up as though to strike. QiRia had jumped when the door had been thrown open and was turning towards the machine, which screeched, “Arrest! Surrender self!” in a metallic scream pitched so high it cut right through the Sound.

Tefwe’s suit had gone to full deployment the instant the door had started moving, covering her head in a close-fitting semi-transparent helmet. She jumped up and threw open the shutters, letting the Sound roll in. There was a white flash and she felt something hit her hard in the back, though without causing pain. She threw herself through the matting curtains and out of the window, landing on the cold slope of scree outside and hurtling in a zigzag down towards the nearest cover – a dark mass of metre-high boulders. “Ship!” she yelled. “You getting all this? Get me off here!”

“Suit lower dorsal area seventy per cent compromised,” the suit told her solemnly. She could feel heat bleeding through where the blow from behind had hit, making her back warm.

“Shit!” she said as she dived for a gap between two of the boulders. She never got there. A second, much more powerful shot – from above, from a weapon platform she hadn’t even known was there – hit her between the shoulders and blew her neck and head off.

Most of her landed in a bloody, fiery, smoking heap just before the collection of boulders; her head flew further and thudded off the top of one of the boulders, bouncing to the ground just beyond. Then the view, from the scout missile or whatever had been accompanying her, flashed once and disappeared too.

The Rapid Random Response Unit, suddenly subject to the aggressive attentions of a small flotilla of Oglari vessels, executed a very risky manoeuvre, succeeded in snapping Tefwe’s still-just-about-alive head back to itself and then flared wildly off at its highest possible, engine-field-addling acceleration.