I don’t know where we are going, it read. No one is telling me. Maybe they don’t want to say. Maybe they don’t know.

He had looked at the words for a long while and then put the auto-scribe book back beside his daughter. He bent and kissed her lightly and went to the door. In the night-dimmed corridor he rubbed the heels of his hands across his eyes. When he took them away, there were worms of neon light still clinging to his sight.

I don’t know where we are going…

He should think, try to think about what they would do when they reached Jupiter. Had the war reached there yet? Did they have enough food to make it?

He swayed.

He was tired…

His feet started to move…

He should sleep…

But he would not, could not sleep. Not now…

He walked, and the ship shivered with a familiar rhythm that once would have given him comfort. He walked and the world and past and questions turned in his head, until he found that he had stopped.

He blinked at the doors of the staterooms in front of him. He began to wonder why he was here. But, of course, he knew why…

He raised his hand, and knocked.

‘Mistress Oliton,’ he said.

The door opened from the inside before he could knock again.

The lights were on in the stateroom. Mersadie Oliton looked at him. There was an expression on her face that he could not quite read. Sadness? Resignation?

‘You have questions,’ she said, and moved back to a chair set beneath a glow lamp. The bed had not been used, he noticed. She picked up a cup from a low table and put it to her lips. Steam and the smell of caffeine rose from it. He glanced at where the decorative samostill sat on a plinth at the other end of the room. An open tin of grounds sat beside it, some gritting the polished wood. There was a pop and a gurgle, and a curl of steam rose from a brass vent-tube.

‘I think that samostill is meant to be decorative…’ he said. ‘I have certainly never used it.’

‘Ah,’ said Mersadie, ‘that would explain why it took so long to get working.’

He looked at her and thought he saw the ghost of a smile on her face.

‘There seemed to be no shortage of caffeine, though.’

‘Part of the family business,’ he said. ‘We held the transit monopoly on Kaderine Caffeine through Uranus orbits for twelve decades…’ He trailed off, realising that he was still standing by the open door.

‘Do you want some?’ asked Mersadie. ‘I think I made too much.’

‘No,’ he said, turning and closing the door. ‘No, I think I might want to try to sleep later, but thank you. Too much of that, and you won’t sleep for days.’

‘That’s what I am hoping…’ she said.