Her hand found the release and punched in the code Aksinya had used. The piston locks released with a thump. Carefully she pushed the door inwards. The light inside was dim, stained orange by the red and yellow of slowly pulsing emergency lights. She stepped inside, hands open at her sides. Eyes looked back at her from a ring of faces. The gun, tucked out of sight, pressed sharp against her back. The lights pulsed in the lengthening seconds. In the distance something creaked and echoed through the hull.

A man stepped out of the crowd. Mersadie suppressed the instinct to flinch. The man was big, tall in the way that only the void-born were but bulked out with grafted muscle. He looked at her for a moment, and then nodded.

‘I was a second on a belt trader,’ he said. ‘I know ships.’

She looked at him for a moment, and then nodded.

‘Thank you,’ she said. The man nodded back.

‘I was a dock pilot,’ said a woman with a lined face and a liver-spotted scalp. And the silence broke as they came forwards in a babble of hope.

Hab Block 287, Worker Hab Plateau 67, Terra

Mekcrol woke, the scream from his dream still on his lips. The dim light of the night-cycle light set in the ceiling still shone. Familiar shadows fell from where his robe and rebreather mask hung by the door. The ventilation fan turned behind its grating, thumping and scraping as it pushed the smells of smoke and oil into the room. Mekcrol turned his head slowly. He was shivering. Sweat slicked his skin.

It was not real… Just a dream… Just a dream…

Still he did not move.

In the dream he had been standing in front of the door out of his hab-unit. He had been waiting for someone… Someone he knew… The white paint on the metal frame had the same pattern of grime and scratches beside the lock release as he saw every day as he left. Except there was something else there in the dream, something smudged and red… like the marks of fingers. Like the marks of bleeding fingers…

The door had opened. Air had gusted in. The smell. Could you smell in dreams? The air smelled of frost. It smelled clean, sharp. The space beyond the door was dark. He had stepped through. Lights had flickered on.

The corridor stretched away to either side. Closed doors led off every two metres. There was no one else there. That was not strange. Hab allocation was linked to shift rotations, so that people would not jam the corridors as they all left or returned at the same time. Mekcrol was lucky. His mother had secured an enhancement to their hereditary indenturing that had made her son a Twentieth Degree Supervisory Menial. That gave him a unit to himself, and an extra hour of rest.