Mersadie found Vek on the bridge. She had sent the children back to their cabin, and the mass of refugee volunteers seemed to follow her commands with the intensity of the desperate. They had held back when she told them she wanted to go to the bridge alone. They had not questioned why.

Part of her had known. There had been no sign of Vek in the rest of the ship and she could not believe he would not have tried to find Mori and Noon.

She had known. But knowing was different to seeing what was left of him lying on the deck of the bridge. There were others, scattered on each level and gantry. No one had been left alive. The boarding force had been efficient. She noticed that a lone figure in crimson armour lay amongst the dead. It looked as though he had been hacked in half. For a tiny, sickening instant she wondered what had done that. She looked back at Vek. Once, maybe, she would have felt the need to weep. Now she just felt cold, as though ice had poured into the space where grief could once have lived inside her.

‘They didn’t damage the systems,’ Nilus called down from the helm platform. She looked up. The Navigator looked down over the brass rail. ‘I presume they were just going to scuttle the ship once they were done.’

‘It’s still working, though?’ she called.

‘As far as I can tell.’

A tremor shook the deck. Lights blinked across the console.

‘If the engines are still working then what is that?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Nilus. ‘Maybe from whatever they punched into the hull to get inside.’

Mersadie looked back down at Vek’s remains. It felt as though she should stop, as though time should stand still and mark this moment. The deck shuddered again. Nilus said something she only half heard. She shook herself, lifted a fallen officer’s cloak and draped it over Vek. Nilus shouted something that was lost under another rumble of metal.

‘What is it?’ she asked, turning away and mounting the stairs up to the helm platform.

Behind her, she could hear the sounds of people coming down the corridor to the open bridge doors. Nilus was bent over on the deck, looking at a slick of blood and oil on the brass-and-iron floor.

‘I said that I hadn’t seen any sign of the ship’s enginseer amongst the dead.’

‘Chi-32-Beta,’ said Mersadie. The deck pitched for a moment.

‘What?’ said Nilus.

‘That was her name, the ship’s tech-priest. Her name was Chi-32-Beta.’

Nilus shrugged the irrelevance away.