A glint caught Vek’s eye. He began to look up at the dome in the roof of the bridge. Something huge was moving across the pale circle of Uranus’ light.

A flash.

He opened his mouth to shout…

White light…

So bright it swallowed sense and sound…

Blindness…

Gasping…

The metal deck beneath his hands and knees.

Then a roaring, shouts filling his ears as he rose, neon scars swimming in front of his eyes.

‘Full power to engines!’ shouted Koln. She was clinging on to her command console, her face drained of colour. Something struck the ship and the deck pitched. Beyond the viewport, the void was on fire.

Cordelia Habitat was gone. Chunks of debris rode a silent wave of destruction, spinning like pieces of shattered rock. He could see the shapes of habitation clusters, and the long tines of a dock spur with ships still locked in place, their hulls holed, fuel and air trailing after them. The Antius lurched and the view slid, and he saw streaks of light slicing across the stars, flashing the colours of jewels – burning topaz, ruby fire, cold sapphire. Ships moved across his vision then, either so vast or so close that he could see their jagged outlines with his naked eyes…

Hundreds of them…

Thousands of them.

It was almost beautiful…

The ship bucked forwards. Pitted metal plates began to slam shut over the view. Koln was shouting orders.

‘Drop us down fast, then cut power.’

‘If we do that we’ll lose manoeuvrability,’ called one of the other officers. ‘We won’t be able to get–’

‘You want to look like a threat to whatever just cooked the whole habitat?’ Koln yelled. ‘Follow your orders or you can go and join those we just left behind.’

Those we left behind…

Vek found that he still had the dead weight of the pistol in his hand. He looked down at it. He was shaking.

‘Sir.’ The voice was low, pitched to draw attention from him but no one else. He looked up. Aksinya stood just by his shoulder. He felt a wave of relief at the sight of the lifeward.

She had served his mother before him and his grandmother before that. Tall, with the willowy thinness of the void-born, she looked as though she would break at a touch, an impression enhanced by the signs of her age. Ash-white skin clung to skeletal limbs, dotted with dark liver spots. A crest of false, carbon-thread hair sat atop her head, and she held herself straight and stiff. The grey-and-black mesh-woven fabric of her long coat, and the white lace at her cuffs and throat completed the impression of a noble’s tutor, or widow-matriarch, an impression that was utterly false. She was old, that much was true, but he had seen her move so fast you could blink and miss it, and break plasteel with a blow from her open hand.