Vek looked at her and blinked, and an image rose from memory into his mind’s eye: an old boat of wood tossed on a high sea beneath a sky of black clouds and forked lightning. It had been an illustration in a book that he had read when he was small – a real book of paper that smelled of strange earthy scents, a doorway into alien realms for a boy born into the void habitats of Uranus. It had come from a distant world with his mother, and the pictures on its pages had shown him things that he still thought of as truer than the picts and holos he had seen of other places: forests of trees with orange leaves, the sun rising behind snow-capped mountains, and the boat on a sea in a storm…

He had come back to that picture of the boat again and again, staring at it, until at last he asked his mother what it meant.

She had smiled.

‘That is us,’ his mother had said. ‘Our lives and all we do are the boat, and the sea is the universe. Sometimes it is calm, and seems our friend, there to give us delight or comfort. And sometimes… sometimes it is a storm that can flip the boat of our lives over, break us and swallow us down. It means that sometimes we are small, and the tides we travel cannot be bargained with or bent to our will. Sometimes we can only hold on and hope that the storm is kind.’

‘What do you need?’ he asked Mersadie.

‘I need to send a signal,’ she said. ‘You said that you sent a signal about me before, on military channels?’

‘Yes,’ said Vek, frowning.

‘Send another signal now. Send it on the same channel you sent the last transmission.’

The ship bucked beneath them as its engines pushed against the fire-soaked void. A chunk of debris struck their spine, and the deck pitched.

‘What should this signal say?’ asked Vek as he pulled himself back to his feet.

‘Just my name, and one other word.’

‘What?’ asked Vek, glancing at the prow viewports as the ship dived into a cloud of gas lit by the flare of more explosions.

‘Loken,’ said Mersadie. ‘It should just say “Loken”.’

Seven

The wall within
Kerberos
Spaces

Battle-barge Throne of the Underworld, Trans-Plutonian Gulf

The wolves closed their jaws on Pluto as the sons of Dorn fled. The Imperial Fists had prepared for flight, that much was clear. One moment there were hundreds of ships spinning in the dance of weapon exchanges. Then, every weapon station and fortress-moon still in the defenders’ hands fired. Rolling volleys of shells, and short-fused torpedoes shook the void and lit the dark with bubbling shoals of fire. The attacking ships’ sensor systems chattered in distress as they filtered the sudden squall of energy spikes.