She was already back to watching the water ahead. Kindling a new cigarette one handed.

“Not safely, no.”

I nodded and thought back through the communiqué I’d just had.

“And what’s it going to cost me to be unsafe then?”

“About double?”

“Fine. Do it.”

A grim little smile floated to her mouth. She shrugged, pinched out the cigarette and slid it behind one ear. She reached across the cockpit displays and jabbed a couple of screens. Radar images maximised. She yelled something to Mikhail in a Magyar street dialect that had slipped too much in the time I’d been away for me to catch more than skimmed gist. Get below and keep your hands off … something? He shot her a resentful look, then unslumped himself from the rail and made his way back into the cabin.

She turned back to me, barely looking away from the controls now.

“You too. Better get yourself a seat back there. I speed up and we’re liable to slosh about.”

“I can hang on.”

“Yeah, I’d rather you were back there with him. Give you someone to talk to, I’m going to be too busy.”

I thought back to the equipment I’d seen stashed in the cabin.

Navigational plug-ins, an entertainment deck, currentflow modifiers.

Cables and jacks. I thought back too, to the kid’s demeanour and his scratching at the plugs in his neck, the slumped lack of interest in the whole world. It made a sense I hadn’t really been paying attention to before.

“Sure,” I said. “Always good to have someone to talk to, right?”

She didn’t answer. Maybe she was already immersed in the darkly rain bowed radar images of our path through the Expanse, maybe just mired in something else. I left her to it and made my way aft.

Over my head, the turbines opened to a demented shriek.

TWENTY-THREE

Eventually, time stands still on the Weed Expanse.

You start by noticing detail—the arched root system of a tepes thicket, breaking the water like the half-decayed bones of some drowned giant humanoid, odd clear patches of water where the belaweed hasn’t deigned to grow and you can see down to a pale emerald bed of sand, the sly rise of a mudbank, maybe an abandoned harvester kayak from a couple of centuries back, still not fully overgrown with Sakate’s moss. But these sights are few and far between, and in time your gaze is drawn out to the great flat horizon, and after that, however many times you try to pull away to look at closer detail, it feels like there’s a tide dragging your vision back out there.

You sit and listen to the cadences of the engines because there’s nothing else to do. You watch the horizon and you sink into your own thoughts because there’s nowhere else to go … hurry …