“Like Kasengo all over again,” shouted Murakami, wet-faced and grinning as he squeezed in through the door that led out to the observation deck. His clothes were drenched. Behind him, the wind screamed, grabbed at the doorframe and tried to follow him inside. He fought it off with an effort and slammed the door. Storm autolocks engaged with a solid clunk.

“Visibility’s dropping through the floor. These guys are never going to know what hit them.”

“Then it’ll be nothing like Kasengo,” I said irritably, remembering. My eyes were gritty with lack of sleep. “Those guys were expecting us.”

“Yeah, true.” He raked water out of his hair with both hands and shook it off his fingers onto the floor. “But we still trashed them.”

“Watch that drift,” said Vlad to his helmsman. There was a curious new tone to his voice, an authority I hadn’t seen before, and the worst of his twitchiness seemed to have damped down. “We’re riding the wind here, not giving in to it. Lean on her.”

“Leaning.”

The hoverloader quivered palpably with the manoeuvre. The deck thrummed underfoot. Rain made a new, furious sound on the roof and viewports as our angle of entry to the storm shifted.

“That’s it,” Vlad said serenely. “Hold her like that.”

I stayed on the bridge for a while longer, then nodded at Murakami and slipped down the companionway to the cabin decks. I moved aft, hands braced on the corridor walls to beat the occasional lurches in the hover loader’s stability. Once or twice, crew members appeared and slid past me in the cramped space with practised ease. The air was hot and sticky. A couple of cabins along, I glanced sideways at an opened door and saw one of Vlad’s young pirates, stripped to the waist and bent over unfamiliar modules of hardware on the floor. I took in large, well-shaped breasts, the sheen of sweat on her flesh under harsh white light, short-cut hair damp on the nape of her neck. Then she realised I was there and straightened up.

She braced herself with one hand on the cabin wall, folded the other arm across her breasts and met my eyes with a tense glare that I guessed was either meth comedown or combat nerves.

“Got a problem, sam?”

I shook my head. “Sorry, mind was on something else.”

“Yeah? Well, fuck off.”

The cabin door sliced shut. I sighed.

Fair enough.

I found Jad looking similarly tense, but fully dressed. She was seated on the upper of the twin bunks in the cabin we’d been allocated, shard blaster stripped of its magazine and laid under the arch of one booted leg. In her hands were the gleaming halves of a solid-load pistol that I didn’t remember her having before.

I swung into the lower bunk.

“What you got there?”

“Kalashnikov electromag,” she said. “One of the guys down the corridor lent it to me.”