 
## **Contents**

Publisher information

Praise for Stephen Hunt

Also by the author

CHAPTER ONE Planet of the Balls

CHAPTER TWO World of winter, world of war

CHAPTER THREE Sliding Void

CHAPTER FOUR The girl from nowhere

CHAPTER FIVE A gift on leaving

CHAPTER SIX Continue the adventure
SLIDING VOID

Book 1 in the Sliding Void series.

First published in 2011 by Green Nebula Press

Copyright © 2011 by Stephen Hunt

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PRAISE FOR STEPHEN HUNT'S FICTION

'Hunt's imagination is probably visible from space. He scatters concepts that other writers would mine for a trilogy like chocolate-bar wrappers.'

\- TOM HOLT

'All manner of bizarre and fantastical extravagance.'

\- DAILY MAIL

'Compulsive reading for all ages.'

\- GUARDIAN

'Studded with invention.'

-THE INDEPENDENT

'To say this book is action packed is almost an understatement... a wonderful escapist yarn!'

\- INTERZONE

'Hunt has packed the story full of intriguing gimmicks... affecting and original.'

\- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

'A rip-roaring Indiana Jones-style adventure.'

—RT BOOK REVIEWS

'A curious part-future blend.'

\- KIRKUS REVIEWS

'An inventive, ambitious work, full of wonders and marvels.'

\- THE TIMES

'Hunt knows what his audience like and gives it to them with a sardonic wit and carefully developed tension.'

\- TIME OUT

'A ripping yarn ... the story pounds along... constant inventiveness keeps the reader hooked... the finale is a cracking succession of cliffhangers and surprise comebacks. Great fun.'

\- SFX MAGAZINE

'Put on your seatbelts for a frenetic cat and mouse encounter... an exciting tale.'

\- SF REVU

Also by Stephen Hunt

~ THE FAR-CALLED SERIES ~

Season 1

In Dark Service (#1)  
Foul Tide's Turning (#2)  
The Stealers' War (#3)

~ THE JACKELIAN SERIES ~

Season 1

The Court of the Air (#1)  
The Kingdom Beyond the Waves (#2)  
Rise of the Iron Moon (#3)  
Secrets of the Fire Sea (#4)  
Jack Cloudie (#5)  
From the Deep of the Dark (#6)

Season 2

Mission to Mightadore (#7)

~ THE SLIDING VOID SERIES ~

Season 1

Sliding Void (#1)  
Transference Station (#2)  
Red Sun Bleeding (#3)

Season 1 Omnibus Collection (#1 & #2 & #3)

Void all the Way Down

~ THE AGATHA WITCHLEY MYSTERIES: AS STEPHEN A. HUNT ~

Season 1

In the Company of Ghosts (#1)  
The Plato Club (#2)  
The Moon Man's Tale (#3)

Season 1 Omnibus Collection (#1 & #2 & #3)

Secrets of the Moon

~ THE TRIPLE REALM SERIES ~

For the Crown and the Dragon (#1)  
The Fortress in the Frost (#2)

~ OTHER WORKS ~

Six Against the Stars  
The Alien who Ate Christmas (children's illustrated)

For links to all these books, visit <http://stephenhunt.net/novels/>

CHAPTER ONE

Planet of the Balls

That was the problem with aliens, mused Lana. They were so damn alien. Not all of them, of course. The one sitting to her left, Skrat, looked like a man-sized lizard, but he might as well have been human compared to the two things swinging opposite them. The negotiators from the world Lana's ship was currently orbiting were a series of mushy orange spheres joined together by flesh-coloured webbing. No eyes, no mouth, no ears she could see – just two ape-sized arms they could walk on or use to swing across the chamber from the various cables dangling from the ceiling. She didn't know where to look, when a back was as good as a front. Their minds were so messed-up and off-the-scale, that Lana's attempts at trying to win a cargo for the return leg of her journey were being answered by a stream-of-consciousness ramble from the translation stick linked into her ship's computer. The chatter might as well be dub poetry rather than a serious attempt at negotiation for all that she understood it.

Lana flicked off the translation stick for a second and leant across to Skrat. 'I don't know what they're saying, I don't know the name of this world, I don't know what was inside the sealed containers we've offloaded, and I don't know what the heck we're still doing docked to their so-called trading station.'

'Patience,' whispered Skrat. 'There is a deal to be done here, old girl, I can feel it.'

Lana sighed. Given how shattered Skrat's life had been before she had pulled him out of that scummy televised corporate gladiator pit, he sure was an optimist. She gazed across at the two delivery agents, one of them whirling about maniacally on the end of a rope, making dolphin-like clicking noises by pulsing its upper sphere in and out while simultaneously rapping like a drum. The thing's friend was leaping up and down on one arm/leg (take your pick), and scratching the other's underside. Is that grooming? Kissing? Indicating their thanks for the ship's delivery; on time and on schedule?

Lana flicked the translation stick back on, a couple of seconds for the wireless connection to the linguistic computer on board the Gravity Rose to pick up speed, and then the speaker at the top of her stick started stuttering: 'Joy comes from chance. Chance is all. Trade is chance. I am horny. I am dying. I am exclusive and taking a minute.'

'To the solar winds with this,' muttered Lana. She stood up and bowed ironically towards the two swinging collections of balls. 'And I am so out of here. Take your minute and add a couple of decades before my ship comes within ten parsecs of your world again.'

The full effect of Lana's outburst was slightly ruined by the bulky environment suit she wore to protect herself from the green gas that the balls had swirling around the visitor's chamber as atmosphere. But what the hell, there had to be some privileges to being skipper of your own vessel.

Skrat was fast behind her, swishing his powerful tail in annoyance, the visor of his suit's helmet misting up as he spat out his words. 'That went well. Another hour, Lana, and we could have negotiated a really exceptional cargo to ship out-system. I'd guarantee it.'

Right now Lana was glad the environment suit covered Skrat. Out of the suit-skin he looked like a bipedal dragon – all shining green scales, solid muscles, sharp white teeth, a pair of eyes like burning coals floating on a chlorophyll-choked millpond – and nobody in their right mind wanted a humanoid dragon annoyed with them. In fact, dragon was one of the politer nicknames for Skrat's race among humanity. Much like dragons, their kind was up for a fight if push came to shove, but they loved trading far more. His species would much rather get one over you in a negotiation than stick a dagger in your back.

'What, with Mister I Am Dying and I Am Horny? Shizzle, Skrat. You were going to end up selling us into their local brothel is what you were going to do.'

'System crash,' squawked the translation stick, still active in her hand after she'd snatched it off the table. 'Core rebooting. Fatal agglutinative group error.'

'Ha,' said Skrat, his magnetised boots cracking down the airlock tunnel linking the orbital station to their ship. The station corridors were low for Lana's six-foot frame. Skrat was three inches taller and he had to stoop even more than she did as he strolled quickly after her. 'I knew it. Language errors. We definitely should have given the dashed computer longer to adjust to their dialect.'

Lana tapped the side of her helmet. 'It's not their language, it's what's up here that counts. You're aiming to service a planet's demand-side needs, you got to understand how the locals think. What they got that anybody wants? Ass-scratching sticks? I told you when we took on the cargo, this would be a one-way job. Sealed containers always are.'

'And to prove you're right, we're shipping out of here with an empty hold,' sighed Skrat.

'Empty hold on my ship,' Lana reminded him.

They reached the ship's airlock, and she leaned forward to let the small camera take her retina print. Scoring a match, the outer door hissed up into the hull. Polter was just visible on the other side of the airlock, eyestalks peering up through the inner door's armoured glass. Next to their navigator stood Zeno, the ship's android first mate. Polter's fussy voice echoed through the little chamber as they stepped inside and closed off the lock. 'Are we blessed with a return cargo?'

'I believe you will need to address that question to the captain,' sighed Skrat.

'Sorry to say, but God has taken the day off,' said Lana. 'We'll be running light until we hit the next system.'

'Perhaps not,' came Polter's reply. 'There have been developments, oh yes.'

Developments? That didn't sound good to Lana. She was in charge of developments. Anyone else started developing shizzle and you just knew that trouble was going to come bouncing close behind. Lana's helmet yanked off with a hiss of escaping air under pressure, and she flicked her mane of long blonde hair back as she reached for an Alice band to secure it, pushing her fingers through the curls at the edges. People said the hair made her look cherubic. Unfortunately, the illusion only lasted as long as it took Lana to open her mouth. 'I didn't even want to leave the Rose to talk to the locals on the station. You heard me say that. I'm sure you did.'

'You're far too over-cautious.' Skrat racked the large pistol that had been strapped to his leg, and Lana followed suit. Her rail pistol had been dialled up to sixteen, maximum power, where one of the ball bearings sitting in its magazine could be accelerated to the kind of air-cracking speeds capable of causing grenade-level explosions. Perhaps that was caution, too. Nothing won a fight like going kinetic on someone's ass first.

'One of us has got to be thinking about limiting our losses,' said Lana. Sure as hell ain't gonna be you, Skrat.

The glass of the airlock's inner door automatically mirrored as the lock's bacterial decontamination routine kicked in. Lana sucked in her cheeks. She hated her own reflection. Had she inherited those classically beautiful Slavic-Nordic look from her parents? Hell if she knew. If I ever get to meet them, I might ask. She looked tired, her green eyes weary. She was only in her late forties, and with anti-ageing treatments she looked more like twenty-five. How could she look so tired? When she smiled, the grin filled her face, one of her few endearing features, but she hadn't felt like smiling for a while now. The inner lock cycled open and Polter danced excitedly on six legs, the pupils on the crab-like navigator's eyestalks wide and excited. She glanced towards her android crewmember. Zeno just shrugged. For all his artificial golden skin and wire-headed Afro, he could do innocent just fine. The look was one she recognized. Don't blame me.

Lana raised a hand and adjusted her green ship overalls. 'I only left you two jokers in charge for a few hours. Polter, please tell me you haven't donated the ship as spare parts to the local orphans' fund?'

'Sarcasm is not among your better virtues, revered skipper,' observed Polter.

'What's going on?' asked Lana. 'I can see that you're busting to tell me how the will of the Lord has landed something shiny-new in our laps.'

'A ship,' said Polter. 'Inbound. Oh yes, not local traffic. A courier vessel, I should say.'

Lana groaned. 'Looking for us?'

'And asking for permission to dock ship-to-ship. I told them that only the blessed Captain Lana Fiveworlds can give permission for that, and she is presently engaged.'

Lana weighed the options. It was hideously expensive to send a single ship out with a message for a trader, even when you had a flight plan logged and a fair idea where the recipient might be. Not when the alternative was tossing a free e-mail into the data sphere and waiting for it to propagate into the path of its recipient. The Gravity Rose would dock and sync her computer core next time she hit somewhere civilised. A courier vessel meant the message was important and covert enough that its sender didn't want to risk the note being hacked rolling about out in the wild. Messages like that, you might be better off ignoring.

'It is a contract offer,' said Polter. 'I can feel it in my soul. Our holds are empty and the Holy of Holies wills the space filled.'

'Yeah, and maybe it's contract law enforcement,' said Zeno. 'How many bills did we leave unpaid at the last planet?'

Lana rubbed her pale freckled nose. 'If it's chasing the docking fees we skipped jumping to this hole, I'll pay that guy sitting out there solely for persistence.'

The four of them headed for the bridge, taking the ship's internal Capsule and Transportation System. The CATS capsule jolted and shuddered, sections of Lana's four thousand foot-long ship squealing in and out of view as they rode a clear bullet down her transparent lateral tube. At times the capsule shot over the ship's grey dust-pitted hull, before spiralling down, blasting through the vessel's interior chambers – passing along the jungle of hydroponics vaults that gave the ship her atmosphere and food, furnishing crew and passengers with the space they needed to stop going stir-crazy on extended flights. By law, all starships needed such chambers. If her hyperspace engines ever failed, they would need to slide to the nearest inhabitable world generation-ship style on her anti-matter thrusters. Although, given Lana's current motley crew, she'd hate to think what her descendants would end up looking like. As pitted as her vessel's hull was, as worn by all the universe's dust that had never quite made it into a planet, Lana loved her ship with the ferociousness of a tigress protecting her cubs. Not because the Gravity Rose was beautiful: she could never be accused of that – the profile of an aircraft carrier taken into space. An eclectic collection of cargo units, hyperspace vanes, passenger cabins, life support modules, in-system antimatter drive chambers, solar panels, self-healing armour, artificial gravity systems, and freight holds from a dozen ship yards and manufacturers welded together with hope, optimism and whatever spare currency Lana and her predecessors had to throw at her. No, not because the Gravity Rose was lovely, but because the ship was Lana's home. And because what passed for the vessel's dysfunctional crew also passed for her family. Lana stretched out her legs and pushed long leather boots out towards the opposite wall of the capsule, hearing the bone-crack of every one of her years. It's not age, honey; it's the intermittent low gravity. Yeah, you keep on telling yourself that. The ship looked her age, too. The Gravity Rose needed an overhaul soon to pass authority checks and retain her flightworthy status. Without that, no planet worth a damn was going to allow Fiveworlds Shipping in to trade. Lana could hear the dead voice of bureaucracy whining inside her skull. 'What if your jump engines lock and you collide with our world? You want us to shoot you down, you want that?'

After Lana got to the bridge she punched up comms and made an offer to take the message point-to-point on a tight laser line, but the courier refused, which kind of made sense. If you were paranoid enough not to risk your precious message getting hacked in the wild, you weren't going to chance someone having a pebble-sized probe hanging tight off a hull and trying to intercept your laser communications.

The courier ship was a pert matt-black needle floating void, not much more than a pilot cabin and life support system forward of her jump drive and the pion reaction thrusters she used to kick some tidy little propulsion out. With a hull-to-engine ratio tricked out like that she could tear a strip through this lonely corner of space. Faster than the Gravity Rose, that was for sure, even with the Rose running empty. Speed being of the essence, and all, Lana opened the doors to the Gravity Rose's starboard-side hold and the courier couldn't have set her down more sweetly if Lana's vessel had been a navy carrier, three little landing skids folding out of the dart. She noted from the hold's cameras that the pilot was another kaggen, like Polter. A five foot-high sentient crab-shaped mass of religious worry. Female kaggens were twice the size of the race's males, so this one was a lad, just like their navigator.

Lana instructed the courier to come to the bridge, skipper's privilege, rather than doing a meet-and-greet in their massive empty hold. There were traditions to be observed, and it never hurt to underline the fact that the courier's sense of urgency wasn't her problem. Not yet, anyway. Not until it started putting bacon on her table, as well as the courier's. A few minutes later the messenger scuttled into the bridge, his two large vestigial claws folded backward along his top-shell to indicate he came in peace and with God. Like the little pacifists come in any other flavour. He signed a private greeting to Polter, and kept on with a kag blessing even as he began talking to Lana, a parrot-like beak on the soft fleshy face underneath his carapace warbling in satisfaction at having tracked down his quarry. His accent was a lot thicker than Polter's. 'I have the honour of addressing Captain Lana Fiveworlds, proprietor of Fiveworlds Shipping, registered out of the Protocol world of Nueva Valencia, The Edge?'

'That'll be me, and I reckon you've got my transponder codes, flight plan and license, to prove it, shorty,' said Lana.

The courier dipped respectfully on four of his six legs. 'I am Ralt Raltish of—'

'Spare me your diocese and family tree stretching back to the fortieth generation. This message, it's only for yours truly or...?' Lana indicated her crew standing on the bridge.

'Not specified. Do you trust your crew?'

'You slide void any other way out here and you ain't going to live long enough to regret it,' said Lana. 'Staying alive is a team game. Least ways, it is if you are not flying some tricked-out comet firing faster than photons. That would be that needle of yours sitting in my hangar, shorty.'

'Then I may pass you my message,' said the courier. 'It is from my most majestic client Rex Matobo, blessings be upon him.'

'Shizzle,' Lana cursed under her breath. Rex. 'I just knew that this was going to be trouble. And the message?'

'He says, "I would appreciate it if you came quickly".'

Lana shook her head in disbelief. 'That's it?'

'I have the co-ordinates of my client's world of origin, with instructions to divulge these to you.'

'You feel like divulging how much business you've been doing with Rex?'

The courier raised one of his two manipulator hands and wiggled a bony finger in a cursory way, the kaggen equivalent of a shrug. 'He is a new client, blessings be upon him. The world of origin is not much visited. In fact, it's not even recognized by the Protocol.'

'I'll just bet it isn't. What's this world called, shorty?'

'Hesperus is its common name,' said the courier. 'Standard cartography reference Hes-10294384b is the planet's formal title.'

She nodded to Zeno, and the android pulled the details from the bridge computer. 'So, Zeno, this Hesperus look like anywhere we want to be travelling to?'

'Doesn't appear too dangerous on the face of it, skipper,' said Zeno. 'A little light on details here, though, on the wiki. It's a failed colony world. Lost their technological base in an ice age and they've been living back in the dark ages for centuries. You might catch dysentery on Hesperus, but nobody's going to be shooting missiles at us down there. They won't even know what a gun is, let alone a starship.'

'Most curious. What is this old friend of yours doing in such an unconducive locale?' Skrat asked Lana.

'No damn good,' said Lana, 'if I know him.'

'You are going to world?' asked the courier. 'I have been paid to return a negative reply, if you choose not to heed my client's message.'

'Give me a minute to think on it,' said Lana.

'This Rex Matobo fellow is a human?' Skrat asked. 'I've never heard of the chap?'

'Before your time,' said Lana. 'The rest of the crew will remember him.' But not fondly, I reckon. 'How about it, Zeno? You want to see Rex again?'

Zeno tapped his artificial skin. 'Hell, it's not my nano-mechanical backside that's going to be catching dysentery.'

Lana groaned inside as she realized how few choices she had left in front of her, now. You can't complain, girl. That's why you're still flying free as an independent. If it's civilised living you're after, sell out to one of the corporate houses and work yourself some of those sophisticated routes inside the Triple Alliance's void.

'Are we going, revered skipper?' asked Polter, eager to see if his premonition about receiving work was about to be rewarded.

'Only if this human chap has money,' insisted Skrat.

'Oh, he'll have money,' said Lana. The main problem is, most of it won't be his.

Worst thing was, she owed Rex Matobo a favor. Not the kind you got to skip by lightly, either. Stepping aside, Lana sighed and indicated her ship's hulking navigation board for the benefit of the courier. 'Load up the damn jump co-ordinates, shorty; then you can light out of here. Polter, crunch the numbers for a hyperspace translation, we've got us a little business to attend to.'

She glanced towards a wide view of the no-account world fixed on the front of the bridge, the ball creatures' planet, its brown gas-wrapped orb barely visible beyond the pitted expanse of the orbital station they had just left. And just once, don't let it be the bad kind. Just this damn once.

CHAPTER TWO

World of winter, world of war

Calder Durk felt them coming through the blizzard after him, six shield-warriors maybe seven. The big, heavy muscled brutes from Baron Halvard's bodyguard. They were fresh and he was exhausted. Even with the weight of his pursuers' two-handed swords, axes, shields and crossbows, and Calder carrying only the single hunting dagger he'd escaped with, the men were going to overtake him soon. His manservant, Noak, was ruddy faced and breathing hard under his bear furs, but showed every sign of being more spry than Calder, despite being twice his young master's age. Fear could do that to a man. Calder wasn't afraid; he was looking forward to the slaying. He was looking forward to carving up Halvard's boys and leaving the treacherous scum frozen in the snow for the baron to find. A man has to die some time, right? Might as well be out here.

Noak recognized the frown crossing Calder's furrowed brow. Knew that his master's supernatural hunting sense was alive and kicking. 'How many behind us now, my prince?'

'Six, I think. Armed for the fight and that's the truth of it.'

'Won't be much of a fight.'

Calder scrambled up a bank of snow, ignoring the aching pain in his legs, spurred on by adrenaline and the desire to survive.

'You with a dagger and me with nothing but spit,' added the manservant, lest the young prince think that he was considering fleeing and abandoning his charge. Of course, with ninety of their friends and crew lying poisoned across the tables of their so-called host's great-hall back in the castle, doing a runner was probably the sanest course for the servant right now. But you're too loyal, aren't you. And you want to live to say 'I told you so', you wretch.

'How far are we from the Frozen Sea, do you think?' Calder asked Noak.

The manservant rubbed the silvery beard of his chin, taking a second to glance behind them. Nothing but endless forests waist-deep in snow, every tree as tough as a granite cliff. The sea has to be less than ten miles ahead, doesn't it?

'Near enough, my prince,' said Noak. 'But there are no ports hereabouts. What are the chances of us spotting and flagging down a passing ice schooner out on the flows?' It was a purely rhetorical question.

'Somewhere between hell and none,' sighed Calder. It wasn't fair, it really wasn't. Surviving the war, surviving the long journey back home. All that way, all that blood, only to die here, so close to... glimpsing Sibylla's immaculate naked body again, a voice within him whispered. He shut that down fast. Survive first, kisses with princess later.

Over the rise and down below lay a structure, something more than the endless snow and forest that they had passed so far during their desperate escape. A round stonehouse alongside an oil derrick, two blinded slaves walking the circle in chains and driving the oil well's pumping-beam up and down. The hut's thatched roof wouldn't stand against crossbow bolts, but the flint stone walls would serve as cover enough against Baron Halvard's assassins. No windows, of course. Anyone rich enough to put glass panes in their walls wouldn't be milking the ground so far from town or village. Whoever owned that hut was probably off fishing at an ice-hole on the river that they had passed a mile back. The hut's chimneystack was cold and smokeless, and the one thing you knew about a driller, they always had enough oil spare to light a fire.

Calder brushed black tufts of hair out of his snow-tanned face and pointed to the stone hut. 'There's our luck. We run down and past, then walk our own footprints back to the hut and shelter inside. When the baron's shield-warriors go past, we take them in the rear.' Maybe if we're lucky, there will be some clay pots inside we can fill with oil. Something more than harsh words to toss at our executioners . . . oil grenades. The two of them, young prince and manservant, stumbled down the rise towards the hut.

'I think you should use it, my prince.'

'Use what?'

'The amulet.'

Calder's hand snaked to the crystal hanging from the chain beneath his fur-covered tunic. 'Damned if I will.'

'You were given it to call for help in time of need, my prince. If this is not such a time, then will it not do until a darker hour deepens?'

'You think so?' Calder spat. 'It was that useless warlock, that dirty singer of spells, that mud-brain of mud-brains, who happily waved our fleet off when we departed in search of glory. If thousands of our men stretched out as pale corpses in front of the walls of Narvalo really were his plan, then it's true glory we have brought back in his name. You think old allies like the baron would have switched sides to the Narvalaks if we'd had the good sense to send that filthy sorcerer off with a flea in his ear? Why, the same scum chasing us would be dragging our sleds across the border towards home and raising a song in our honour!'

The prince's manservant didn't appear to agree with the assessment. 'The wizard is powerful.'

'He's mortal! His plans can be snapped as easily as the skis on an ice schooner. If it were otherwise, the shaking hand of a Narvalak priest would be crowning me King of the World now while you would be drinking your gourd off in some sacked Narvalo tavern.'

They reached the hut. Calder was about to threaten the two slaves outside with murder unless they held their silence, but then he noticed the reason the two oil-pushers were still so intent on the progress of the wooden wheel they were chained to. Their cheeks were hollow from a time long ago when their tongues had been cut out. Blinded as well. Tough luck for them. The peasants should have put up more of a struggle when the baron's warriors arrived at whatever dirt-hole of a village these two jokers had been living in. There's a lot of darkness in the winter. That had been one of Calder's father's favourite sayings, before he had fallen off a horse with a crossbow bolt through his left eye.

Calder glanced over to where Noak stood examining a gear reducer on the oil well. What's he trying to do? Calder scooped up a snowball and threw it at the manservant's back. 'You found a crossbow hidden behind the tubing? Come on, we've got to run past the hut and double back before the baron's swords turn up.'

Calder and his manservant followed the plan. Wading through the snow past the driller's hut a good distance, then carefully walking back over their footprints in the snow towards the hut. There wasn't a lock on the driller's door, but it could be bolted from inside. Just light planking on the entrance, not up to much. Good for keeping out wolves and bears for long enough to lift a crossbow off the empty hook on the wall. Calder could have kicked in the door himself, if he wanted to advertise their presence inside to the assassins. The prince had to hope that two of them, as good as weaponless against a company of shield-warriors, was a plan so crazy that the element of surprise was the one thing they would be armed with.

'Check the room,' whispered Calder Durk. 'See if there's anything here.' Not that there was going to be. A fireplace with a roasting spit. Some straw to sleep on, a few blankets in the corner of the sunken floor. Spare netting and line hanging on the wall to fish the river. Anything metal or sharp had gone to the river along with the baron's driller living here.

Calder kept a wary eye on the top of the rise, peering through the planks of the wooden door. The two slaves were still working the noisy, creaking wheel, the oil derrick nodding back and forth in time to their labours. Black liquid dripped out into a large wooden barrel from a pipe rammed into the down-hole. Doesn't seem much coming out of there. Maybe the well's nearly tapped out? Calder hadn't spotted sled tracks in the snow, so that meant the driller who lived here had left on foot. Too poor to keep his own dogs and pay for sled and harness. There was a wooden measuring stick leaning against the barrel, half-covered in tar. So, the driller had dipped it into the barrel to take a measure of its contents, just to see if his pair of slaves slacked off while he was away catching fish for their dinner. Not a trusting man. His slaves might be blind and mute, but Calder suspected they'd feel the crack of the whip well enough if they stopped turning the well's crank.

Noak rifled through the scant possessions behind them. 'No weapons.'

'Any clay pots, something we could fill with oil to burn them when they pass by?'

Noak lifted up a solitary metal frying pan. 'I can smack them with this.'

Calder laughed, despite their predicament. 'You really are an old woman, now.'

'Just rub the amulet, my prince, please,' pleaded Noak. 'Before Halvard's killers turn up and see the light of sorcery under our roof.'

Well, what the hell. In for a lump of copper, in for a lump of gold. Calder lifted the amulet out of his shirt, and resting his hand on its diamond surface, chanted the incantation the sorcerer had made him memorise. It took a second for an evil whining noise to fill the silence. A ghostly face appeared before them, hovering in the centre of the hut, and Calder tried unsuccessfully to keep the shivers from freezing his spine. Off to the side of the hut, Noak traced the sign of the Fire Goddess across his chest. Something used to ward off demons. The apparition grinned. Skin as black as night on his face – it didn't matter how much snow-glare you took, no skin should get that tanned – his accent exotic and strange, a voice all-too knowing and cock-sure. Hair curled like a woman's. Smug too. How could the sorcerer still appear so bloody smug after he had dispatched the manhood of an entire nation to its untimely end?

'I am betrayed,' said Calder. 'Baron Halvard burnt my schooner at her moorings and murdered my crew with poison at his own table. He has broken the compact and sold us out to the enemy for my weight in silver. That was the price of his honour.'

'Ah, Prince Calder, last of the House of Durk,' smirked the sorcerer. 'Reduced circumstances, then?'

Calder had to stop himself shouting at the sorcerer. The assassins would be close enough to hear them in a minute. 'I followed your plans, and I have been reduced in all things. Four armies lie dead in front of the walls of Narvalo. My crew and I have spent a year in foreign parts voyaging home, fighting creatures and monsters and enemies so sodding strange they would freeze the veins of lesser men. Now all I have been left is this dagger, Noak here, and my honour.'

'Well,' said the sorcerer. 'Top tip for next time, your highness. You would have done better keeping your armada of schooners intact and losing your dagger, rather than vice-versa.'

'You dog,' cursed Calder. 'I built the giant wooden wolf like you instructed, left it outside their walls. You know what the enemy did to it? They dragged it onto the sea-flows, set barrels of oil alight in a circle around it, melted the ice and drowned every man hiding inside.'

'Yeah, heard about that one,' said the sorcerer. 'Hey-ho. You got to give it to their priests. Stupid, they aren't.'

'This is your doing!'

'Kid, I warned you. There were other ways of getting you crowned high king that were open to us. The subtle kind: bribery, corruption, backroom shenanigans. Wizards like me, that's where we do our best work. But oh no, you couldn't keep it in your pants. You wanted the big dynastic marriage to Sibylla. Well, guess what, your highness, getting even against her ancestral enemies was the price for that sweet booty.'

'You dare to talk about Sibylla like that...'

'I hate to burst your bubble, boy, but your sweet girl is lining herself up a selection of nice rich Narvalak noblemen to seal her future with.'

'Liar! They are blood enemies. Her council would never accept such a marriage.'

'Don't have lot of choice anymore. Sibylla owned one of the four armies that got iced last year, if you forgive the pun, remember? Oh, and the girl's used the engagement ties between your country and hers to declare your ass dead while annexing your lands. Not too sloppy. Guess there's more of her mother in her blood than I gave her credit for. That's my way of saying she had me fooled too, not that it's much consolation to you right now.'

For a second, Calder was almost mute with fury. 'You oath-breaker, you lying, false—'

'I'm sending you my apologies, my prince,' shrugged the sorcerer. 'Along with something a little more substantive. Sure as shizzle didn't think things were going to pan out this badly.' One of the eyes in the ghostly dark apparition winked at Calder. 'Compared to you mayflies, I'm almost immortal. Think a man would have learned by now, right?'

'My prince,' hissed Noak, his eye pressed to a gap in the thatch. 'Halvard's people are outside.'

The evil witch-light winked out inside the hut, leaving Calder and his manservant alone again. His honour wasn't armour; Noak wasn't up to much in a brawl, so that just left the hunting dagger. Calder drew it out, keeping the bone handle tight against his sweaty palm. A hand's length of steel, against what? Seven armoured men coming down the slope, large as trolls, swords sharp enough to slice ironwood. Killers all, rattling with blades and crossbow bolt bandoleers. Faces hidden beneath steel wolf masks riveted under their horned helms. As if they need to look any more fearsome given the size of them.

Noak still clutched the iron pan. It was just heavy enough to brain a man, if you got lucky. 'My prince,' he whispered. 'If I'm favoured enough to be allowed to follow you into the Halls of the Twice-risen, will you grant me a boon?'

Calder nodded.

'Pension me out of this job.'

'Follow me out of this hut, and you'll have earnt it.'

Calder's plan started as he'd foreseen. Outside, the seven brutes piled down the slope and passed the oil derrick and the driller's hut, intent on following the false trial of footprints in the snow left by Calder and his manservant. They didn't bother checking the hut, and why would they? Nobody in their right mind was going to take on a company of shield-warriors. Was it Calder's imagination, or were the two slaves outside walking the circle a lot slower now? He set that thought aside. He didn't have time to be distracted by their silent toil. The hunters had kept their crossbows strapped and dangling from their armour. So, they weren't about to shoot Calder down as he fled. This suggested that his treacherous ex-ally, Baron Halvard, had expressed a desire to have the notorious Prince Calder taken alive. Not out of any sense of mercy, but so that the dog of baron would have something more than a corpse to hand over to the enemy. A bad memory sprang forth. Outside the walls of Narvalo, the priests threatening Calder that unless he abandoned the siege forthwith, they were going to give him a criminal's death tied to a stake, personally dipping him in tar and lighting the match. Yes, a living prince would be worth quite a lot to the Narvalaks. It wouldn't matter if there were a blizzard pummelling their great fortress city, Calder could foresee standing room only in the large square outside their high temple.

Calder timed it just right, springing the door open a second after the hut fell out of sight of the fighters. Much to Calder's surprise, Noak came sprinting right behind him, seemingly as eager as Calder to take the shield-warriors in the rear. Well, if the fighters planned on taking Calder alive to burn at the stake, Noak's one chance of surviving was that the seven thugs would seize the manservant for the local slave market. On the baron's lands, that would probably mean Noak ending up blind and tongueless as the third cog on a driller's well. Not really living at all. Even as Calder closed the gap on the warriors, the snow muffling his boots, it was hard to know where to plunge his dagger. Somewhere between the round iron shield and the chainmail? Try to pierce the leather neck-guard hanging down from the back of the horned helmet? Back of the thighs? One up the ass?

His problem was solved when Noak brained one of them from behind and the remaining heroes suddenly became aware that maybe they should've checked the driller's hut behind them after all. With one of their number collapsed forward, pole-axed by a first-rate head trauma. Calder shoved his blade into the exposed neck of the shield-warrior who'd whirled around to face him. The giant went down gurgling behind the metal facemask, no doubt a look of surprise on his face to match Calder's shocked realisation that the shield-warrior had taken his dagger with him. Showing a little more foresight than his master, Noak tried to pull a loaded crossbow off his victim, right up until the second when one of the assassins shoulder-charged the manservant and sent him flying sideways.

Calder didn't have the luxury of retrieving a weapon from his victim, as four of the baron's bulls jumped over their comrade's corpse and kept on coming at him. He back-pedalled, turned and ran, followed by the killers' roars of fury. The young prince didn't have their armour to slow him down. But then, he wasn't running with leg muscles the circumference of a tree trunk and pursuing hungry unarmed prey, either. It took a lot to sweat in weather as cold as this, but Calder managed it, reaching the shadow of the creaking oil derrick a couple of steps ahead of his pursuers. He swivelled around desperately. To one side the two slaves were still blindly pushing the rotation wheel. He lunged for the wooden measuring stick half-covered in tar and held it up, a blunt useless spear against the five giants closing in on him. They still hadn't drawn their crossbows, leaving Calder to face a thicket of sword points and axe heads pointed in his direction.

'Come on, lads. You can let me go. I'll make it worth your while. Just see me back to my side of the border and there'll be more silver in it for you than you'll earn in a lifetime of humping for the baron.'

'Careful, your highness,' one of them laughed, breathing hard, 'you strike me with that pole and you're going to leave an oily scratch on my tunic.'

'Do the smart thing,' pleaded Calder.

'You think that free you're good for more than a farthing back home?' sneered one of the men. 'Only way your hide is worth anything is the baron's blood price on you. We toss you across the border, the only people getting rich are the soldiers serving in what used to be your army. Except it isn't anymore, is it? Heard it belongs to your bitch now, except she ain't even that, is she?'

Calder waved the measuring stick menacingly, but it only made the shield-warriors laugh harder. 'You don't get to talk about Sibylla like that. She's a highborn and you're lowly pack rats not fit to stand sentry on her door.'

'Are you really going to make us work for this?' growled one of the shield-warriors, shifting the axe he held between his hands. 'Baron wants you back for the fire, but nobody said anything about you needing to have your wedding tackle attached when we hand you over.'

'Work for this?' Calder glanced back to where Noak lay prone in the snowdrift, his ribs being kicked by the same shield-warrior that had shouldered him down. 'If it's a blade or kindling that's on offer, you braves better practice your sales pitch.'

A low hissing noise sounded behind Calder. What the hell's that? One of the warriors made to move forward, but his colleague halted him. 'Stomped, not sliced. He's got to walk back on his own feet. I'll be cursed if I'm carrying him all the way to the castle.'

The hissing was louder now and it suddenly occurred to Calder what else sounded like an ice snake homing in on a man's heat. He hurled the oil-measuring pole forward like a javelin, glancing off the metal mask of the shield-warrior in front of him. The distraction only lasted a second, but it was long enough for him to turn and start running up the slope without one of the shield-warriors cutting out his hamstrings with their blade. Calder had put maybe five feet behind him when the oil well exploded. That was what Calder's canny old retainer had been doing when the prince had snowballed his back. Shutting off the valve to the well. But the driller's slaves hadn't known. They had still been walking their circle, slower and slower, building up pressure. Pieces of machinery scythed out, cutting down half of the baron's killers, the derrick replaced by a fountaining black gusher spewing oil over the virgin snow. Incredibly, the two blind slaves had escaped the explosion. They were still walking the circle, except their walk was now a sprint, the well's wooden beam unattached from its pumping mechanism. Two of the shield-warriors came to their feet, distinctly unamused by the devastation wrought on their friends. Calder kept scrambling up the slope, but a crossbow bolt took him in the back of the left leg, a stream of intense pain as he collapsed down to the snow, screaming.

'Baron's going to be disappointed,' yelled one of the shield-warriors, pulling back the lever on his crossbow. 'But we don't need his blood money that much.'

Not as disappointed as me.

The giant's comrade yelled up the slope as he ploughed through the snow. 'Reckon we're going to have to tar and light you up here, boy, now that you've struck black gold.'

Calder moaned, unable to crawl further. He stared up at the pale silver sky, pregnant with snow clouds. Far above, a pair of black dots circled. Crows from the Halls of the Twice-born, sent to seize his soul in their claws, to carry a dying prince back to his ancestors? Calder clutched at his burning, useless leg, trying to staunch the blood pumping out across the cold hillside. The blood was his oil. Pumping, pumping. Then the nearest black dot spat out a bolt of thunder and it slapped into the slope, exploding with a hundred times the power of a trebuchet, rock and frozen dirt showering down across his head. Another spit from the crow, then another, in quick succession, Calder's ears hardly heard the thunderclaps through the smoke and fury. Breaking through the cloud of vaporised stone and steaming snow, the distant dot emerged. Not a crow, but a flying black monster with two wheels captured spinning inside its body, dragon's breath hazing furiously out of its rear.

Calder shouted up at the flying monster, but his ears rang deaf and the words only sounded in his mind. 'Are you the Hall's crow, are you the—?'

A twin of the ebony-coloured beast emerged out of the cloud of carnage, Noak's prone body clutched by six insect legs, putting the creature's monstrous size into true perspective. Hell's teeth, it's going to feed on him! These monsters were bigger than any insect Calder had ever seen, even out in the hell-haunted wastes where he'd ventured with his crew and schooner. A decapitated arm still clutched a great sword less than a foot from Calder in the snow. Calder rolled over to the limb, prizing open the cold pale fingers, stealing the sword and thrusting the blade up uncertainly towards the creatures. 'Come on, you great ugly dung beetles. I've fought armies and killers. I've battled creatures out on the sea flows that make you look like lantern flies. I am holding your fate in my hand.'

Hovering almost soundlessly, the closest flying beast opened a red eye, painting Calder's chest with a warm red cross. 'The evil eye, is it?' He puckered a kiss up towards the monster. 'Come on, you bloody demon, you're boring me to death down here.'

It's kissed him back, the sharp nick of a something flying through the air almost too fast to follow and slapping into his chest. He looked down dumbly at the tiny needled tooth embedded in his tunic. He laughed. Calder had taken worse sled splinter scratches on his hands. Then the young prince experienced the novelty of ninety thousand volts of electricity coursing through his muscles. After that, Calder didn't feel much at all.

***

It came as a considerable surprise to Calder that he was actually able to open his eyes. Every muscle in his body felt as though he had been expertly filleted, dragged out of his flesh, and run through a mangle before being carelessly shoved back inside his carcass. Groaning and trying to hold down the vomit inside his gut, he opened his eyes. I might have known. Standing in front of his cot with arms on both hips, studying Calder's agony, was that useless wizard, Matobo the Magnificent.

'Those flying fire beetles were yours?' asked the prince.

'Don't be overwhelming me with your gratitude, boy,' said Matobo. 'There were another two companies of the baron's guardsmen fast on the heels of those pretty boys I saved you from.'

'Saved me? I feel like I've been fried in whatever corner of hell you summoned that pair of flying monsters from.'

'I had to put the zap on you and your friend. Those stretcher legs on my... flying beetles, weren't going to hold your weight so good if you took in your mind to start struggling.'

Calder tried to sit up. He stared out of one of the room's narrow stained glass windows. It looked like the capital outside. Late evening. I'm home. 'Am I inside your tower?'

'Where else? My pets landed you and Jeeves down here yesterday. You've been sleeping for a while now. You don't need to worry about any of the commanders in what used to be your army coming knocking for you, though. I implanted a false memory inside the mind of one of the shield-warriors who wasn't turned into a Roman Candle by your exploding oil well gag. After I put a match to the oilfield, I left him thinking you and Jeeves were crispy critters.'

'Who is Jeeves?'

'Your family retainer, boy.'

'Noak. He's alive too?'

'Yeah, I was feeling generous. Man works for me, he gets free medical.'

Calder's hand snaked down to his leg. The trousers had been removed along with his tunic, and he was wearing a white dressing gown cut from a material that seemed impossibly light and soft, yet as warm as a bearskin jacket. And even more impossibly, his leg seemed in perfect working order. The skin where the crossbow bolt had slammed through muscle and bone was red and itched slightly, but apart from that, as good as new. He touched his chin. Someone had shaved him. An expert barber too, his cheeks felt as clean as a babe's. 'By the gods, does your sorcery know no bounds?'

'Oh, I'm just full of tricks.'

'A pity you don't have a poultice capable of healing wounds without leaving my head feeling like hell's own hangover.'

'That's the effect of a different potion you're feeling, nothing to do with your injuries. Just a little something to help you on your way.'

Calder felt a shiver of fear as he noticed the wizard's familiar – a large black hunting hound – slip through an open door into the stone bedchamber. Whenever some fool called into question Matobo's mastery of sorcery, the wizard mumbled a spell over his dog, and then the hound would speak, conversing with doubters as if the animal was human. Calder had seen such magic many times with his own eyes. Matobo would then smile menacingly as he informed a sceptic that the hound had once been a merchant who had cheated him, and explain how he turned the trader into a dog for the crime. It wasn't a trick of ventriloquism, either. The wizard could walk miles away, and the cursed dog would still plead with you to save it from its evil master.

'You can keep on feeling generous, wizard. I'm going to need your sorcery to sneak me into the palace, and then I'm going to carve out the skull of every member of the Privy Council that supported my removal.'

Matobo sighed. 'Magic I may be, but suicidal I ain't. Every nation on the continent knows that you've been removed from the throne, and there's no spell of forgetfulness big enough to fix that. A few palace guards I can handle, the army of mercenaries and foreign shield-warriors your princess has brought to the party is another matter.' He turned to his familiar. 'Bring my friends in.' He gazed down at Calder as the hound trotted obediently out. 'I've got alternative arrangements for you. I'm going to send you to a place where the price on your head won't mean a whole lot. As you might imagine, that's pretty damn far away.'

'This is where I was born, this is where I will die,' Calder insisted. 'It is my birthright. Sibylla will see me. She'll help me regain my throne.'

'You think so?' He rummaged around in the pockets of his purple robes, digging out a tiny globe the size of a marble.

'Is that your crystal ball? It looks too small to scry into the future.'

Matobo grunted. 'Even better. This toy shows you the past, kid. At least, it does when it scurries into the right room and its cameras are working properly.'

He mumbled something at the globe and it unfurled legs, turning into a spider-like creature. The little metal beast flexed its pincers, rising up on its hind legs, as if begging Matobo the Magnificent for food. The wizard whispered at it again. 'Sibylla surveillance file. Six days ago. Her bedchamber.' At his command a flat square of light formed above the spider, little black lines flickering down the brightness until a picture appeared, like some priest's illumination on parchment. It was a perfect picture, though, capturing Sibylla's gorgeous flawless skin as if Calder were spying on the scene through a keyhole. Sadly, the flawless picture came with perfect sound too. Sibylla was naked and writhing in the arms of someone else he recognized, the High Marshal of the Narvalak army. If it's a pardon she's earning, she needn't enjoy it so much.

'The baron has promised the priests they'll be given the prince alive,' said the High Marshal. 'I can have the boy brought here for you to see, if you want.'

'Why would I want that?' asked Sibylla. 'Your cardinal wants Calder for burning. It'll be quicker if you ship him straight back to your country. Bringing him into the capital will only encourage any dissidents left alive. Let Calder's future be written across the sea and out of sight of our peasants here.'

The high marshal scratched his naked scarred ass. 'I thought you might want to slip him a vial of poison for old time's sake. In my land his end will not be quick, not that which a warrior deserves.'

'The cardinals will hardly trust me if I can't even send them a single deposed royal. You told me the church values competence above all.'

The soldier stroked Sibylla's spine as he shrugged. 'As you wish.'

Calder's fist punched through the scene, the hairs on his arm painted with the light of his now definitely ex-fiancée's coupling as the conversation died away to be replaced by moans of pleasure. 'Make it stop.'

'I warned you,' said the sorcerer. 'When you lit out of here with your army and your fleet, you weren't going to war, you were creating a vacancy. And nature does so abhor a vacuum. Especially when it's the nature of a perfect pampered princess.'

'Has your Seeing Eye truly shown me the truth?'

Matobo pushed the spider into a tiny sphere and tossed it to him to catch as if it was a child's marble. 'The kind of truth that opens your eyes. Guess this game hasn't worked out for either of us.'

'You still have your powers and position,' said Calder, bitterly. 'What am I left with? Ashes and the taste of mud in my mouth.'

'If it's any consolation, I am going to have to pack up here too. Leastwise, out of your country. It's getting mighty tiresome scraping your ex-girlfriend's assassins off my courtyard every morning.' Matobo wiggled his fingers mysteriously. 'And who knows, sooner or later one of those suckers might get lucky. And as someone a lot wiser than me once said, old Matobo's going to have to be lucky all the time. Sibylla's friends only got to get lucky once.'

Calder managed to push himself up and stay sitting on the cot, gathering the sheets around his body. 'There is nowhere so distant that it will be out of reach of Narvalak's fleet.'

'You'll be surprised. I got me a friend with a real special schooner.' Behind the wizard, the door opened, two people entering the bedchamber along with the wizard's canine familiar. One of them was a woman, every bit as handsome as Sibylla, although in the newcomer's case, the princess's pert superiority had been traded for a round-faced curiosity. The woman was not richly dressed. A single-piece green suit that looked like a washerwoman's overalls, marked with an oval heraldic emblem on her shoulder, the garment's material stiff and strong like sail fabric. Her companion, though, was a true oddity. Tall and spindly, he wore an identical set of overalls covering metallic gold skin, as if he'd been gilded as a babe in the precious metal. His face appeared noble and slightly pained, with an exotic cast about it that went beyond the sheen of his golden skin. Even queerer was his hair – not hair at all, but a close brush of wire, also gold, like a plate-armoured knight wearing a moulded helm.

'This is the man?' asked the woman in a low, smoky voice.

'Prince Calder Durk,' said the wizard. 'Meet Lana Fiveworlds, captain of that special schooner I was telling you about. Her friend is Zeno, works as the first mate on said ship.'

'You want me to take passage with a female master?' spat Calder in disbelief.

'Stow that shizzle,' advised the wizard. 'And it isn't just passage she'll be offering you. It's a job on her schooner too.'

The woman Lana ignored Calder's anger, reaching down to scratch the head of the wizard's hound. 'You still with this old reprobate, Buddy? Thought you might have traded up to a better class of master by now?'

'Pah,' said the dog, half a resigned growl of agreement.

'My hound!' said Matobo.

Calder shivered in superstitious fear. 'You expect me to demean myself by working as a common sailor, wizard? I have the honour of my house to uphold. You cannot mean me to flee my own land in such a pauper manner?'

'You call this a little favour?' laughed Lana Fiveworlds. 'Taking his neo-barbarian slipped-back ass on the Gravity Rose? Is the boy even housetrained? It'll be quicker teaching that pet monkey of Polter's to be crew. What kind of retards were his ancestors anyway, settling on this hell world?'

'Wasn't their fault,' said Matobo. 'Didn't you read the wiki on this world? The first settlers came in racked, stacked and packed on coffin ships. Overpopulation excess, poor as dirt. Too poor to pay for a decent survey of the Hesperus system. When they set down, this world was a paradise. Forty years later the interglacial ended, and a full-on ice age started. I still have the original brochure from nine hundred years ago. Fragrant pine forests and sandy beaches. Of course, the settlers were too poor to afford a mass lift-out from Hesperus, even if they'd turned up a civilised planet willing to stamp a quarter of a million no-money colonists' entry visas. The mining combine backing them shrugged its shoulders, pointed to the emigration indemnity waiver and walked. So here their descendants stayed, and here they shiver.'

'Jeez,' said the strange gold-skinned sailor. 'You just have to look at the forests here. Steel-tough pines you need a plasma cutter to fell. Any biologist worth a dump in the park could've told you what kind of weather pattern that's going to mean. Wasn't any beach-and-bikini settlement.'

'You got that right,' the wizard turned back to Calder. 'So this is how it is, your highness. Exile is never easy. Take it from someone who can't go home himself. But it's either my friends here, or execution by burning if you stay. Trust me, working as crew isn't as bad as it sounds. Not when you're on a magic vessel.'

Calder felt recovered enough from his injuries for a flash of anger towards the sorcerer. 'Trust you! The last time you asked me to trust you, all I ended up losing was my love, my kingdom, my crew, my ship, and now my honour.'

'You put it like that,' said Lana Fiveworlds, 'and I might start liking you. What with us having so much in common and all.'

The golden sailor, Zeno, laughed. 'Anyone who's met Rex Matobo has that story in common. You should be ashamed of your flammy ass, old man, coming down here and pulling your Wizard of Oz scam on this failed world.'

The wizard raised his hands placatingly. 'It was for the locals' good. Could've got them real organized if the horse here I'd backed came in. This place is mineral-rich. Drag it back to the carbon age, set up a freight sling in orbit, and the same mining combine that dumped this hole would be clamouring for cargo boosts from us. Give it a hundred years and we'd be streaming out minerals, a line of solar sails so tight that traffic control would need an upgrade to handle them. And best of all, you do the mining here old school-style, and you'd be pumping out so much CO2 that soon enough the place would be global-warming itself back to short sleeves and cocktails by the beach.'

'Yeah,' said Lana Fiveworlds, 'you're a real philanthropist, Rex. But seeing as how the reality is you've got everyone here all steamed up at you, same as normal, how come you're not running out and taking Prince Charming with you? I pegged your ship in a crater on the moon, stashed under a stealth web.'

'My ship's a fine craft, but she's hardly bigger than a shuttle,' said Matobo. 'And I've still got bounty hunters trying to collect on the warrants on my head.'

'Strange that,' said Lana. 'How everyone who you 'help' always seems to end up on the lam with a lynchmob a couple of steps behind them.'

'Risk and reward so often travel together.'

'Don't they just,' said Zeno.

'I owe Calder Durk a little more than a no-frills ticket out of his homeland,' said Matobo. 'If it was simple as that, I could have kept the courier I sent to you waiting until I retrieved the prince from his difficulties, then packed him off in the direction of the first civilised port. Mister Durk needs a new life. The kind of life the Gravity Rose so kindly provided for me in the old days.'

'This is it then?' said Calder. 'You would make a coward of me. I am to run away, exiled?' He hardly cared now. All he could think of was Sibylla in the arms of that foreign dog. Sibylla had encouraged him to walk the path to war, and now here she was, welcoming their common enemy's embrace – it didn't bear thinking about. Be glad your father and mother passed before they could see this. Be glad your brothers died in battle. Be glad the council already loathed you as an untested, untried pup. Unable to be crowned king until you'd proved yourself with a triumph.

'Will Noak bear this exile with me?'

Matobo shook his head. 'Your manservant was on his heels as soon as I fixed up his broken ribcage. Said you and he had an agreement. I paid him off on your behalf, the new queen sitting on your treasury and all.'

'You're not going to run away, your highness,' said Lana. 'You're going to fly. In style.'

Calder felt a twinge in his leg where the crossbow bolt should still be impaled. 'Are we to travel by Matobo the Magnificent's giant beetles?'

'Matobo the what?' Zeno laughed.' You and me going to have a few words, you ever going to call yourself crew.'

'Where are my clothes?' asked Calder.

'Incinerated,' said Matobo. The wizard produced a white set of undergarments and a pair of full-body overalls similar to the ones worn by the female captain and her golden sailor. 'You recognize these greens, skipper?'

Lana seemed amused. 'You kept them, all this time?'

'You're about my build, my prince,' said the wizard. 'They should fit you. Put them on, and may they bring you luck.'

'The kind that ain't bad,' added Zeno.

They showed no sign of leaving, so Calder drew on the underpants, vest and then stepped into the green single-piece uniform. A whole village might share the fire of a great hall in the depths of winter, so Calder wasn't overly concerned or self-conscious as the wizard and his retinue observed his nakedness. Calder reached down by his side. It felt empty with no scabbard. 'I lost my sabre when my ice schooner was fired at harbour.'

'We got our own,' said Lana, laughing.

'Where is the humour in that?'

'The shore boat that landed my friends here is known as a sabre,' explained Matobo. 'It's an acronym. SABRE. Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine. And you had better be on your way. A nighttime takeoff will draw less attention to your presence.'

'Shizzle, Matobo. You worried we'll melt the lead on your tower's roof? We'll hover on repulsers until we hit the mesosphere,' said Lana. She looked at Calder. 'Don't worry about your sword, your highness. Believe it or not, we do have some blades racked in the Gravity Rose, for our own little medieval moments. We'll give you one thing to take with you, though.' She looked across at her golden-skinned sailor and winked. 'You remember that two-timing louse Pitor, and what I did to him when we docked at Zeta Reticuli?'

Zeno shrugged. 'As well as your ex-boyfriend does, I'm sure. What is it with you organics and your plumbing?'

Lana slapped Calder on the arm. 'Time to have some fun, your highness.'

Fun. Calder remembered what that was like. It seemed a hell of a long time ago, though.

***

Sibylla dragged herself out from under her heavy, warm, quilted blankets, pulling back the velvet curtains on her large four-poster bed. There was the sound again. She hadn't been certain at first, what with the noise of the loutish high marshal snoring beside her, but someone was clearly urinating within earshot. Given that the only chamber pot in the royal apartments was tucked under her bed, and the nearest alternative toilet was the moat's ramparts a corridor's walk away, this wasn't a wholesome development.

The recently crowned queen reached under the bed, finding the hidden dagger scabbard. She removed it, scabbard and all, not yet drawing it. The blade was poisoned and she didn't want to risk pricking herself, still half-asleep. Not unless there really was an assassin inside the palace's royal apartments. Perhaps someone on the staff who had needed to fill up with a couple of litres of liquid courage, only to find themselves caught short on the way to remove Sibylla from the throne. One of her younger sister's thugs maybe, the princess hoping to move herself up the line of royal precedence now there were two kingdoms to claim, rather than one? Or a loyalist from the previous regime? Perhaps Sibylla hadn't purged the ranks of the royal bodyguard as thoroughly as she thought she had?

Sibylla felt the cold from the wind before she spotted the open door on the balcony. Her royal gown of state laid spread across the floor, and the smell! She stepped barefooted through the warm puddle soaking her clothes, and mastering her revulsion, she tore back the heavy curtain. The balcony was empty? She stepped carefully outside, her dagger drawn, ready to slice the rope of any attacker's grappling hook. But Sibylla found only the forty-foot drop of the granite walls outside, the dark bulk of the city beyond and below, a handful of windows illuminated by candlelight at this late hour. Merely the cold to kill her with pneumonia if she tarried here naked too long.

For a second, Sibylla thought she heard a distant echo of familiar laughter. Calder Durk? The mocking noise came from the sky. A distant shape dark against the black of night sky, a night bird shrinking into the heavens on this freezing cold night? She kicked her way past her ruined garment in disgust. Did ghosts get to take a leak one last time, before being carried away into the Halls of the Twice-born? Away into the heavens? She sighed. Maybe the priests would know? Sadly, there would be a lot more of them crossing the ice from Narvalak in the years ahead.

***

Matobo had the contents of his storage chests laid across his bed, sifting through the things he'd collected during his years on Hesperus.

'There isn't much to show here for years of freezing my ass off on this lousy planet,' he told his hound.

The throat muscles around the dog's neck bulged as it started to speak. There were a few things that even top-notch genetic engineers couldn't get right. 'You should've told Lana the truth.'

Unsurprisingly, Matobo found he didn't agree with his hound. 'If she knew about the prince, there is no way she'd be shipping out with him. Not even as stowage, let alone crew.'

The hound shook its head sadly. 'You think I don't know, but I do. It was you who warned the priests the prince was heading for the baron's castle. You set Calder up to be betrayed. Ally or not, Baron Halvard had no choice. It was switch sides or be invaded.'

Matobo shrugged, but didn't deny the accusation. 'Calder wouldn't have left if he still thought he had a chance to get his kingdom back, would he? And this way everyone thinks he's dead. Killed in an oil blaze set by the baron's assassins, murdered with nothing left to live for.'

'You underestimate them,' growled the hound.

'I'm not about to do that. Listen, pup, it's all about risk and reward, same as it ever was.'

No. I'm careful enough. There wasn't going to be much evidence left behind to show that Rex Matobo had even been on this planet. Not after he'd packed and left the cold world of Hesperus light years behind him. Never let it be said that Matobo the Magnificent wasn't a careful man. Matobo had grown even more cautious after the events of a few months ago. The heavily armed scout ship jumping out of hyperspace into Hesperus system. Coming looking for something incredibly valuable. Expecting only a few axe-wielding barbarians as opposition. Matobo chuckled. Nobody expected a wizard. Certainly not one paranoid enough of uninvited visitors to have seeded Hesperus orbit with hundreds of stealth mines. Hardly a fair fight at all, but then that was the only sort Matobo got out of bed for. Any other kind of conflict was far too dangerous and unpredictable. Matobo was even going to jettison their pilot's corpse into the sun before he jumped out. Burn it up on the same trajectory he had used to dispose of the badly holed scout ship. Not a scrap of DNA left to indicate that one of their crew had been captured alive, the pilot's mind probed and stripped of every useful scrap of data, putting Matobo back in the game. And back on the run, of course. But he was used to that.

'You are letting the Gravity Rose's crew run the risk,' accused the hound. 'If Calder Durk is traced back to the ship, everyone on board is going to be murdered to ensure their silence.'

'Lana and Zeno owe me their lives,' said Matobo. 'I think we can call our debt balanced out now, don't you? And it probably won't come to such unpleasantries; let's plan for the worst and hope for the best. We just need to find ourselves a buyer for Calder Durk. Can't do that with the merchandise on board, waiting to be jacked out from under us, can we? After we secure ourselves an honest buyer for the prince, then everyone is happy.'

'Do I look happy?' asked the genetically modified hound.

'You've got a naturally sad face,' said Matobo. 'Even as a puppy you always looked like you were chewing a wasp.'

The hound sucked in its cheeks and sloped off. Matobo's own conscience on four goddamn legs.

CHAPTER THREE

Sliding Void

Calder felt a sprinkle of water on his face as he came around, his head throbbing as hard as it had been inside the wizard's tower. Except he wasn't in the wizard's tower, he was in a metal-walled chamber with the strange golden sailor, Zeno, sitting in a chair opposite a bunk unit built into the wall where Calder was laid out. 'What happened?'

'You went freaky-deaky when we lost gravity. I tranquilized your ass. You were getting kind of hysterical anyway, after Lana let you mark your territory back in your old castle. Damn, you fleshies, water in, water out. I don't know what psych handbook she got that shizzle from.'

Floating, Calder remembered floating and the panic rising in him, as if he was cast adrift in the darkness, the infinite night. Calder moaned and rubbed his throbbing temples.

'Matobo the—' Zeno sniggered, — 'Magnificent filled your head with a new language back in his tower when he was fixing your leg, used an information virus to rewrite your brain. That's why you're feeling that headache. Your superior temporal gyrus is still adjusting itself. And it's why you can understand Lingual. You kind of spoke a variation of it anyway, if you account for nearly a thousand years of cyclic drift in syntax and the fact that your ancient ancestors hailed from a Swedish factory world.'

Calder cast about the room, a steel vessel? How does such a wonder work? He noted the round glass portal across from him had been transformed into a mirror, hiding the sight of whatever lay outside the ship.

Zeno picked up a hypodermic filled with a bubbling red substance. 'Got your orientation virus here, but seeing as you have a headache already, I'm not going to burn your brain with that A. is for Android, H. is for Hyperspace bunk. Too much of that'll give you brain cancer, which'd take a bucket full of medical nanotech to fix.'

'I don't think Matobo's spell of language is working. I can't understand a word of what you're saying.'

'Baby, that's because you're living in the dark ages and short of about a millennia of context. But don't worry. Doctor Zeno's got himself an alternative to a neural rewrite in his medicine bag.' He reached back to a workbench cluttered with unfamiliar machines and tools, turning around with a black skull cap made of some shiny dark material 'I know you've got theatres and actors on your world; picked up that much from the primer that Matobo broadcast to us before we landed.' He lifted the cap and fitted it over Calder's head.

'Is this more of your sorcery?'

'Sorcery, no, but a spell, yes. Old school sorcery, and I should know. I used to be in the business. Acting, that is. Think of what you're going to watch as a piece of theatre. You'll see a play, but you'll watch it through the eyes of one of the actors, experience what the actor feels. Hate. Love. Fear. So real it's beyond real. And that's shizzle you can trademark.'

'You wish to amuse me?'

'Edutainment, man. Normally you'd get to interact, take part in the play, but I've turned that function off. You're a couch potato for your first ride.'

Calder felt uneasily at the cap. 'What would I learn from attending a play?'

'It's a cop show, one of the best, a series called Hard TAP. Most relevant episode I could think of. There are these two heroes, right, cops, and they're going to a world settled by Amish types. Spaceport is a sealed city with minimal contact with the rest of the world. Whole thing is about the mores of modernity as they interact with a pre-fusion age civilisation. Personally speaking, I think the whole thing's a rip-off of Harrison Ford in Witness. But the cops get to explain the real world to the Amish . . . like the existence of modern dental care and how you flush a toilet, and you'll be picking up on those basics too. As introductions to the modern age go, this one is as gentle as I can make it for you. One thing . . .' He bent in and adjusted the headset. 'You'll be in the sim for six months, relative. Out here, it'll be more like ten minutes.'

'I am not sure about this.' The cap starting to itch as Zeno fiddled with the strange black length of—

MotherrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRR!

— impact-retardant plastic, the sim controls still clutched in Zeno's hands after all this time.

'You son of a . . .!' Calder tugged the cap off his head. 'Sticking me with a sim when my brain's still hot from some half-price neural rewrite.'

Zeno pushed Calder back. 'Down, your highness. That's the trouble with these damn things. You're going to be pimp-rolling down the ship like you are police rather than crew.' He clicked a button on the side of the remote, advancing through all the titles he had on the ship's archive. He stopped when the words, Hell Fleet: Episode Twelve were flashing on the remote's tiny green screen. 'This show is a lot more relevant to business on board the Gravity Rose. Six months as an ensign in a TAFC jump carrier. But let's wait until this afternoon to make a spacer out of you. Otherwise you'd be kicking down doors and maybe hit an airlock release by mistake. Too much too soon will fry your mind – but I've got to warn you, soon enough your barbarian butt's going to be gagging for another episode.'

'I'm no sim addict,' protested Calder. 'And you are a . . . robot, an android.'

'Good guess. Weren't any robots starring in that cop show, is how I remember it. Amish don't allow robots on their worlds, not even in the spaceport. 'Cept you didn't want to call me a robot, did you? Go on man, use the old cop slur . . .'

'Oiler.'

'See, ten minutes as a cop and you're already acting like a racist. Yeah, I'm a dirty oiler. Just like you're a filthy fleshie.'

Calder rubbed his aching forehead. His scalp felt hot. He realized it was his mind, cooling from being excited by the headset. He couldn't believe it had all vanished, that it had never even existed in the first place. A whole other life. He had been a police agent travelling between worlds, tackling federal cases for the Triple Alliance where local law enforcement was either lacking, corrupt or out of its depth. Calder looked down at his hands, expecting to still see the blood on his hands from the last stand on the Amish world. His partner dead, sold out by a racketeering spaceport manager. Only Calder left, Calder and a few backwoods farmers who he'd convinced to throw aside their pacifists tenets and take up arms against the offworld hitmen arriving to execute the only witnesses to an interstellar crime boss's villainy. Calder had saved the woman and her son in the witness protection programme, exposed the conspiracy and taken care of the crime family's henchmen. Calder had saved the day, and this was his reward? He looked at the sailor with new eyes. Except for Zeno's golden metal skin and the spiky steel Afro, his face was human. 'But you're no clanking machine, why would you need oil?'

Zeno held out his arm, a section of golden skin rippling back to reveal a conduit of black liquid flowing across a carbon frame embedded with micro-machinery. 'I don't bleed blood, just nanotechnology. That's where your racist cop shizzle is coming from.'

'Gods!'

'Yeah, right about now, you're thinking that life with the Amish and your head stuck between your ass is looking like your gravy. I'm right?'

'You're not wrong,' said Calder. 'The rest of the crew, are they similar to the creatures I saw in the spaceport? Are they aliens?'

'Cop instincts now.' Zeno whistled in appreciation. 'The Gravity Rose has got five crew. Well, maybe six, with you. We'll see how that works out. You've met Lana Fiveworlds, the skipper. Me, you know. There's Zack Paopao who takes care of the engines and the engineering on the rear of this bucket. Fleshie-ass human, same as you. Kind of a recluse, though. Our navigator and pilot is called Polter. He's a kag, which is to say a kaggen. Negotiator and cargo man is Skrat. He's a skirl. They're aliens, although truth to tell, humanity hasn't thought of them as anything other than weird-looking amigos for millennia. You'll be seeing why we didn't bring either of those two down to your world. You lay eyes on a man-sized talking lizard and a giant sentient crab inside Matobo's tower and we'd need to be taking your medication to a whole new level.'

'What is your position on the ship?'

'Me?' Zeno placed his arms behind his wiry Afro and leaned back in the chair. 'I pretty much run this place. There's a couple of thousand robots on the ship, real oilers – not self aware, like yours truly. Everything from talking vacuum cleaners to hull repair drones. Huey, Dewey, and Louie, they're all answering to me. I'm the bot boss, the go-to-guy, the man with a plan. I guess you humans prefer having an android on board to manage the vessel's mechs. Makes you feel a little less like gang masters in the slavery business.'

'I don't understand,' sighed Calder. 'How is that you're intelligent while they aren't?'

Zeno shrugged. 'Trick ain't building something like me, man. Trick is building something smart enough to be useful, but dumb enough not to go self-aware. Lot of effort goes into that. Take the Gravity Rose's main computer core. If our ship's AI, Granny, develops herself a little self-awareness, you think she going to want to haul high-quality machine parts from point A to point B for Fiveworlds Shipping? Shizzle no. She's going to be all, 'Hey, there's a quasar near here. I ain't never seen me a quasar. Can't we jump over there, skipper? Please. Please!' Your ship gets herself a soul, then the law says you need to fly yourself to the nearest planet and strip the vessel down and re-home her. You don't have a ship no more, you got yourself a citizen. What us spacers call a wilful ship. If you're sliding void with a cheap-ass outfit, they're going to be tempted to erase that baby girl and do a dirty re-install out in the darks where the law ain't looking too hard. Sometimes ships go missing, and you just know that some fool crew had themselves a 'Sorry Dave, I can't do that' moment. I was one of the first oilers, man.' He tapped the side of his head. 'Back when Sony-Warner didn't know how quantum computing would stir up the soup of an artificial mind. You think they were happy to lose an asset and gain an employee? Sentience is all about complexity; that's what separates you and me from a lump of stone. Well,' he pointed to a silvery figure resting on a shelf, a hand-sized sculpture. 'My smarts, residual royalties, and that . . . a genuine Oscar back from when there was a Republic of California.'

'You had better feed me another sim,' said Calder. 'I'm losing you again.'

'All I'm saying is that old Zeno's three times older than that castle on Hesperus you took a leak over. All this is new for you. It's real ancient to me.' He patted Calder on the shoulder. 'But that's my problem, not yours. Let's head to the bridge and greet the freaks.'

Calder felt a shiver of apprehension. He had glimpsed non-humans arriving in the space port in his sim episode, but as the android had said, that was more real than real. How would actual reality stack up to a cop show? 'They're friendly, the aliens?'

'They're good as human. You were a TAP agent for six months, right? That's where the triple in Triple Alliance Police comes from. Humans, kaggenish, and skirls. The alliance's three dominant species. The Triple Alliance is the nearest thing to a superpower in this corner of the galaxy. I sit your butt through the pilot episode of Hell Fleet, and you'll know all you need to know about The Man. Except that we try and stay clear of alliance space on the Gravity Rose. We're a small indie outfit so we work the independent worlds. That's the Edge space your cop buddies were so scornful of.'

'The Edge is light on law.'

'Light on bureaucracy, too,' said Zeno, opening the door to his cabin. 'You reach your thousandth birthday and you'll realise that life's too short for that paper-pushing, permit-chasing shizzle, too.'

***

Calder hadn't seen anything like the bridge of The Gravity Rose before. He found himself standing in a heavily armoured tower in the middle of the vessel's superstructure, staring out over the pitted metal hull. An industrial landscape of pipes, plates, sensor dishes and modular hardware – the vista dotted with lights: yellow from her portholes; red from the hull beacons, green-tinted illumination from domes filled with creepers and trees and the assorted bounty of hydroponics domes. The vegetation's shadows slowly shifted across cold mechanical valleys and rises outside, a flickering green web . . . the hydroponics' forest canopies moving with the breeze of air circulation systems. It wasn't the infinite star-scattered darks outside the ship that stunned the young exile, however. Nor the hazed view of the universe from standing behind a rippling magnetic shield. The bridge's interior was enough to stun him all by itself. Difficult to discern the bridge's crucifix-shaped chamber, ceiling and walls – bony arches ostensibly exposed to the void outside between her dark carbon struts. Console pits swam with chattering icons while crew chairs floated suspended on purring crane arms. Behind ranks of systems desks and console banks, the command centre was painted with a dancing rainbow storm of holograms. Like a dream's procession, flat oblongs of sensor displays flickered into existence in the air, briefly sketching out the velocity and vector of distant comets. Just one of a hundred displays and thousands of icons, disappearing and reforming across the deck... a storm of information overload. Colour-coded and three-dimensional. Water use. Cabin temperatures. Malfunctioning atmosphere recycling systems due repair. Empty storage chambers being sterilised by exposure to the void. Buggy ship sub-routines being rebooted. Robots being allocated. Droids being recharged. Solar flares being monitored.

Zeno came up behind the prince-in-exile. 'Hell of a sight, isn't it.'

'It's a complete mess. How can you make any sense out of this? You might as well stand behind the wheel of an ice schooner and invite half your crew to scream directions at you while the rest leap up and down tossing maps and charts in your direction.'

Zeno tapped the side of his head, smiling knowingly. 'These days, there's a little bit of me in every human – the droid inside. Not inside your Amish friends, of course. They don't do implants. But the crew of the Gravity Rose have them. Without a computer implanted inside your skull, you can't possibly cope with so much information. We might as well let the ship's AI push out on autopilot, retire to our cabins for the duration and sip cocktails for the rest of the voyage. Some crews do that. Not the clever ones, though, remember that. Lazy out here ain't much different from dead.'

Calder shivered in dread. Is the apprehension mine, or residual memories from rubbing shoulders with the Amish for so long? To have an organic computer burrowed alongside your brain like a leech, the machine's creepers sucking nourishment from your blood, sending you information when you summoned it, filtering this headache of information overload into some semblance of sense. 'I'm not so sure.'

'Personally speaking,' smiled Zeno, 'I'd say that the droid inside is what makes you human, these days, if that ain't a contradiction. A little bit of logic and analysis to cool those animal passions. You'll need an implant, one day, if you're to work on board. Time comes, maybe you'll even want it.'

'Can't imagine that.'

'Try experiencing an implant viscerally, first, in Hell Fleet's pilot episode. Then tell me you don't want it.'

'How about you, Zeno. Do you need an implant to handle this?'

'Man, when it comes to all this, I am an implant. To me, everything you see here is slow motion. This dance can speed up . . . if the ship's threatened, for instance. But you fleshy types can't cope with too much hypervelocity decision-making, not without being seriously genetically modified. And then you don't appear so human anymore.'

'Does the Gravity Rose get threatened often? I was under the impression she was a merchantman, not a warship?'

'More than you'd think. Any jump-capable starship is worth a fortune, even today. These babies aren't like ground cars, one sitting in every citizen's garage. And to pay for cargoes to be transported between worlds is no small thing – a load's got to be seriously valuable to someone, somewhere. You rub those two economic facts together, and there's no shortage of pirates, privateers, hijackers, criminals and corrupt governments looking to steal, jack, kill or impound our ass and take everything we have. For crew, it's like travelling with a million dollars stuffed inside our trousers.'

'If the ship is worth so much, why doesn't the captain just sell the vessel and retire to a life of idle luxury?'

'I guess Lana likes moving about too much for that. Besides, the Gravity Rose has been passed down through her family. The ship is like a family member to the skipper. Only one she's still got, as it happens. That makes us her cousins or some such. Every ship you'd want to serve on is like that. We're more than brothers in arms – or tentacles and claws – and you wouldn't sell your grandmother, would you?'

'I know a few nobles back home who would,' said Calder, trying to dismiss the raw pain of his betrothed's betrayal.

'What happens on the dirt stays on the dirt,' said Zeno. 'That's an old spacer saying. Up here, you're crew, and each other is all we got. When you're sliding void, the light of the last dirt you touched down on might not even catch up with you for another million years. When things go wrong, you need to be able to trust the crew next to you. If you don't, one of you ain't got no business being on board.'

'Is that why you came when the wizard called?'

'Matobo the Magnificent? Damn. Yeah, partly I guess. He was crew. Not a shining example of the breed, but Rex still had your back when he was on board the Rose.' He indicated the others across the bridge, dismounting from their command seats as crane arms lowered them to the metal decking, each chair chased by wisps of hologram displays still hungrily demanding attention. 'There's one thing we've all got in common with each other. Me, the skipper, Polter, Skrat, Zack Paopao. None of us have exactly got much going on in what we used to call home. In our own way, we're all exiles, same as you.'

If the crew had that in common with Calder Durk, it was about the only thing. Calder had to stop himself from turning tail and fleeing from the two alien members of the crew advancing towards him. His first instinct was to reach for the police-issue burner in a shoulder holster; an item he had never possessed in real life. Skrat, he could just about handle. So, this is what a skirl really looks like up close. Like one of the baron's tall muscular brutes of a shield-warrior, but recast as a humanoid lizard, a solid green-scaled snout of a face with the crimson eyes of a snake and sharp white grin like a serrated dagger. He was wearing a set of green ship overalls, as if someone had decided to play dress-up with their pet killer lizard. Of course, Skrat's uniform had been altered to accommodate the short heavy tail swishing with a hound's enthusiasm. But Polter . . . the scuttling alien navigator had too much of the spider about the way his crab-like carapace advanced. Calder's hackles shivered as though someone had poured half-melted river ice down his back. The police instincts from his sim told him that the creature was from a race that was one of humanity's two greatest allies in this cold, unforgiving universe – the kaggenish. But the prince's eyes fed his brain with the far less reassuring image of a five-foot high six-legged crab with two wavering eyestalks, a pair of small manipulator hands below a massive pair of vestigial fighting claws, and a colourfully tattooed carapace armoured enough to take a schooner-mounted crossbow bolt in his centre and still charge. Rather than rushing at Calder and attempting to shove the prince inside the round fleshy shield-sized mouth under his carapace, the knife-like mandibles around Polter's mouth chattered in an excitable manner. 'Blessings be upon you, Calder Durk. My ship is your ship.'

Skrat just halted, eyeing up his newest crewmember. 'I wonder if this is what you human chaps mean when they say my prince has come? Somehow, one suspects not.'

'Be nice,' said Lana, her chair landing with a bump behind the two exotic creatures. She banged the centre of the web of straps holding her inside the chair and stepped out. 'And I think you'll find, Polter, that my ship is my ship. At least, the last time I checked her registration papers, that's what I read.'

'I was merely being courteous, revered skipper,' said Polter, a slight tone of offence creeping into his voice. Calder watched fascinated at the play of mandibles as the navigator spoke. Gods, how long will it be before I get used to him? He rested his eyes on Lana instead. Far easier. She really was a beauty, and he found his eyes drifting down towards the firm padding around her chest, the buttons teasingly open around the top few buttonholes of her flight suit. Calder jerked his gaze back to her face. She didn't notice that, did she? He was only gazing so intently at Lana because the two aliens on the bridge had disconcerted him, surely?

'This is Skrat,' said Lana, indicating the lizard. 'If you ever shake hands with him on a deal, check your wrist to make sure you've still got all items of personal jewellery intact.' She reached out and affectionately tapped the monstrous navigator's carapace. 'And this is Polter. He's a little skittish around new people, but he's the best navigator in this corner of the void. He can drop us down so close to a system's gravity well that you can hear the water in our ship's pipes boil in protest at the hyperspace translation.'

Calder looked in puzzlement at Lana. 'Why would the water pipes boil?'

'I got him started with the cop shows,' apologised Zeno. 'I'll throw a few Hell Fleet episodes the kid's way tomorrow, when his brain's recovered enough that I don't turn his mind into a hearty barbarian stew.'

'Don't want to fry the new man on the team,' said Lana. 'At least, not yet. Why don't you explain to his highness how this lady flies, Polter?'

'For a ship to enter hyperspace,' said Polter, 'she must jump far outside the gravity well of large planetary bodies such as worlds, suns, gas giants. Gravity fields exert too strong an interaction on the artificial wormholes created by the ship to cross into hyperspace. Jump out too close to a world through an unstable wormhole, and your engines will be fried, then you must exit hyperspace blind – maybe strike a world or moon. The balance of probabilities, however, is that you will simply be left derelict, floating in the void between the stars. Exit hyperspace too near to a system's gravity well, and a similar devilish accident results. Your hyperspace engines will be destroyed. At least on the way into a system, you can signal your destination and pray that a rescue attempt can be made.'

'Damn! Make salvage, is what you make,' said Lana. 'Goodbye ship, hello some vulture of a tug company and the wrecking yard. It's a real art, plotting hyperspace translations. The nearer the system you're entering or exiting, the more complex the math of the jump. But when you arrive light years out from a system, you're left burning expensive fuel on your sub-light drive, wasting valuable time. Lucky for us, Polter is one of the best at what he does. A real artist.'

The explanation seemed almost as inexplicable to Calder as the navigator's alien form. With a body like Polter's, even trying to keep his fighting claws flat against the shell in a gesture of peace, the navigator appeared built for battle, not complex acts of chart reading and pilot mathematics. Just goes to show you, appearances can be deceptive. A little like my darling ex-fiancée. A smile as sweet as honey and a dagger tucked below her dress for your heart. 'Will I be trained in this art, as one of the crew?'

Polter's two manipulator hands danced about, a faint sim-memory alerting Calder that this was the Kaggenish race's laughter. 'No, indeed, Calder Durk. It takes about half an hour to translate a ship between the veil of the mortal universe and the blessed vaults of hyperspace. The act of doing so, of joining with the math, is highly addictive.'

'Addictive?'

'He ain't kidding,' said Zeno. 'Polter here is an aesthete. Kags don't get drunk or high or addicted to sims. Just the way they're built. Tough on the outside, tough on the inside. In the early days of space travel, Earth used human navigators. Most humans lasted a maximum of five jumps before they had to be retired. After that, they just went crazy, chasing the hyperspace high. Kept on jumping their ship all the way to the next galaxy until the skipper put a bullet through their skull. Artificial intelligences can navigate a jump without getting addicted, but then you've also made your ship smart enough to want to bug off and do something more interesting than carrying fleshies about like donkey rides on the beach. Hell, even my android mind would get addicted if I jumped the ship regularly. My brain's wiring is too damn close to yours.'

'It is not a drug,' insisted Polter. 'To travel hyperspace is to travel through the lowest level of heaven. When you breech the mortal world you are connecting with God. It the holy bliss of the maker of all things that I feel. The kaggenish are the godliest of all creatures, thus it is we may travel within the creator's rapture and blessing.'

'So you say, short-stop,' observed Zeno.

'I keep on hoping for a miracle every time we jump,' smiled Lana. 'Like we might exit at some shizzle-hole world and find our anti-matter engines have been upgraded with some nice new shiny Rolls Royce models. Or discover my cargo holds have been filled with precious metals. That's the sort of service this girl would be happy with if I were sliding heaven, rather than sliding void.'

'God sends us life, revered skipper,' corrected Polter, 'that we might shape miracles from its raw materials.'

'And right now we've been sent six-foot of disenfranchised nobleman,' said Lana, banging Calder's arm. 'Although I'm damned if Rex Matobo is any kind of prophet. Talking of which, where's my oracle of the drive rooms? I'm sure I ordered Zack Paopao to the bridge to meet our new crew.'

'I intercepted the chief's response to your missive,' said Skrat. 'The old boy was not particularly polite. The gist, I believe, was that he's rather too busy to run about on ship socials when the engines are falling apart around his ears. There was considerably more profanity in his original memo, however.'

'That's no memo, that's a cry for help,' said Lana. She nodded slyly toward Calder. 'And I think that's just the place for a new crew on his uppers to learn the ropes on board. Wouldn't you say?'

Calder had to wonder why all the others started laughing. The joke, I suspect, is on me.

***

Calder rode the rickety transport tube down the length of the Gravity Rose, listening to the bleeping of a short bipedal robot that was supposedly leading him towards the engine rooms. The low-level machine accompanying him was nothing like Zeno. A boxy four-foot tall slab of electronics with short waddling pipe-like legs. A collection of tool arms hung off either side in lieu of arms – little more than steel poles with pincers, diagnostic sensors, cutters, welders and assorted other tools. The robot had a single eye in the top-right hand corner of its flat casing, a lens behind a circle of glass that would open or contract as it stared short-sightedly at its human charge, whirring each time it refocused. It hummed and hawed and impatiently stamped its steel feet as it stood in front of the control panel at the transparent capsule's nose. Every now and then, the robot interspersed a single word among the digital birdsong coming from the speaker on its front – usually follow or sometimes engines.

Calder had experienced his first episode of Hell Fleet now, served by Zeno like a pusher feeding his latest client. Calder's sim avatar had started out as a console tech and board swapper in Hell Fleet, a junior programmer attached to a carrier vessel's SysMaint division. It seemed an unglamorous start, but then, as Zeno had later proposed, that was the point. Most of the sims' audience were stuck in similarly mundane white and blue collar jobs across the alliance. Lowly origins built up empathy with the viewer. When all the hardship pilots died later in a freak asteroid strike on the flight deck, it made becoming an emergency pilot – tape and virus-trained – feel like an actual achievement the viewer might have lucked into. The Gravity Rose made a lot more sense after the show, but everywhere Calder went, he was seeing things – experiencing things – with two sets of eyes. There was the modern thirtieth century perspective, where a robot like this was just a Sony R4-serv180 maintenance model, as ubiquitous on a ship's decks as the Model T automobile was on the highways of an earlier age. Then there was the viewpoint of Prince Calder Durk, where the walking box was nothing more than the iron golem of Zeno, himself a creation of even greater sorcery. The modern frame of reference laid over the real, hard, primitive life that was his own until recently. Calder's semi-perpetual sense of disorientation wasn't helped by the fact that he was living his tightly compressed artificial sim life through the character and personality of an avatar, experiencing adventures that weren't his. It was a mind shizzle of epic proportions. Was he watching a great metal temple move magically through the star-spattered heavens? Was he riding a half-arsed independent merchantman, the bane of every TAP agent and in-system police officer, with their smuggling, unlicensed cargoes and chancers' scruples? Or was he rattling through an antique held together with sticking plaster and unfounded optimism – the class of ship that wouldn't stand up to the first pass from the hardships of a carrier's fighter wing? Hell, they'd be lucky to survive the radiation blast from a warning shot across the bows.

The trouble was, none of those competing worldviews seemed real to Calder, least of all the first twenty years of his life on Hesperus. Perhaps I should be glad of that. Reality should be freezing out in the plains. The hand of every loyal villager turned against me for the reward Sibylla's placed on my head. Real would be having my feet chained in a pot in front of Narvalo's walls and watching it filled with oil before some nice priest arrives to entertain the mob with a burning torch. If sorcery this be, then I suppose my hat should be doffed to Matobo the Magnificent. Everywhere Calder travelled on the ship felt as warm as a banqueting hall crammed with guests and toasted by a dozen roaring fireplaces. Not just the warmth he felt when he was in Lana Fiveworlds' presence, either. He'd almost forgotten what feeling cold was like – and as a prince royal, he'd felt the chill a lot less frequently than most. Well, it was always said that heaven's fields beyond the Halls of the Twice-born lay as a perpetual paradise. Happy to report, it's true. Somehow, Calder didn't think the priests had the Gravity Rose in mind when they'd sung their hymns. The Gravity Rose was less like the ice schooners of Calder's experience. She seemed closer to a deserted city, empty except for a handful of crew and thousands of semi-autonomous machines that tended acres of echoing, empty cargo chambers, every space as still as a cathedral. Deck after deck of uninhabited passenger cabins, each identical with neatly made beds and powered down entertainment cubicles, each as devoid of human life as the next. Restaurants and large communal areas, all powered down and waiting the reanimating touch of contract stewards and stewardesses to run the decks. Even the vessel's hydroponics domes, filled with lush tropical forests where you might – at a push – pretend you were under an honest farmers' greenhouse – sat empty of woollen-gloved yeomen tending the soil, air inside the domes far too humid to be back on Hesperus. That was without agricultural robots climbing up trunks and spraying fruit, turning over the soil, a hanging mesh of irrigation pipes blasting mists of water and plant food into the undergrowth. The whole ship had the air of a metropolis emptied in the face of a horde's approach. Waiting to be possessed by the first band of raiders to breech its unmanned gates.

Ahead of the transport capsule, Calder noted the plate-like circumference of the blast shield approaching, a massive one-mile high dish protecting the rest of the ship from the brute reactions that occurred at the vessel's business end. The princely part of Calder marvelled that there was enough iron in the world to cast such an artificial bulwark. The fleet ensign from Zeno's sim merely looked at the dark cratered mass, pitted by age and countless engine boosts, and couldn't believe that any shipyard had actually granted a flight worthiness certificate to this ageing iron-carbon composite – barely able to take half the thrust of a modern carrier's engine shielding. Approaching the shield, Calder's capsule tilted down and rode the monorail into the ship's interior, passing through the centre of the shield and out along one of five connecting struts – each the size of an oilrig's legs – that joined the ship's engines to the rest of the craft. Like the Eiffel Tower turned horizontal, girder after girder shot past Calder, the armoured disc behind him now, along with the command, cargo, crew and passenger quarters. Half way along the connecting struts he shot past a rotating set of vanes, seven of them circling about, lazily, as if someone had taken it into their mind to build a windmill capable of harnessing solar winds for their foundry. And in a manner of speaking, it was a foundry – a mill capable of distorting space-time through an artificial singularity and initiating a translation of the whole vessel into hyperspace. Sensitive enough to field interference they had to be well clear of the solar system's mass to jump into hyperspace. They were currently heading out of Hesperus System, rising straight on a vertical trajectory, the quickest way to break free of the tyranny of the local gravity well. Calder couldn't see the frosty orb of his home now. It was no longer visible to the naked eye. With nearly a subjective year of sim living under his belt, it seemed an age ago he had been stumbling through the lethal snowfields, his heart thumping in fear as he fled for his life with loyal old Noak by his side. In reality, he had been gone less than a week, the Gravity Rose boosting up towards light speed, distant stars crawling past. No wonder Calder was beset by panic attacks. Half the time it felt as though he didn't know where he was, who he was or even when he was. Exiled in every way possible.

It only took a second for Calder to pass through the rotating shadow of the vanes and then he was sliding towards the engines. At the far end of the connecting struts lay the ship's drive section. A hexagonal power plant dotted with great spherical structures like mushrooms infesting a tree trunk. Enough room for a sizeable fusion plant to power the ship's internal systems when the vessel's solar panels were too far away from a sun to operate comfortably; more acres and cathedral-like vaults to house the hyperspace engines and in-system antimatter pion reaction drive.

Slowing on the connector strut, the capsule decelerated for the first in a series of vault-thick doors to swing open along the tube into the engine block. As if Calder's capsule was packed full of valuables and being gently stored in a safety deposit box. In reality, the width of the walls was as much to protect the universe outside from the contents of the drive chamber as to keep the engines safe from asteroid strikes and pirate assaults. There wasn't much point piloting a starship unless you could enter a solar system at the end of your journey, and most worlds' inhabitants rightly got very nervous about vessels coming in leaking radiation and other exotic particles. Even with missile silos, fighter bays full of hardships, rail cannons, lasers and the associated panoply of combat, the main difference between a warship and a freighter like the Rose was largely one of intent. Flying the Gravity Rose into a world's surface at just under the speed of light would result in one hell of an insurance loss for the inhabitants. The ship's monorail emerged from the long armoured tunnel into a large chamber, a central floor filled with a series of lozenges, each a steel and crystal construction the size of an apartment block, the crystalline portion of their surfaces gently pulsing with blue light. After six simulated months sharing the sensibilities of an ensign in Hell Fleet, this hyperspace translation matrix was still as good as black magic to Calder – largely because it might as well have been sorcery to his fleet avatar. For all the analogies heaped upon the understanding of such devices – think of it as knife to slice into the deeper realities of the universe – think of it as a translation device to convert the mathematical language of one reality into another – think of it as a piano's tuning fork to . . . no, think of it as a big steaming shizzle-pile of the wrath of the gods, able to mangle the stuff of creation, mould it into spears and hurl it like one of Vega's thunderbolts across the Creators' phantasmal realm. Calder's barbarian explanation made as much sense as any the sims had provided with their talk of advanced Brane theory, affine-parameters and T-duality. His capsule pulled in behind a pod already docked at a halt and the robot driver at the front stomped around, tweeting static in-between its follow follow. A door on the side of the capsule rolled into the roof, allowing man and machine to step onto a viewing gantry overlooking the jump matrix. There was a second Sony unit waiting for them, the two robots sharing a burst of communication before forming up behind each other and waddling off. Unlike the robot from the pod, this new boy had its front panel painted white with black characters scrawled across it. The language virus which had burnt the alliance's lingua franca, Lingual, into Calder's skull, provided no comprehension of the writing; but part of his sim learning dimly signalled that these were Sino characters or similar. Lots of Chinese-racial worlds inside the Triple Alliance – Calder's partner in the Hard TAP sim had been one Fu-han Meng. A racist cop voice rose with him, sighing: With a surname like Paopao, you think the chief of the drive rooms is going to be Färsk Nordic rather than a chink?

With each other for company, the robots seemed to have forgotten about their human charge, and Calder groaned, following after the duo as they marched beside the glass of the viewing gallery, little flashes of cerulean light flashing off their metalwork. Catching up, Calder stepped into a lift with the maintenance units. Then he sank through the decks, an archaeologist's excavation of layered shielding – geological layers of concrete sandwiched between layers of alloy steel, diamond composite, sand, water, air, self-healing fibre-reinforced ceramics, until he reached the Engineering Command Housing core, or ECHO core, in fleet parlance. For most starships, the ECHO core was the most important part of the vessel – all that separated a functional space vessel from being a couple of million tonnes of metal coffin stranded parsecs from civilisation at worse, or a new satellite trapped in a world's gravity well at best.

The Gravity Rose possessed a four-storey chamber, a large central atrium surrounded by rises of railinged decks connected by a nest of walkways, gantries and lifts – some designed for human crew, many more arranged for the hundreds of mechanicals moving around the space. The robots rolled between consoles and the banks of instruments, tending them with all the care farmers showed growing crops in the greenhouses of Hesperus. There was none of the information overload of the bridge here for Calder could see. No storm of flashy icons and hologram schematics, the walls reassuringly solid rather than a skeleton interspersed with the star-spattered void, the banks of consoles comfortingly mechanical. At the centre of the atrium, rising up towards Calder as the lift descended, stood one nod toward modernity – a gigantic table that could have seated a company of marines, but instead was attended by a single man in ubiquitous green crew overalls. He paced its length with the intensity of a field marshal, the hologram landscape across the tabletop not one of military formations, but the hills and valleys of drive cores and reactor piles, portions rising like volcanoes to demand his attention. Circling the table as if they were engaged in a race, a small army of robots rolled, stepped and hovered in holding patterns, waiting for the man to jab a finger towards them, his mouth issuing commands unheard by Calder inside the whining lift. With orders tossed at them in this seemingly derisory manner, a robot that had been singled out would peel away and head off to do the officer's bidding. Calder's diminutive escort waddled out of the lift first, the open door flooding the lift with the sounds of organised chaos outside. He stepped out after them. It smelled like an oil driller's cabin – either that or a cop garage. Burning grease. Ionisation in the air, robot exertions, machine frictions. The ever-present whiff of great energies being released in distant chambers.

Up until now giving Zack Paopao the title of Drive Chief was superfluous, as he'd had no human crew to boss around. With Calder's arrival, that was about to change. The twin R4 units halted outside the roller-derby circling the chief's last stand, observing it with the cool detachment of race referees. Calder walked across to stand just beyond the looping train of robots. Some were little more than crab-sized steel shells with antenna flickering as they jolted along on hidden wheels, other robots taller than the R4s, tractor-tracked cabinets beeping and hooting between themselves, spindly beanpoles with binocular-shaped heads above whipping nests of metal tentacles.

Chief Paopao was either ignoring Calder or oblivious to his existence. He stood five and half feet tall, his round Chinese face sporting a trim goatee beard and a dark bushy mane of hair running to silver. It was hard to peg a person's true age with life extension treatments, but Paopao looked old – maybe late fifties or early sixties. In alliance space, the chief could have been celebrating his half-millennium birthday and Calder would have been none the wiser. Life extensions were prohibitively expensive, the genetic wizardry of resetting human telomere DNA a treatment that could only be initiated so many times – not to mention a closely guarded secret among a select network of laboratories; one practised in exchange for disgustingly large amounts of money. But there was something about the chief that spoke of age, of weariness, of tiredness – or was it just the stink of a man who had been defeated by life once too often? Was it the hunched way he leant over the control table? Harried flicks of his fingers across the control surface, pinpointing nascent problems he had fixed a hundred times before. Or the wiry compactness of his body – as though every inch of fat and waste had been sucked away by a life weighted too long with labours? With nothing to do but brood between sim episodes, the stench of failure was an odour Calder worried might be clinging to his body. When the chief turned around and finally deigned to acknowledge the newcomer's presence, the look Calder received was curiously familiar. Where have I seen that before? Oh yes, the glance his father had shot Calder when the military council arrived bringing news of his older brother Brander's death on the battlefield and the unexpected tidings that Calder Durk was now heir to the whole kingdom. A mixture of fear and fascination.

'Ah, well,' announced the chief. 'It is my fault, really. I ask for extra help and this is my punishment. One of Rex Matobo's favours, only the learning of a couple of sim episodes away from planting an axe through one of my reactor plates for fear it's possessed by demons.'

Calder was going to point out that one of the sim sessions had been Hell Fleet, but on balance, he didn't think that would reassure the officer. 'Calder Durk at your service, chief. I've left my axe at home.'

Paopao made a curious sounding tutting under his breath. 'I count my blessings.' As Paopao reached down to tap the control table, Calder noted an animated tattoo wriggling along the chief's left forearm. With the officer's shirtsleeves rolled up, Calder watched a crimson phoenix with a missile clutched in its talons growing smaller as it orbited a moon, before rushing out and smashing through a number four. That's the unit insignia of the Fourth Fleet. So, Zack Paopao had done Hell Fleet the hard way – in real-time, rather than via sim. Calder remembered Zeno's prohibition about questioning the crew about their lives before the ship, but where was the harm in trying to bond with this hermit of the drive rooms?

'You were in the Fighting Fourth?'

Paopao grunted dismissively. 'If you had been on real jump carrier, not that public relations joke that Zeno carries around, you would know deck apes usually call it the Fleeing Fourth.'

'Public relations joke?'

'Fleet has PR hacks attached to the show's design team, as well as technical aides from navy. Icons on a bridge's warfare boards might be one hundred percent accurate in show, but all else is recruiting poster puffery. It's called Fleeing Fourth because no alliance fleet has retreated more or lost a greater number of lives in action.' Paopao jabbed angrily at the control table before his fingers encompassed the three robots he expected to hop to his orders. 'Plasma realignment on number five tokomak. Full repair instructions are logged in the local queue on level two. Go.' He turned back to Calder. 'Officers call it Fleeting Fourth, however. For fleeting tenure of careers there. Which is why I am here. Look around, boy—' his hand encompassed the ECHO core. 'On your joke show, there were four hundred and twenty six ratings and officers in the carrier's drive rooms, working three shifts across twenty-four hours. Numbers are right. Details always are – although never the spirit. What do I have? A crew of oilers. And now you. Rest of them float around Gravity Rose, issuing directives as though they are in the court of the Han Emperor. And where do orders end up? Here, mostly. But you will see. You will see where real work is done on this vessel. You with your sword and your two sims and your Fighting Fourth.'

I left my sword behind, too. 'Where do you want me to start?'

'Over there,' said the chief. He pointed to a thick curtain with woodblock prints from the Confucian Analects hanging down to make a wall in front of a compartment just off the central atrium. 'Instructions inside for you, too.'

'We're getting ready to make a jump,' said Calder, walking away from the command table. 'To somewhere called Transference. That's what Zeno says.'

'Big world,' said Paopao. 'Old world, too, with large station in orbit. More station than orbit, these days. Lots of traffic. Captain Fiveworlds always finds a cargo at Transference.' He laughed. A raw, bitter sound. 'Not always a legal cargo. But then, Transference is not always a legal place.'

Not legal. Calder didn't like the sound of that. He had imagined his new life as a peaceful exile. That was the whole point of banishment, wasn't it? Your old existence ripped out from under your snowshoes while you were dispatched to some distant village on a faraway shore where catching a fish in an ice hole was news most weeks. That old fraud Matobo the Magnificent hadn't passed him from the frying pan to the fire, had he? Besides, Calder had spent long enough as a federal agent to know that you didn't want to be pulling the kind of shizzle that would bring the Hard TAP knocking on your airlock door. Lifting aside the curtain, Calder was surprised to discover the space behind – little more than an annexe formed by the overhang of the engineering deck above – had been made into a makeshift den. There was a cot pushed against the walls, rugs thrown on the metal decking, plastic warehouse shelving filled with clothes and personal items. A door led through to a bathroom, and against one wall, a long bank of domestic appliances that would have had an Amish farmer flagellating his spine with a horsewhip in disgusted envy. It wasn't a part of the engine room's original specification, not if the makeshift orange butane bottles piled near the cooker were any guide.

'You actually live here? You do know there a couple of thousand spare liner-grade cabins on the other side of the radiation shield?'

Paopao turned from the command table and stamped a boot on the deck. 'Covered by insufficient liner-grade hull armour and a two petawatt deflector field. Here we are safe. X-ray laser head missiles and kinetic-kill shells may detonate off our surface and we will feel not a tremor inside the drive rooms. There are only two rules a wise man must observe, Mister Fighting Fourth. One: never leave drive rooms. Two: never get off ship. Nothing but trouble, every time I leave drive rooms.' He pointed to a space under a deck opposite his own, still filled with console banks and robots moving to and fro. 'Have R4s clear that one out, take blankets and what you need from passenger levels. You may stay here. I will not tell others. You will be out of their hair. They can scheme and plot and smuggle and hustle across void and you will no longer notice or care. There is always work here. Always work.'

'I think I've grown attached to the cabin they've given me near the bridge,' said Calder. The one in Sane Land. He could hear Zeno and Lana laughing right now. 'Where are the instructions you spoke of?'

Paopao made that loud, disapproving tutting again as he left the table and approached the quarters. 'You will be day pupil among boarders should you commute here each day. Robots will know. They always do.' He sighed sadly, at a perceived lack of wisdom in the ship's latest crewmember. 'Instructions are on cooker. How to cook rice and make ochazuke.'

Sim service in the fleet wasn't quite matching up to the reality of shipboard life for Calder. 'I could program a robot to do that for you every day.'

'Pah. You teach an oiler to cook for you, you do not eat food. You consume fuel. Oilers like Zeno, high functioning AIs, they possess enough subtlety to steam rice. But they are too smart to want to.'

Unlike the greenhorn rescued from an ice-age colonial disaster. I guess exiles don't get to select their duty. He went over to the cooker. It wasn't anything like the gleaming auto-cooking slabs of steel inside the main mess. Four gas hobs sitting over an old school induction oven. No LED panels, no voice command functions, no floating screen with a library of automated recipes. No reader to recognize the RFID chips in a meal packet. No five-second ration-pack heat-ups. No pulse cooking or wave boiling. There was a laminated sheet of instructions taped to the side of the cooker. Make ochazuke: (1) Steam rice for ten minutes with bruised stick of lemon grass. (2) Add ho-ji cha tea, sprinkle on pickled plum and mitsuba. (3) Add jako. (4) Scatter top with bonito flakes. Each ingredient was sitting in a porcelain jar, labels scrawled in both Chinese and Lingual.

'The way you cook your food reflects the way you live,' lectured the chief as Calder blundered around his makeshift personal space, searching for pans and water and checking the jars for ingredients. 'Rice is born in water and must die in ho-ji cha, in tea.'

Calder had come from a society where most meals stank of ice-whale blubber and oil, where vegetables under glass were as expensive as the fuel it took to heat them through to harvest. So far, Calder had been content to be surprised at every sitting by the variety of food on offer. Hermetically sealed meal packs from hundreds of cultures and worlds and nations; flavours richer and more exotic than anything he could have imagined. But faced with a simple meal of natural rice, tea and jako fish – none of which had survived the cold march of Hesperus's glaciers, even if they had existed at the start of the world's lost hot spell – Calder came to appreciate that, in this one matter of culinary skill, Zack Paopao wasn't quite as eccentric as he appeared at first glance. Back home, Calder would probably enter the historian's scrolls as the callow prince who had lost a thousand warships and sealed the hegemony of the Narvalaks over the world. Up here, at least, he'd enter the rolls as the crewman who could steam rice and put up with the drive chief's half-crazy manners long enough to master an antimatter pile and hyperspace matrix. The meal was finished in less than half an hour. Zack Paopao sat opposite Calder, both of them crouched cross-legged at a table so short it might as well have been a wooden wheel resting on the rug below.

The chief scooped rice into his mouth with chopsticks while his neo-barbarian houseguest used a metal teaspoon. 'Sufficient,' opined the chief. 'A man who steams good rice may be trusted with the care of antiproton storage ring.'

'Is that in the fleet manual?'

'Found it inside fortune cookie on station above Kunjing Four.'

'Do you have any idea how crazy that sounds?'

'Pah, you have not talked much with other crew yet, then, if you think that Chief Paopao is the crazy one on board Gravity Rose.'

No, I suppose I haven't at that. 'Well, I know you're not mad from your service with the fleet. They've got entire hospital ships full of medical virus to take care of stress and combat disorders.'

'Only if you submit to them, Mister Fighting Fourth. Sometimes it beholdens a man to remember.'

'Like where you got that tattoo?'

'A mistake. Service with the fleet often is. All a mistake.'

Paopao didn't say any more and Calder sure didn't feel like he had any right to push further. Must have been one hell of a mistake, to end up swapping the company of a well-resourced finely tuned legion of engine men and drive hands on a carrier for lonely duty at the ass end of an independent trading rust-bucket. 'And ending up here was chance, just like with me?'

'Yes. Much like you.' The chief halted eating, a chopstick hovering thoughtfully in the air above the meal. 'This ship collects lost souls. At first, I thought it was Captain Fiveworlds collecting us. But later, I realise, it is the ship herself.'

'The ship's computer isn't rated anywhere near an artificial intelligence level.'

'Of course not,' said Paopao. 'I would not fly on a wilful ship. Yet, still, the Gravity Rose collects us. Even Captain Fiveworlds was harvested.'

'I understood the Gravity Rose had been passed down the family line; a business and a vessel both?' That, at least, was something Calder could understand. Many a merchantman back home had been passed on as a child's inheritance, wooden decks on an ice schooner absorbing the blood and sweat of forty generations of the same family before finally being gnawed out by iron weevils, soaked in oil and burnt for fuel.

'Passed on by distant uncle that Lana Fiveworlds had never heard of or met before? A couple of billion dollars worth of generosity. With so much money, you think this uncle would have taken trouble to father at least one heir. That's what clones are for, if all else fails.'

The chief was beginning to sound crazy again. Madness leaking in from between the plates of his reactors. He didn't like the way the chief was impugning Lana Fiveworlds, either. 'What do you believe happened?'

'This vessel is not right. And I say this as someone who has slid void on dozens or more ships of line and tramp freighters. Pah, she looks right, on the surface. A grand old lady who huffs and puffs for every one of her seven supposed centuries. Modules from here, hull extensions from there, just like a real ship would grow over the ages. Lucky cargo-run two hundred years ago to coincide with refurbished navigation system. Known parts and manufacturers. But when things get tough for the Gravity Rose, when our environment turns to what the fleet calls aggressive space, target rich and hostile heavy, then her act is dropped and coughing lady is replaced by courtesan assassin. A little too fleet of foot and fast in processing speeds for her ranking.'

He's gone crazy out here, for sure. 'So, what do you think?'

'I think that I locate serial number on jump drive's main matrix, and discover the shipyard it was supposedly manufactured in went bankrupt a decade before our engines were supposedly commissioned for the Gravity Rose. False. All false. We are not sliding void on a genuine ship, we are sliding void on something pretending it is a ship.'

Calder hummed at the unlikely tale. 'Yet you're still working here?'

'Paopao has been collected. Where else can I go? This is my haven, right here. It can be yours also.'

'Do the other crew know?'

'Why should they? This is the only ship that Captain Fiveworlds or Zeno have known. Polter has navigated for other ships, but who knows how a kaggen's mind really works? Besides, our ship has collected both Polter and Skrat too.'

'You haven't told them? Not even Lana; I mean the skipper?'

'In here, shielding protects against everything. But not out there. I am thinking armour protects our minds too. You can think clearly here, without interference. Our minds are safe. Our minds are clear.'

Calder warily finished off his rice. Maybe the chief had deserted before they could decommission him through a hospital ship. That would explain a lot. Or maybe he had been collected, just like he claimed. He wondered what Lana Fiveworlds would think of the chief's odd theory. But then, Calder had been thinking a little too much about what was going through Lana Fiveworlds' mind, lately. It couldn't only be because she was the only real woman within a couple of millions miles of their metal vessel, could it? After all, when it came to scratching itches, there were plenty of side-plots in every sim intended to get you closer to your fellow actors than was considered decent in a theatre circle back on Hesperus. And it wasn't just that when Calder had Lana on his mind, he was able to stop brooding about Sibylla and her callously expedient jettisoning of him. It wasn't even the liberating freedom that came from this being the first time Calder had come into contact with a member of the fairer sex when he wasn't a noble, and therefore didn't have to worry about the woman's gaze continually flicking back towards the throne behind the man, rather than the man himself. He couldn't blame it on homesickness, space sickness or the boogie. When it came to such matters, the heart knows what the heart knows, and it had to be admitted, there was something about Lana. Of course, she was also the captain, but then, Calder had recently been the master – more or less – of an entire nation, so what was a little differential in rank between classes compared to that?

Thus it was that the pattern of Calder Durk's first honest job – non-noble and definitely unregal – was formed by daily repetition, the labour allowing him to forget what had gone before and ponder with luxury what might come after. As the Gravity Rose built up speed and pushed out of the system, Calder rode the ship's tubes to the hermit hunkered down in the armoured stern for each fresh day's labour. When Calder emerged from the drive rooms, it would be with scraps of paper containing lists of manual tapes, halfway between an information virus and a sim – less painful than the former, a hell of a lot less entertaining than the latter – to locate in the ship's data archive, play and master. Calder was glad that Zeno was still feeding him a selection of sim episodes – all in the name of civilising the prince, naturally. Playing catch-up with the last thousand years of history his abandoned world had missed out on. It made for a disjointed experience. A day of grafting under the exacting tutelage of the drive chief, followed by time-compressed months of high octane excitement, violence, sex and power trips in virtual landscapes. Then back to the real world, where only an hour had passed and the virtual universe would slowly fade to become as insubstantial as a dream. Given a choice, the chief never left the ECHO core; using the necessity of manning his command table to justify his ten-foot commute from makeshift den to the drive room centre and no further. Given that the tube network didn't extend over the ship's drive section, it meant that Calder had to spend a lot of time riding small onboard vehicles down seemingly endless drive corridors. Dropping off and collecting maintenance robots, or laying human eyes on oilers' work to make sure it was up to standard. The only company on his trips were robots. They were more like dogs than droids, albeit hounds that could weld, hammer and diagnose engine faults. Following him around and grumbling in machine language, parroting simple instructions. They weren't the demonic artificial intelligences of Amish mythology, they might lack the laconic street-jiving charm of Zeno, but the robots had a simple animal intelligence about them. Calder couldn't read the Chinese characters painted on their bodies by the chief – little black marks of calligraphy whose brevity mocked the long names Paopao had given them... Electricity Bird That Rivets Well, Iron Turtle That Acts As Antihydrogen Reaction Analyst. Once he found a missing robot stranded down a maintenance corridor, narrowly avoiding running it over as the motion-activated lights sprung into life ahead of the rubber-wheeled cart he was driving. The robots on the back dismounted from the flatbed and surrounded the bot, warbling sorrowfully and poking it, before they arranged for a jump-lead to siphon electricity from the cart's batteries into the robot's powerpack. When it had been powered back up, they shepherded the lost robot onto the cart's rear, chirruping 'Broken positioning system' at Calder for the rest of the journey. As if they expected Calder to disassemble the cart's mapping system and swap it for the robot's. In that one incident they had – at least to Calder's eyes – demonstrated concern, pity and happiness. They might not be able to pass whatever tests of sentience that had transformed Zeno from property to citizen, but Calder could see why over time the chief had grown fond enough of them to give them names. It wasn't an attitude Zeno shared. Zeno acted perfunctorily and emotionless towards the robots he was gang boss for across the ship. But then, perhaps the android was close enough to their kind to be more realistic about robo-management in the first place.

One day, while searching for a rice sack in the chief's den, Calder found an old fleet dress uniform sealed inside a rug-covered crate. A short blue jacket with three buttons on either side, rank stripes on the sleeves and a chief engineer officer's striped shoulder boards. The sole clue to the uniform's origin was the ship's name on the cap – the TAFC Warrior. Later on, back in Calder's cabin, he looked up the vessel's name in the ship's archive, but the only thing he found was the teasingly vague title of a redacted and recalled news item from fifty years ago. Mutiny on the jump carrier Warrior. Story sealed under NAVCOM authority. Declassification expiry in three hundred years. Well, that put a new light on things. Not so much collected by the ship, as avoiding collection by the fleet's master-at-arms. It certainly explains why a crewman with Zack Paopao's experience is holed up in an antique tramp freighter.

'Everyone's hiding from something,' Calder told the dog-sized robot cleaning his cabin's metal floor. 'And they won't find any of us out here.'

'Please repeat your instructions...'

'I want to go home,' said Calder. 'But I no longer know where that is.'

'Indicate where you wish me to start . . .'

'Everywhere and nowhere, you metal golem. Just like me.'

'I need specific tasking . . .' said the robot, brushes underneath it rotating as it washed the deck.

Yes, I know how that feels.

CHAPTER FOUR

The girl from nowhere

Lana sat behind her desk in the day cabin, a hologram model of the Gravity Rose floating above the table, colour coded for areas of high hull fatigue, systems maintenance and ship repair requirements. When she had started out as the vessel's skipper, that model had been painted as emerald green as a field of verdant grazing land. Now she was a blotchy red patchwork that looked almost as sick as the accounts of Fiveworlds Shipping. A little less healthy after every trip. Damn it, I'm not going to sell out. This ship is my life. She's all I've got. But surviving meant Lana was going to have to take on cargoes that would pay better. And out in the Edge, those were just the kind of loads that would be under surveillance by TAP agents. Smuggling was a dirty business, a trade as spotty as the model of her ship, but it was also a lucrative line of work, and the universe wasn't exactly offering Lana too many alternative choices if she was going to stay afloat.

'Which would be the cheapest repair to carry out and remove from our most urgent register?' Lana asked the ship's central computer, Granny.

'Our solar panels,' said a disembodied, honeyed voice from her desk's interface. 'Replacement would also save on the costs of main engine fuel being diverted to power our internal systems.'

'What efficiency are the panels running at?'

'Forty percent while in-flight at optimum range from a sun.'

Lana waved the ship's model out of existence as a knock on her door sounded.

'Calder Durk,' announced the computer.

'Let him in, old girl.'

Calder entered the cabin. He was looking hale and healthy on a proper diet, putting on weight under his crew overalls. But then, after seal fat and whatever the hell else they hunted back on Hesperus, anything and everything probably tasted good. Pure gravy. At least it is for one of us.

'Mister Durk.'

'Skipper, you said you wanted to see me.'

She signalled the chair in front of her desk. 'Just wanting to check that Zeno isn't burning out too many of your synapses with his education regime. Being able to find your way to my cabin means you've passed my first test. Also, I wanted to say that we're all quietly impressed by how well you're adapting to life on board the ship. Life in the modern age as well. You've probably already realised you won't get too much praise from Chief Paopao, but the fact he's not bombarding me with calls demanding I transfer you to bridge duty is as good as it gets at the dirty end of this vessel.'

Calder shrugged as he sat down. Was it Lana's imagination, or was the man uncomfortable receiving praise? He stared at her with his young eyes. 'Where I came from, captain, you didn't get too many opportunities to learn things twice. Not even when your father is king.'

'My father's king. That's a hell of a pick-up line. Well, you're good to stay on board if you don't feel your royal bloodline is being squandered kicking about the Gravity Rose. Otherwise, we'll be heading for the closest thing to civilisation out in the Edge, a world called Transference. Transference Station is the largest port around these parts. Plenty of work to be had there if you want it, on the station or the world below, and a pretty solid state safety net to make sure you'll never starve or die from lack of medical treatment.'

Now Calder appeared more worried than embarrassed. 'And what would I do at such a place?'

'Whatever the heck you like. You're not in the Middle Ages now. Take an apprenticeship, go for a corporate indenture, sign up for tape learning and accept whatever work comes your way. Damn, live in social housing, eat greasy vat-grown crap and bliss out on sims every hour you're awake. You can relive the last millennia of human history in a year or so, catch up on everything you and your ancestors missed freezing your sorry asses off on Hesperus.'

'That wouldn't be living.'

'Smart man. You'd be amazed how many people waste a lifetime coming to that conclusion.'

'I'd prefer to stay on board.'

'Most worlds that get settled by humanity aren't like Hesperus,' said Lana. 'After you've felt a real breeze on your cheeks and the sun warming your hair, you might change your mind about staying as crew. When winter arrives on Transference, it won't seem so different from home. And if you don't care for the midges and drizzle dirt-side, there are plenty of orbital habitats inside the alliance that are larger than worlds now. Inside those places, you can set your watch by the time they turn on their artificial rain.'

'I've only just discovered the rest of the universe exists,' said Calder. 'Or at least, I've realized the night sky isn't a heaven full of warring gods...'

'. . . and now you want to see it,' said Lana. 'I remember that feeling.'

'But you were born on board this vessel, weren't you?' asked Calder. 'I mean, you've inherited a starship. That means you were part of a ship family. The stars in your blood and all that...'

The stars in my blood. Maybe they are. 'Hell if I know,' said Lana. Calder's chiselled features appeared more puzzled than usual, so she continued. 'You've boarded free trader vessels in those Hell Fleet episodes you've been skimming, right? Look around my cabin. What's missing from the room?'

'Pictures of the previous skippers,' said Calder. 'Maybe a few busts of them, too.'

'Full marks. The way previous captains are venerated by a ship family is close to ancestor worship. But the truth is, I'm not sure if I was raised in a settled community or born on board a free trader. About the only thing I really know about myself is my DNA-dated true age and the fact that Lana is probably my real first name.'

'You were adopted, raised in a children's home?'

'Not even close,' said Lana. 'I arrived at Transference Station as an adult, steerage on a refugee fleet escaping the civil war inside the Truespitze League. The League's an independent confederation of twenty supposedly highly civilised systems that completely went to pieces over whether they should seek membership with the Triple Alliance, stay self-governing, or join a rival superpower called the Skein. You've got to give it to humanity, when we turn on ourselves; we surely do know how to do it properly. I was one of half a million fleeing refugees racked and stacked in cold storage. What the evacuation fleet didn't over-advertise about travelling in cryogenic suspension, though, is the same shizzle they inject into your body to allow you to survive hibernation sleep has a one in hundred chance of giving you brain damage. A hospital put me back together again at Transference Station, but I lost all my memories escaping the civil war; although from what Zeno tells me of the conflict, I didn't miss much.'

'Zeno was there too?'

'Crewed with the refugee fleet. As an android he was perfect for the duty – Zeno didn't need oxygen during the voyage, and even in hibernation, so many refugees places a hell of a strain on a ship's recycling systems. Zeno stayed on Transference Station a while working for the same refugee charity that had paid to pull us out of the war zone. That's how we met – he's been with me ever since. So what do I really know about myself? I was wearing a bracelet with Lana etched on it, so that's either my first name or maybe my favourite cat. I have my true age, dated with a few years' margin of error, from the hospital's medical scan. I've never been matched to any known bloodlines, but then the closing arguments inside the League were debated with nukes and bioweapons, and there weren't a whole load of local databases left to query after that. Must have been pretty desperate to be travelling steerage in a hibernation coffin, though.'

Calder indicated the walls of her cabin. 'If you were a refugee, how did you come to inherit the Gravity Rose?'

'The ship arrived a year after I'd been discharged from hospital, through a blind trust and a lawyer who'd traced me, insisting I was the rightful heir of the Fiveworlds legacy. The lawyer told me the Gravity Rose's entire crew complement was down on the League's capital world when the first of the weaponized plagues struck. Whole planet was placed under quarantine and every shuttle that tried to lift was shot into atoms. The captain was the last to get sick and die, but before he did, he called the Gravity Rose and ordered Granny to push on out on auto-pilot, sub-light speed, and head for the nearest alliance peacekeeping station.'

'But what about the crews' logs, the ship's records? Granny must be able to tell you more about your family?'

'Story I heard from the lawyer was that Granny had been ordered to engage a law firm to trace any surviving kin, hand over the Fiveworlds family's DNA profile to make that happen, then Granny was to erase her data banks. Fresh start and a blank slate for any surviving heirs. The ship's robots had been ordered by the last skipper to clean out every cabin, load up all personal effects and records and jettison them into the sun. They did a thorough job. For all of the centuries on her clock, I got the Gravity Rose more or less factory fresh. My DNA was the only match the lawyer ever found among the refugees or in any alliance database. Maybe I was crew dropped off on another League world to work some side-deal? Maybe I was the skipper's daughter, my parents suspected things might get hairy and they wanted to keep me safe, so they found an excuse to drop me off early? Whatever happened, it meant I was just lucky enough to get lifted out before those idiots in the League switched off the lights on their civilisation.'

'Damn,' said Calder. He sounded like he meant it.

Calder's worried eyes tracked her as she got up and walked over to the porthole, gazing out on the universe he wanted to see more of. 'I've been following up various leads over the years, trying to piece a little more together about who I might be, but there's very little to go on. I think the Gravity Rose's previous crew were using the Fiveworlds Shipping name as an alias, a front company. They were into smuggling or worse, and operated off the grid as far as possible. There are no legitimate records of cargoes shipped by the vessel prior to me inheriting her – not as the Gravity Rose, and there's no data trail inside the Edge of a ship family called Fiveworlds. So I don't push too hard anymore. If I ever find out who I really am, I suspect I might not like the answer. But as I said, my first name probably really is Lana. As to the rest...?' As she finished the story, Lana realised that she wasn't even beginning to be ready to hand her nearly bankrupt vessel over to one of the big corporates. The Gravity Rose is the only home I've got, and all that's left of my family, too. Damned if that's worth swapping for a bank account stuffed full of money. What would I do without her? Buy a bar on Transference Station... sell drinks to spacers and bore strangers with stories of all the planets and the places I saw when I still had the stars in my blood? And what the heck would Zeno, Skrat, Polter and the others do without me, without the Rose? But deep down, she knew the answer to that. They'd find another ship to crew on. Maybe Lana could too, although no sane captain wanted an ex-skipper with a second opinion flashing in her eyes every time an order was issued. Lana would have to fake her license and change her name, and as it was, she was barely clinging onto her fragile second identity.

She turned around and found herself facing Calder, the warmth of his kiss as much a surprise as his body manoeuvred in front of hers. It lasted far too long until Lana recovered her posture and shoved him back. 'What the hell! Where'd that come from, Prince Charming?'

'I know what it's like to walk away from everything in my life, Lana.'

'Don't think that we're alike! You know what you've lost. Far as I'm aware, Calder Durk, I might be married with children waiting for me in some refugee camp wondering where the hell mom's got to. So you reserve your sympathy for your sorry ass and remember the bars on my shoulder means that saluting me doesn't include pushing your tongue down my throat.'

'That wasn't sympathy,' said Calder. 'You must realise that? You're far too beautiful for my kisses to be offered merely as consolation.'

'Save your line of sweet patter for shore leave and the class of company you rent by the hour, your highness. The Gravity Rose isn't some village sauna back on Hesperus, with a bunch of Nordic neo-barbarian types running around bare-assed and beating each other with birch twigs in the snow. Don't screw the crew. That's as good a rule as any on board a vessel, and that goes double for a new boy on the rebound.'

'I apologise if I've offended you. That, well . . . just felt right.'

'Yeah? Word up, I'm not interviewing for a replacement ship family and planning to start a generation ship, here. And on my world, 'you're doing a good job' doesn't translate as 'jump between the captain's sheets'. So off you goddamn hop, your highness, and we'll say no more about it.'

Lana frowned as the man left. Calder doesn't seem too embarrassed or reluctant about trying it on. A lot less abashed than being told he's doing a good job, but what the heck. Maybe the direct approach was just how you had to roll when you'd been raised in a brutal environment where a blanket that wasn't shared was a bed where you'd wake up as a human icicle the next morning. She sighed. You can take the man out of the Dark Ages, but you can't take the Dark Ages out of the man. Not after a week or so, anyway. 'Granny, stick an e-mail in Zeno's log telling him to stick a few sims that concentrate on modern social mores into Mister Durk's education plan. Tame soap operas... you know, series with high-class dances and refined small talk and an emphasis on high manners. Lives of the Planet Kings, for instance.'

'Yes, captain.'

Yes, captain. No sweeter pair of words in the human vocabulary, as far as Lana was concerned. She tasted the edge of her lips with her tongue. Calder surely didn't need to be educated in the art of kissing, though. Almost as worrying as how long the memory of its warmth lingered in her mind. Must be a by-product of how few long-term memories I possess compared to everyone else. Obviously that.

***

When it came time for the jump into hyperspace, to depart Hesperus system for good, Calder had mixed feelings. There was a part of him left nostalgic, perhaps even homesick, for a good honest breeze that'd freeze your breath as it left the mouth, filling your lungs with icy needles. But there was another part of him couldn't imagine abandoning this strange metal temple cutting through the heavens, although he wasn't exactly sure how much of that was due to the woman who captained the vessel, or the execution order hanging over him at home. You've been collected by the ship too, Calder Durk. He had rather been expecting to be rejected by Lana Fiveworlds, if truth be told. Back on Hesperus, it was customary for a woman to reject her suitor three times. It was also customary to assign the man challenges to prove his worthiness. Hopefully, Lana's challenges would be a lot less demanding that those set by the princess... such as forming a political alliance to conquer the greatest empire the world had ever seen. Which didn't exactly end well for you, did it? Calder felt a sting of self-doubt. Proving himself as an able crewman was obviously the first of Lana's tests. Zeno's education programme was proving indispensable in that regard. How many sim jumps had he made in Hell Fleet? How many jumps had he made as a Martian oligarch on his private yacht in Lives of the Planet Kings? How many jumps had he made on commercial liners as a TAP agent, hopping between the crimes of a dozen worlds? Now he was wondering what the temporal discontinuity would feel like in reality? A week travelling in hyperspace while six months passed by in the universe outside. It seemed a fair swap, however; to shortcut the generations a starship would need otherwise to waste travelling between the worlds.

Calder assignments involved a busy schedule of maintenance checks across every yard of the translation matrix, as well as spacewalking outside tethered to the ship while he checked the rotating jump vanes for dust ablation and structural fractures. There might have been many a cheap entertainment sim that showed a hyperspace jump as little more than a navigator flinging a single lever forward on the bridge, followed by the stars accelerating into blur-lines, but the reality was far more time consuming, dangerous and prosaic. The Gravity Rose was breaching the very walls of space-time with an artificial wormhole, then translating the ship from one state of matter to another, sliding void across an alien plane of existence to shortcut the immutable laws of relativity and decades of slower-than-light travel between worlds. Any one of these acts was bordering on insane. Performing them all in a pre-programmed sequence was nothing short of reckless. Even the sniff of a significant gravity field would destabilise their homebrew wormhole into a homicidal tantrum. The particular curvature of local space-time had to be precisely mapped to allow the Gravity Rose to be translated into a protective dark-matter envelope, allowing the ship to exist in transit across the exotic plane of hyperspace, before dropping back into real space without smearing into a million tachyons. None of these you did at the flick of a lever helpfully labelled 'hyperspace jump.'

Calder stood with the chief by the command table. The officer had donned twin sensory manipulation gloves to augment the bandwidth of his crew implant, the desk a riot of hologram symbols rising and falling at his command. He resembled a half-mad conductor directing a symphony. The robots in the chamber had ceased their deranged roller-derby around his table and formed up into a choir, two ranks of mechanicals standing in admiration at this act, this wizard's summoning. They trilled and sung reports relayed from hordes of robots deployed across the drive chambers. The show had been going on for half an hour, now.

'You should have a sickbag to hand, Mister Fighting Fourth,' said Paopao, swivelling a screen forming in front of his eyes.

'I've never been sick yet.'

'They do not show vomit in Hell Fleet,' said the chief. 'It would not assist in recruitment. One detail that is often omitted.'

'What, and all the deaths and floggings they show do?'

'You will see soon,' warned the chief. 'The difference between sims and reality.'

Outside, the vanes picked up spin, stirring up a soup of gravity, distorting the matter inside the perfectly spherical steel globe they had launched ahead of them, its mass increasing exponentially. Becoming a wormhole. Paopao tapped a metal cabinet door under the command table with the toe of his boot. 'Sickbags are inside here.'

Calder just shrugged.

'Old Han saying. You never get pregnant in a sim brothel. Not even a little bit.'

'I'll cope.' I hope.

CHAPTER FIVE

A gift on leaving

Zeno checked the communications dish records from his station's computer terminal. A regular habit before the Gravity Rose dropped into hyperspace. Flickering around him were interface readouts showing the status of the ship's robots. A thousand situation reports feeding through. Zeno ignored his toiling droids for a second. He searched for one particular pattern of background radiation registering on the sensors, as seemingly random as the spin of a neutron star. With all of Hesperus system stretched out below them: twin suns – a Class G and an A-type main-sequence star – three gas giants and five planets dancing like a clockwork orrery – all the radiation lay beneath them, not above. That just made this supposedly random spike very easy to pick up. There it is. So, one of his relays was in place. Zeno ran the pattern through his mind, picking out the subtle variations from the spike's agreed norm. Decrypting that information gave him the precise coordinates where the little drone's communications relay was sited, even higher on the elliptic than the Gravity Rose. Somewhere outside the deeps of the clean zone spacers used to drop in and out of hyperspace. With the satellite's exact position established, Zeno took control of one of the backup dishes and established a point-to-point laser line with the drone relay.

To outside eyes, the screen on Zeno's station showed only static, the hisses of random radio babble from the speakers. Neither was there any sign of the android talking, his wireless networking carrying everything he needed to communicate through the dish. To Zeno, however, his mind's on-the-fly decryption showed the static as it really appeared wherever the signal originated – a shadowed face waiting against a background devoid of location cues. It took an insane amount of money to send a live message between solar systems through a tachyon relay. I wonder which of us is the more insane?

'I was expecting you earlier,' announced the silhouette. A male voice, deep and sonorous. Him, then, not one of his representatives.

'The side trip I told you about took a little longer than expected,' said Zeno. 'Rex Matobo's favour has been called in and we're carrying an extra crew.'

'Calling in debts is what Matobo does best. The trouble starts when you ask him for something in return.'

'Talking of which,' signalled Zeno, 'I was wondering when it was going to be my turn to get my back scratched.'

'What you have asked for is a difficult thing, android.'

'Nevertheless.'

'Those who possess the necessary talents are not human. That makes them hard to find, let along bargain with.'

'The shy alien excuse? Well, damn it. I know all I need to know about being human.'

'We have a compact, you and I. You are honouring your end of it. I am honouring mine.'

'I've only got so much patience.' Zeno tapped the side of his head and the laser lost coherence for a second or two in response. Then the signal came back. 'These private little chats of ours might get real hard to arrange, real soon.'

'A bluff. You are not my only source of intelligence on the Gravity Rose.'

'Horse-end, I say. We ain't exactly Cunard Line out here as far as the steward count's concerned.'

'Of course not. But the ship is what you need too, android, whether you realise it or not.'

'Not nearly enough, anymore.'

'She will have to be.'

'Shizzle, one day you're going to have to tell me how you do it.'

'It?'

'Forget, brother, forget everything you've done.'

'The trick, I would say, is not to need to.'

'Sometimes I wonder which one of us was manufactured as a machine.'

'You were studio property once, Zeno. Try method acting . . . try pretending to be someone else. Someone who can follow my orders, for instance.'

'Shizzle.'

'Where are you heading next?'

'Transference Station,' said Zeno, 'hunting for a new cargo to pay our bills.'

'Let me know your destination jump coordinates as soon as you have your cargo. Leave them in the usual dead drop on Transference Station.'

The static lost its hidden signal and lapsed back into raw fizzing, even with Zeno's decryption filter running. He sighed and rested his wiry Afro against the blank projection plate, the hissing spit of static flickering across his artificial scalp. His morphic features briefly reset as a golden-skinned Humphrey Bogart. The whole world is about three hyperspace jumps behind...

The water being squeezed out of his tear ducts was real enough. Every last millilitre of it, more was the goddamn pity. Zeno was about to switch off the monitor when the static suddenly transformed into the man's silhouette again. 'I thought we were done?'

'Listen quickly,' ordered the man. 'My satellite inside Hesperus system has detected a drone vessel heading for your position. It is heavily armed and closing in fast on the Gravity Rose.'

'Who the hell does it belong to?'

'I do not know, but given the speed with which it is accelerating towards the wormhole you are creating; my suspicion is that good intentions should not be presumed. It is attempting to intercept you before you jump out.'

'Shizzle!' Zeno rolled the "Z" in the profanity. 'Rex, you—'

'Son of a—,' snapped Lana, warnings and tracking icons exploding around her on the bridge as the ship's sensors captured the accelerating profile of the drone. 'What have you done this time, Rex? Who have you screwed over?'

'Do you need to ask, dear girl,' said Skrat from his chair on the bridge. 'I believe it's self evidently us!'

'Bring everything we've got online, Skrat.'

'Already done, but I am rather afraid we won't be weapons-hot in time. That drone is closing too dashed fast.'

I know, I know. Lana tossed all the telemetry on the attacking drone back to the engine room and prayed that the chief would be able to speed up the process of wormhole formation. Then she brought Zeno into the loop on the intercom. 'Zeno, we've— '

'I see this hostile, skipper. Every bot on the lot is hot to trot: preparing to give and receive fire. Damage control parties are moving into place. So, this is Rex's parting gift to us?'

'Guilt by association, I'd say,' snarled Lana. She rotated the communications array back in the direction of Hesperus and trusted that Rex would receive her message before the crafty scumbag was tracked down and killed by whoever had set their damn ship-killer on the Rose. Of course he'll slide out of this mess, it's only Rex's friends he gets killed. Damn, I should have remembered what it was like when he was crew. I'm such an idiot! 'Rex, there's a heavily weaponized drone on our tail at the jump point. That means that an equally well-armed vessel dropped it off as insurance before heading in-system for Hesperus. Tell me you don't know about this? Tell me that you haven't irked someone so badly that they've sent a warship after your sorry ass?' She punched the message out and leaned back in the chair, fuming, trying to work the angles. That ship killer was honing straight in on the Rose using the gravity signature of the artificial black hole forming. The drone had probably been lurking out in deep space when the Gravity Rose arrived in Hesperus space, but then, you didn't need to create a wormhole to exit hyperspace, only to enter it. They had escaped detection entering the system. Exiting was going to prove problematic, if not fatal. Even if Lana aborted the jump, the drone had them locked now. The old adage a fellow skipper had once shared in a bar came back to her. They always nail you on takeoff, never on landing.

'Polter, can we make the jump before that drone lights us up?'

'My profuse apologies, revered skipper,' said Polter. 'Even with my best effort hyperspace translation, we will be in weapons range for at least a minute before jump out.'

'Close quarter defence wall is online,' called Skrat. Lana could feel it. Her ship implant spreading her consciousness around the ship, the Gravity Rose's systems becoming an extension of her body. A line of kinetic cannons dropped out of their pods, the sensors on their rotating gun barrels scanning near space for incoming projectiles. Lana felt the ship trying to break through the drone's ECM field, steal a reading on what missile package the drone was packing. Their own electronic counter measures formed around the ship, sensor jammers spinning up into life, false signature buoys rolling down into ejector tubes, hypervelocity chaff tubes frantically being loaded by Zeno's robots.

Rex Matobo appeared as a projection floating in front of Lana's command chair. 'Ah, Lana. I am most sorry to see you have run into a few difficulties.'

'I just bet you are. You didn't warn me that I'd need to shoot my way out of the system. Who the hell is it out there closing in on the Rose?'

'Hard to say,' shrugged Rex. 'So many people seem to have taken an irrational dislike to me over the years.'

'Yeah, I know how they feel. Come on Rex, what the heck am I facing here?'

'Anticipate advanced fleet-level weaponry. That would be prudent.'

Prudent. Shizzle. Rex was lying, Lana knew him well enough to know that with a steely certainty. Rex knew what was out there and why; he just didn't feel like sharing. 'Your comms signal is scanning as mobile.'

'I am in my vessel, sliding right behind your drive wake. I will be in a position to open fire on the drone within thirty minutes.'

'That's about twenty five minutes after we're dead in the void, Rex, if I can't take that drone out.'

'Do try to stay alive. You are very dear to me. And I apologise again for the rash and disproportionate actions of my enemies.'

'You can stow your apologies up your rear hatch. Where's the drone's mother ship?' demanded Lana. 'Can I expect to be outnumbered any time soon?'

'I don't believe so. Besides, while you and I may occasionally be outnumbered, we are never outclassed.'

'I'll carve that on your tombstone, old friend,' said Lana, killing the line.

'The dear chap should sport scales as splendid as mine,' said Skrat, 'that a human can be quite so slippery . . .'

Lana snorted. 'You've heard that old human saying, Skrat: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." Well, the enemy of my so-called friend is also my enemy, even if we don't want them to be. Don't reckon we've got much choice on this one.'

'Tracking a multiple missile launch from the drone,' said Skrat. 'Rather too small to be nuclear warheads. Probably something to scramble our shields, then the fiend will dive in and rake us clear with kinetic projectiles.'

'Botheration!' swore Polter. The navigator began chanting a prayer as he busied himself with their hyperspace translation. 'Lord, admit us to the vaults of heaven, Lord, admit us sinless to the dark flow.'

Sinless? Lord, if you're out there, jump us just as we are. Lana hovered in her ship's cyberspace above the firing solutions being formed by Granny, close-defence guns juddering as they adjusted in their mounts. Her stomach scrunched itself into a dense ball of dread. The icons of the incoming missiles blinked on and off as their likely positions adjusted ever closer; colour-coded impact probabilities flickering as the salvo's stealth measures battled it out with the ship's sensors for battlefield supremacy. Come on, drone, Rex is running up behind us, weapons hot and ready for action. He's the one you want, not us. Pull away, keep your powder dry for the real enemy. Run the threat analysis and target the more dangerous vessel. But the drone kept on coming, as did its wall of missiles. Another screen flicked on. It was Calder in the engine room.

'Skipper, the chief reports our vanes are spinning at maximum. Plot our exit against the current rate of singularity formation. He says it won't be nearly quick enough.'

'Well, tell me something I don't know, your highness.'

'I think I have a way to beat the drone . . .'

'Give me a break,' said Lana. 'A month ago you were running around the snow in bear skins. A couple of episodes of Hell Fleet doesn't make you a goddamn carrier commander.'

'Actually,' said Calder, 'this is something I learnt back home from a very wise manservant. When you're hunting a wolf, you must bait the snow with a steak. When the wolf is hunting you, you must bait the snow with two steaks.'

Lana looked at him for a second, before the sheer genius of what he was suggesting struck her like a diamond blade through the skull. 'Calder, I could kiss you.'

'Maybe take the bars on your shoulder off first, skipper.'

'Get to it, Prince Charming, and get to it fast.' Lana killed the feed. She was going to have trouble with that one, she could see that. But only if they lived long enough. 'Polter, plot the mathematics for a second singularity.'

'But revered skipper,' said Polter, 'I cannot possibly keep two wormholes stable simultaneously.'

'I don't need you to,' said Lana. 'Make the second singularity a beast, a real roaring unstable giant. A big, juicy distracting steak. Shrink our first wormhole. Small as you can, with it still able to pass the Gravity Rose. Skrat, launch a countermeasures buoy to orbit the mega-sized singularity, make sure its squawking a hell of a lot more radiation than we are. '

Skrat's bridge chair bobbed to the side of Lana's. 'Done! Quite ingenious, although I must say, old girl, it's normally myself who panders to racial stereotypes by acting quite so recklessly. The drone and its missiles should hone in on the decoy wormhole and our buoy, but only if the wormhole's structure endures. I don't believe anyone has ever attempted this before.'

'For good reason,' protested Polter. 'The holy of holies preserve us! I will need to integrate the topography of both wormholes, keep each wormhole in phase with the other so the dirty singularity doesn't destabilise the clean one. Singularity compression on the clean wormhole could prove fatal for us, oh yes... our margin of error on the jump is going to shrivel far beyond all safe thresholds.'

'Shave an inch of steel off our hull if you have to, but jump us just the same,' ordered Lana. 'You're the best in the business, Polter, and damned if you're able to kill us twice. You can do this!'

Lana tried not to bite through her tongue. Rex Matobo was quite capable of killing everyone all on his lonesome, it seemed. She felt the second wormhole forming out in the void across her interface, raw and wild, a screaming whirlpool distorting the normal order of space-time, the ship's sensors protesting at the extra pressure being exerted on them. Off to their starboard, the second singularity shrank, slowly, methodically, the architecture of spin and form that might safely admit them screeching as it was bullied smaller, exotic particles bursting into existence all around the ship. Beyond, their decoy buoy danced around the wild second wormhole opening up. Here I am, it screamed. Here. Here! But the incoming drone and its opening missile salvo had yet to buy into the ruse. Accelerating closer and closer on the Gravity Rose. The drone was going to pass them like a Samurai from some damn historical sim, a brief flash of its blade, and Lana's precious ship would be decapitated. This is all I have, please, please. She felt the ship's point defences lighting up the kill area around the vessel. Granny plotting firing solutions, planning where she needed to spread her storm of fire to kill the first volley; the processing speed of the Gravity Rose's computer systems matched against the deadly intelligence inside the missiles.

'Impact imminent,' announced Granny. 'Hardening command armour.' There was a clash outside the vessel as thick plating enclosed the bridge, cutting off all sight of the stars, a sandwich of self healing materials that could, theoretically, absorb an acre of hell and still soak up deadly residual radiations.

Lana felt a sudden burst of energy through the sensors as their clean wormhole malformed for a second, before Polter brought it under control. He moaned inside his chair, drumming nervously on his carapace with his two largely superfluous vestigial combat claws. Their navigator only did that when he was praying real hard. Maybe somebody was listening to his devotions. The drone and its missiles suddenly altered their trajectory, vectoring in on their massive singularity and the hyperactive countermeasures buoy orbiting it. Have we done it? Have we really done it?

'Singularity seed is transformed. Event horizon on the clean wormhole is formed and stable,' announced Polter, the ledge of carapace above his face bobbing in eager anticipation of his joining with God. Lana felt the Gravity Rose manoeuvring into position, responding to the commands from her implant. Lana had never ridden a horse before, but she had a feeling that it would be a lot like this. Gently, that's it, gently does it. Nothing to indicate we're here. Nothing to look at. Just a tiny little starship jumping clean. And... damn! Two of the drone's missile salvo suddenly peeled off, accelerating back towards them. Detected her engine burn? She threw stealth to the wind, and the antimatter reaction drive roared into life at her command. Lana felt the surge in the artificial gravity field around the ship, cancelling the Gees that would otherwise have flattened the crew.

Polter reported their status calmly, pacified by the act of navigation. Lana was anything but. 'Vane control is optimal. Dark matter envelope now modelled.'

Outside the Gravity Rose her near-space envelope was suddenly filled with a thousand slugs of molten metal streaming towards the missiles, the Rose's guns juddering and spinning all along her hull. While the void was silent, the ship's passages chattered with the clamour of war: chains of shells jangling; barrel coolant systems squealing. Lana's sensors flashed mad with alert icons. The twin missile strike had split into a dozen sub-components, independent warheads flowering out and tracking in on them from every direction.

'Tidal eye is targeted and locked. Transit entry and pre-translation dive into dark flow will commence in four, three, two . . .'

Lana sat bolt upright in her chair, even as the emergency environment seals triggered, her chair transforming and flowing around her, converting into a lightly armoured space pod. And still the missiles came.

***

The world of Hesperus. Six months later.

Noak's wife came back from their small house's entrance hall looking worried. He didn't think it was merely because the ice drifts outside had made getting to market on the far side of town difficult. 'There are two men at the door. They say they have business with you.'

'We haven't been living in the town long enough to have business with anyone we don't know,' said Noak. He had surely travelled far enough East to guarantee that. Any further and they would be across the border. 'What name did they ask for?'

'None,' she said. 'Not our real ones or our new names.'

'Probably just peddlers, my love,' said Noak, 'trying it on.' He glanced towards the crossbow he had sitting near the roaring fireplace, its iron trigger face shiny in the crackling logs' orange glow. Always good to keep a weapon to hand. 'Nobody knows us here.' Most of the people he had served were corpses on the other side of the ocean. Even Noak's nodding acquaintances were rightfully toasting their feet by fires on the far end of the continent. Certainly not out here, in the high mountains, colder even than the plains and the coast.

'They might be customers,' ventured his wife, ever hopefully.

'Might be.' And setting up his shipping concern river-running on a single-sailed sled out in the nub-end of nowhere, Noak couldn't afford to be shy. Not with the wizard's seed money mostly spent over the past six months.

His beloved showed them in. Two large rangy men, both wearing neat bearskin jackets and trimmed beards to match – no swords or crossbows, though. One had a silver fur-lined jacket while the other wore black. This pair certainly didn't look like trappers needing cargoes sailed back west. Their skin was pale too, almost pallid, didn't get out much in the sun-glare. Not locals, for all that they wore tricorn hats in the alpine style.

'Welcome gentlemen,' said Noak. 'Feel the fire on your bones.' He indicated the opposite end of the table he was seated at, a couple of stools close by. 'I am Bertil, the master of the town's shipping company.'

The two stood standing and silver-jacket spoke first. 'We passed your river schooner moored at the bottom of the valley. I am Mister Bligh and this is Mister Thetford.'

Noak nodded. 'You boys aren't peddlers, are you?'

'Travellers,' said the one named Thetford.

'Seekers,' clarified his colleague.

Noak looked at his wife standing by the door to main room. 'Well then, how about you seek out a couple of cups of warm honey beer for our guests, my love? I handle cargo as a rule, not passengers,' continued Noak. 'Mountain salt and pelts, mostly. Not much room for cabins on a narrow-berth river runner. And with names as foreign as yours, I doubt if I'll be sailing far enough away from the mountain ranges for your tastes.'

'We have our own transportation,' said Bligh. 'And what we seek is truth, Noak Barlund.'

'I think you've got me confused with someone else.'

'I doubt that,' said Bligh. Bizarrely, he produced a frying pan from underneath his bearskin. Noak felt a terrible sinking feeling in his gut. Last time he'd seen that pan, it'd been bouncing off a shield-warrior's helm on the other side of the country. 'But we are going to match your DNA to the skin traces on this, just to be certain.'

'Who are Dee and Hay?'

It was at that moment that his wife re-entered the main room, swinging an axe at the nearest visitor, Thetford. She caught the man on the shoulder, cutting down and sending a severed arm flying over to the other side of the room. A childhood filled with chopping wood for a house's fireplace could do that for a girl's back swing. Incredibly, Thetford just stood there, casually glancing at his bloody stump spurting blood as if the wife had done no more than jostle him on a market day.

'That was clever,' said the wounded visitor. 'Your request for beer was a coded signal, warning your spouse.'

Bligh pulled out a pipe-like object from under his jacket. 'Let's just take it as red that you are the prince's manservant.'

The stranger pointed his pipe at Noak and he barely had time to protest, 'Ex-manserv—' before Noak found himself falling to the stone floor, his body paralysed, prisoner in the clutches of a waking nightmare.

Bligh knelt by Noak's side. Noak couldn't see what they had done with his wife from the angle where he'd painfully collapsed, but he noticed there was a strange set of metallic strips tied as a glove around the intruder's hand.

'So, is this the one?' asked Bligh.

Thetford nodded. 'DNA pairing positive; his ribs have fractures sealed with modern bone replication and there are multiple micro fragments of rail-gun shell casing embedded in his spine. Here's the shell match. A General Weapons Combine MA1002 flight drone. It's old school TAMC military surplus.'

It was spells they were talking about, magic. Matobo the Magnificent, damn his bones. The sorcery that had flown Noak away from certain death at the hands of the baron's soldiers, the same magic that had healed his broken body. And they can detect it. Have the priests dispatched their own sorcerers to track down Prince Calder? To track me down?

Bligh came into view again, kicking Noak's crossbow away. 'Not quite as old school as one's trusty crossbow, though, Mister Thetford.' Bligh smiled, but without an iota of warmth. 'Hello, Noak Barlund. There's one thing you should always remember when consorting with wizards. Their magic always leaves traces. Let's see what you really know, shall we?'

'And with any luck,' said Thetford, 'you will be able to help us locate Prince Calder. That's rather what we're hoping for, isn't it Mister Bligh?'

'Quite so, Mister Thetford.'

Noak couldn't scream. It was as if his lips had been sewn shut. Bligh stroked Noak's hair as though the ex-manservant was a hound, little spines on the metal glove's surface putting pressure on his scalp.

'We're going to take a copy of your mind, which will, I'm afraid, hurt immensely. Burning your synapses out one at a time is not a procedure you can experience under anaesthetic. You have to be conscious during magnetic resonance capture.'

Noak tried to struggle, but his body stoically ignored his requests – not even a toe twitching in response to his increasing panic.

'After you're dead, you will be free. You shall live forever!'

Who is this maniac? The madman's first prediction turned out to be true. Noak's brain burned with all the agony of a tar fire execution in front of the walls of Narvalo. Noak wasn't actually alive to see how the second prediction worked out. But it was amazing how much he could perceive after he was dead.

CHAPTER SIX

Continue the adventure

The adventures of the Gravity Rose continue in the second novella of the Sliding Void series . . . Transference Station.

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