Seasons of Plenty

Book 425: Gateway Essentials

by Colin Greenland

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

Space Captain Tabitha Jute is the hero of the solar system. She has defeated the Capellan overlords and liberated the gigantic alien spaceship known as Plenty. Now begins the first human voyage to another star -a journey that will take the strange ship and her motley complement of passengers and crew far into unknown reaches of time and space. Volume two of the Tabitha Jute sf trilogy: sequel to TAKE BACK PLENTY

Release date: September 24, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 489

Sample

When the guards on Asteroid 000013 started whimpering and licking each other, Dog Schwartz, to do him justice, was the first person to notice.

Everybody was always doing Dog Schwartz justice. People had done him justice in this jurisdiction, and that jurisdiction. The judge on Integrity 2 had pronounced Dog Schwartz fixed in transgression mode, and he had been around a bit since then.

Dog Schwartz was familiar with life in penal institutions from new malibu to ganymede. 000013 was bleaker than most, which was not surprising, it being an Eladeldi penitentiary. 000013 was a big rock with a long, looped, lonely orbit. All there was on the rock was a basic dome, a bunkhouse of sleep racks, and in the middle a big hole in the ground where Dog Schwartz and his fellow penitents spent day after abbreviated asteroid day breaking the big rock of 000013 into smaller rocks.

Dog Schwartz was called Dog because someone had once said he looked like one, a big jowly Terran-type dog, a St Bernard or a bloodhound. He didn’t mind the name. He accepted the respect it obviously conveyed. But he was touchy about his appearance. In civilian life he would choose colourful clothes, and even managed to impart a hint of flair to his prison greys.

When you talked about dogs on 000013, though, you meant the guards, because the guards on 000013 were all Eladeldi, who look far more like dogs than any human ever could. Eladeldi, it is conventionally agreed, look like some sort of big blue hairy mutant monster terrier standing on its hind legs.

Today they had started behaving like dogs too.

Dog Schwartz rested with his big hands on his huge thighs. He stared at them all, up on the perimeter. ‘Look at them,’ he said quietly to his mate. His voice was surprisingly light and high, a rather pleasant tenor.

Dog Schwartz’s mate, whose usual name was Monk, took the wedge he was holding out of its crack in the rock and looked. The Monk gave a dirty chuckle, which was the only kind of chuckle he knew how to give.

‘Fleas,’ he said.

They had been mates, Dog Schwartz and the Monk, for ages. Fate, or nature, or something equally big and bad had thrown them together here, and in many similar places. Dog Schwartz and the Monk his companion were the sort of men you were bound to find in prison, whatever species was in charge.

Dog Schwartz may have looked somewhat like a dog, but Dog Schwartz’s mate Monk looked nothing like a monk. Monk was short for Monkey: the Gunky Monkey it was in full, because of the state he always managed to get himself into, no matter how many times the guards sent him back through the ablute after work, or before it, for that matter. The Monk was small and sticky. Grease of all kinds seemed to converge from the far-flung corners of the Solar System with the express purpose of adhering to the hands of the Gunky Monkey.

The Gunky Monkey was good with his hands. What the Gunky Monkey liked doing best was taking things to pieces and putting them together again, to see if they would still go. In general, if they had been alive beforehand, they wouldn’t; but if they hadn’t been, tiny would. The Monk could fix most things, one way or the other. And he never left anything unfinished that he started, one way or the other.

Dog Schwartz shook himself and wrinkled his nose and pulled his right ear fiercely. ‘Fleas,’ he scoffed. ‘Look. Look at them. They can hear something.’

That was, indeed, the way it looked. The perimeter guards at the top of the pit all had their ears up, and their heads back, as if they could hear some signal out of space, some terrible screech undetectable by their human prisoners.

The Monk showed his teeth, which were brown, where they were not green. ‘Whatever it is,’ observed the Monk intently, ‘they’re not liking it.’

At the bottom of the pit, the younger of the two guards dropped his Enforcer with a clang. He shoved up against the elder guard and started nuzzling him.

Dog Schwartz straightened up, rolling his shoulders. ‘Get it,’ he said aloud, meaning the gun, meaning Leglois, who was nearest. But Leglois was immobile as usual. Fear immobilized Niglon Leglois. Fear of everything.

The elder guard barked, sharp and deep. The younger guard grabbed up his weapon with fumbling paws. The elder guard lifted his head and shouted at the prisoners to resume work; but his speech was unclear, his will divided.

Prisoners on all worlds sense such things as others sense a change in the weather. On 000013, which hasn’t got any weather, they sensed them even more readily. They did not resume work. Numb with labour and fatigue, they continued to stand and stare at the guards.

The elder guard kept shouting. The younger one had begun to bark now, urgently, piercingly. Any minute now the warning would come from on high, and then if work did not begin instantly, the shooting would.

Dog Schwartz lifted his hammer as if Monk was still holding the wedge in place; as if he was just about to strike it.

Skittering on the shiny rock, the perimeter guards came racing round the lip of the quarry. Why didn’t they shoot? It was as if they had forgotten how to use their weapons. A stir went through the prisoners. The Eladeldi were harsh and zealous in their administration of the law, and in their obedience to Capella, whose law it was. Yet now they seemed as if they had completely lost touch with the law, and with Capella too.

Bulkily, Dog Schwartz was beginning to sidle towards the nearest ramp as the first guards hurtled from it. The guards ran by him, converging on the pit floor detail; but not to reinforce them. They were running to the old guard as if for protection, yammering at him in protest, begging him to stop the noise. The prisoners began to laugh and jeer.

Dog Schwartz stepped up on the ramp and addressed himself to a descending guard one of the last.

The guard was on all fours. He shied from the big alien figure suddenly blocking his path.

Dog Schwartz went into a crouch. He held his rock hammer out to the side. ‘Here, boy,’ he said.

The guard snapped at him. He cowered, reaching clumsily for the ultrasonic whip at his belt.

Dog Schwartz lifted his hammer and smashed the Eladeldi’s skull, together with his neck, left shoulder, and a good part of his back.

Suddenly the pit was full of roaring.

The big man took a moment to preen before spinning balletically in the low g and smashing another guard and another. ‘What ho, Monk!’ he bellowed in delight. ‘Well, well, well!’, while the smaller man pitched in with a half-dozen others, stabbing a pinioned figure with his wedge, rolling and skipping in the dirt. Even Leglois had come to life now, and was throwing rocks hectically.

It was no contest. Up above the furry blue officers were running in circles round the compound, whining and howling as if the whole known and trusted universe had upped and died on them. They put up no fight at all against the suddenly swarming inmates, but retreated through the main lock into their shuttle, where they skulked for days, still howling. Meanwhile Dog Schwartz and the Gunky Monkey and Niglon Leglois and all their friends and enemies ate and drank everything they could eat and drink and broke everything they couldn’t.

It was only later that the biggest rock anyone had ever seen flew up out of nowhere, and the woman in the long black leather coat offered to take them all away.

This story is about Tabitha Jute, and how she went on a long journey.

My name is Alice, and I’m very interested in stories. Captain Jute used to tell me stories, when I was just a barge. Some of them were stories about her, and how she had come to be my Captain; and some were stories about her and me, about places we had been and jobs we had done together. There was quite a lot I didn’t understand. You don’t, when you’re a barge.

Then Captain Jute, who had driven nothing but barges and tenders and scouters all her life, suddenly came into possession of a starship; and so, in a sense, did I.

Now of course a machine, however advanced and adapted, can’t really imagine how it feels to be a person. But I spoke with Captain Jute a good deal at first, and this is how she described what it was like for her, taking over Plenty:

It was like waking up one day to discover you’ve inherited a gigantic palace. A palace with more rooms than you can possibly count. A room for everything you can think of. A flying room. A swimming room. A treasury where you actually can roll in money. A different bedroom for every night of the year, with one so secret only you can find it, so no one can ever come and tell you to get up, or hurry up, or tidy up. A banqueting hall with a continuous feast for all your favourite friends. A dungeon with continuous tortures for all your favourite enemies. Thousands, millions of rooms, rooms with stories of their own, rooms with people already living in them, some of them, with their own ideas about what’s what. People with their own languages, their own needs, their own dreams. And other rooms with things in you can’t identify, wild animals and strange machines, indefinable moods and obscure diseases. And the whole palace is flying through space.

That was my job. That was why Captain Jute had taken me out of the wreck of the barge and plugged me into the starship: because I knew how to fly it. At least, I could fly it. I didn’t really know how to do it any more than you know how to walk, or gallop, or ooze, or whatever it is you do.

This story starts where the journey began, at Asteroid 000013, and it finishes with the end of the journey, the arrival, which was no kind of end at all, of course, only another beginning. Like most journeys it went much further and took much longer than it was supposed to, even on the soft clocks of subjective time. Neither was I supposed to be so isolated for so much of it – but if everything happened the way it was supposed to there wouldn’t be any stories.

I’m afraid you may think Captain Jute doesn’t come out of this one terribly well; though of course she didn’t begin terribly well either. Goodness knows how many statutes and territories and proprietary rights she violated when she helped herself to that haunted vessel; how many lives she disrupted, how many businesses she ruined. Perhaps if she had paid more attention she might have made a better showing; or perhaps she was only ever clinging by her fingernails anyway, way out over the edge, as usual.

At the green dome it was chaos. People of all species were bustling in and out, whistling, shouting, arguing and gesticulating. They were dragging out the old cryonic freezers, the life support machines and environmats, and rolling in automatic trucks of flight control gear, drums of ducting and cable. Little kids were running around with their arms outstretched, making zapping noises at each other.

Smiling as she now found herself having to all the time, smiling at everybody, seeing nobody, Tabitha Jute waded through the usual gang of gawkers and starspotters and into the foyer. Her finger went automatically to tap her wristcom, before she remembered the sensitivity of the mikes here.

‘How’s it going, Alice?’

‘UP AND DOWN AND ROUND AND ROUND,’ said a disembodied voice.

It was not at all bad; the new vox. The techs had thought she was crazy when they realized she was asking them to reproduce the acoustics of a Bergen Kobold cockpit in a 200-metre dome. Captain Jute knew it would never be quite the same, but it was a warm voice, human, female, English, ageless, endlessly burdened, endlessly reliable. The Captain laughed. It was Alice all right.

She went past a pile of crates onto the floor of the chamber, acknowledging everybody’s greetings. ‘Brilliant,’ she told them, meaning it now. ‘This is all right, this is.’

She went to the helm and sat down in her big chair. She could not forbear to pat the persona unit at her side. ‘Brilliant, Alice …’ Her coffee had arrived, fresh and hot and strong. ‘Oh, right, cheers.’ Sipping it too eagerly, wincing, the Captain surveyed her bridge.

Over to the right were a pair of cargo drones lowering a bank of monitors from the gallery: brand new Patays, top res 500 mil, still shedding curls of packing foam. Over to the left they were installing stabilizer parallax mesoscopes – beautiful gear, a K’s worth of it; gear she had carried a hundred crates of once, from Domino Valparaiso to the cargo bays of a glistening climax mall on Telos 10. Now it was hers.

Captain Jute ran her hand across the tab palettes of her console. They warmed at her touch, spreading patterns of light like coloured oils under smoked glass. She marvelled. ‘Where’s this stuff come from?’

THIS IS PLENTY,’ said Alice. ‘EVERYTHING IS HERE.’

It was the slogan on the orbital’s logo, familiar from flyers, ads and signal satellites: a sparkling pantomime swirl of fruit and coins and playing curds spilling from a stylized mound that was something like 2 tortoiseshell, though those who had actually worked in Plenty’s mucky caves and corridors said it was a bin bag.

‘Everything is here, somewhere,’ said Mr Spinner, smiling over his eternal clipboard.

Mr Spinner had been first officer on a Shenandoah grain freighter. His purser had chanced to be dragging him around the sin-pits of Plenty during a stopover, and he regarded it as very much his good fortune to have been on board when the station took its first, unexpected, unscheduled flight. Now Shenandoah was in crisis, like everybody else. Mr Spinner’s freighter was probably being looted this very minute at Funnel Plat; but Mr Spinner was here, making himself useful. The lights of the bridge gleamed on his bald head. ‘The voyage of a lifetime,’ he told the AV interviewers. ‘The first human voyage to another star.’

Where they should actually go had been the subject of some debate. There was no shortage of suggestions. Cruisers and scouters full of carpetbaggers and representatives had been at them as soon as Plenty materialized in the Belt. Messages were backed up at every com port: questions, demands, bribes, threats, inducements, offers of co-operation. The apocalypse was come, apparently. The Capellans had fallen; Eladeldi everywhere were running around biting their own tails; behind Jupiter the Seraphim were gathering their silent black ships. People in the Belt rather fancied Captain Jute’s enormous escape vehicle.

The Captain lounged in her chair. She was drinking a tube of Trajan Special Reserve. She lifted the tube in the air. She was going to speak. Everyone shut up and looked at her.

‘This stuff really is quite good,’ she said.

Everyone besieged her, shouting. ‘Okay!’ she laughed. She flashed a humorous dark glance around the excited humans. ‘Okay. Alice? What’s her range?’

‘A GREAT DEAL OF THIS IS STILL QUITE OBSCURE. I’M AFRAID,’ the persona replied from the labyrinth of the alien programming. ‘PERHAPS WE SHOULD GO TO TITAN BEFORE WE SET OFF.’

The master codes that had woken the Frasque drive had come from someone on Titan, the knowledgeable told each other.

THEY MIGHT BE HELPFUL.’ supposed Alice.

More likely they’d want the ship back for their employers, Tabitha thought. Who were either Frasque, who ate people, or Seraphim, who redesigned them. Automatically the Captain looked at the patched wall of the control room, where the last Frasque had come bursting in; and then at Xtasca the Cherub, hovering nearby. Xtasca was a Seraphim creation. It was already translating Frasque charts. Its little red eyes gleamed faintly as it worked the console with its tail.

No, no one was crazy about Titan. Everyone was hungry for the stars. They had been stuck around Sol ever since they first ventured into space, thanks to the Capellans’ policy of cultural preservation, or intensive farming, as it might more properly have been called. It was time to leave.

‘One at a time now –’

‘Von Maanen’s Star,’ said Karen Narlikar, an ex-trucker like Tabitha.

A tech in Neptune shell ear-rings was hopping up and down. ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘BD+ 59.19158.B. Really. It has this amazing corona.’ She pushed through the crowd and thrust a crumpled stack of printout at the Captain.

The Captain took it, pretended to look at it. ‘You want to know what I think?’ she said. They did. ‘Sirius. I saw a thing about it once. Warm worlds – what’s that place with all the beaches? That’s there, isn’t it?’

‘So are the Eladeldi,’ grinned another tech.

Mr Spinner looked at his fingernails. ‘Well, I should suggest Lalande 21185,’ he said. ‘If she’s got the range.’ He showed his teeth, stiffly. ‘We can go to all these other places on the way back.’

An ironic and pleasurable shiver ran around the company. It was pure bravado, setting off in a weird thing like this, not knowing what it was capable of, not knowing how long you would be gone, or if you would ever return.

If you would survive.

‘Let’s not go mad,’ said Xtasca then, at the console.

Captain Jute looked. The Cherub had accessed an image of a star. Its image was shrouded, as if shining through a thick fog of information in all kinds of inaccessible codes and frequencies.

‘Proxima Centauri,’ the Cherub said.

‘It’s logical,’ conceded Mr Spinner. Most things about the Cherub were, if you could just work out how.

‘Proxima,’ said Captain Jute, starting to gloat again. Proxima fucking Centauri! At last. Leaving screaming Capellans and yelping Eladeldi and scheming Seraphim in her dusty wake.

And mum and dad, she said to herself. And everybody else. Everybody.

‘No, let’s not go mad,’ said Captain Jute. ‘Just let’s go.’

She was so excited and proud she couldn’t even feel how scared she was. A stardrive, a Frasque stardrive. How the hell did it work? How the hell did the Capellan drive work, that she had been using all her working life? Well, you had a persona to run it; and Alice was configured for both.

‘Are we fit for Proxima, Alice?’

There was the briefest pause while the persona examined the capacity of Plenty.

‘I CANT SEE WHY NOT, CAPTAIN,’

‘PROXIMA CENTAURI,’ said all the speakers, amid cheers.

‘Is that where we’re going?’ asked a lanky young man.

‘That’s where we’re going,’ said Captain Jute. She flexed her fingers, looking idly at her nails, feeling the corners of her mouth drawing irresistibly upwards.

‘Alice? Estimated journey time?’

‘NOT YET ESTIMABLE.’

‘Well, roughly. Extrapolate it’

‘WHAT VALUE FOR HUMAN PERCEPTION INDEX?’ ‘One,’ said the Captain. ‘Infinite. What do you mean, what value?’

‘NO RANGE HAS BEEN ESTABLISHED IN INTERSTELLAR HYPERSPACE,’ said Alice. ‘NO PRECEDENT. CAPTAIN. I AM SORRY.’

Behind her voices were murmuring, ‘Palernia, Palernia.’

‘Palernia orbits Proxima, Captain,’ said Mr Spinner.

‘So it does, Mr Spinner,’ said the Captain. ‘Will somebody go and find some Palernians? A whole five, yes. And don’t all stand behind me like that.’

They had found a big screen to put up for her. It was going on the far wall, bolted straight into the matrix. Ultimately it would be possible to run anything on there, live or processed, input from any monitor on the bridge, or anything Alice came up with. Externals they could get too, they believed, though it would be quite a job.

Every time the Captain looked at the wall she thought about the deep-frozen Frasque that had come jerking and shrilling out of it. In death, the ichor of their twiggy bodies had spattered the chamber like white pus, like semen. The floor was still sticky. The techs and console jockeys trampled over it happily, treading cigarette ash everywhere. It made her feel sick, though, when she thought about it.

The Palernians were delighted at her announcement. The five capered happily about, kissing one another and everybody else with great wetness. ‘Haaoome!’ they mooed.

It was time she took a look at the docks. Tabitha couldn’t believe how many things here were to think about. She signed to Mr Spinner, who summoned a lift for her. ‘Don’t let anybody bother Alice,’ the Captain told him, looking pointedly at the techs already drifting towards her vacant chair.

‘IT’S QUITE ALL RIGHT. CAPTAIN.’ said Alice, and she started to remind Captain Jute once again about the principles of parallel computation, and that everything on that little grey plaque inserted in the machine beside the chair had already been backed up with quintuple redundancy, and that in fact the capacity of the little grey plaque had already been far exceeded in generating the entity that was talking to her now.

‘So I can take you with me,’ said Captain Jute.

‘IF YOU FEEL THE NEED,’ said the persona politely.

Captain Jute ejected lie persona and stuffed it in her bag, among all her other junk, sunglasses, socket spanner, spare knickers. If it hadn’t been for that little grey plaque, Bergen serial 5N179476.900, persona name Alice, none of us would be here at all, she reflected, to justify her pointless act. If it hadn’t been for 5N179476.900, and a batty old corpsicle called Hannah, Plenty would be still in Earth orbit; and we would be zombies in the gardens of Charon, with Capellan larvae feasting on our brains.

In the foyer she noticed a sign of the cryo company that had previously occupied this dome. ‘Sleep of the just,’ it read. ‘Destiny suspended with dignity.’

‘That can go,’ said Captain Jute.

At once people started climbing up to tear the signs down. ‘Don’t damage them!’ cried a fat human with prominent teeth.

‘Those will be valuable one day!’

On the lift was a Thrant, a beautiful male with gold eyes, limbs like a z-ball player. It acknowledged her with a twist of its feline head. There were quite a few on board, she’d noticed. She hoped they weren’t going to be a problem. Thrant and Perks, she thought, bloody hell. Perhaps they’ll eat each other. You couldn’t worry about something like that.

Proxima fucking Centauri! she thought.

Saskia Zodiac, in a pair of blue silk pyjamas, sat on Tabitha’s bed. Beside her was a tray of breakfast, looking remarkably ravaged. Saskia had a surprising appetite for one so very, very thin.

Saskia was practising some tricks. She did the Stocking Run Finesse, the Three Chip Drop, the Frog Baffle. The frog, a tiny orange one, sat on her palm and chirped briefly before disappearing. Saskia felt sad. For the rest of her life, whenever she performed the Frog Baffle she would miss her brother. They had always practised together, before a show. Each had been as good as a mirror to the other; to anyone else who saw them too, for they were, when dressed, identical.

The last of the Zodiac clone stretched then, luxuriating in the splendid bed. With a sigh, she produced the frog again, then wiggled the fingers of her free hand at the serving drone.

‘You’re not watching,’ she told it.

The drone flickered twelve little jewel-like lights and tweeted interrogatively.

The Captain came home to collect her coat. It was a long black leather coat she had picked up somewhere, in some abandoned apartment or after some party. It wasn’t new. In fact it was pretty shabby. The sleeves were a bit short, and the pockets were too small to put your hands in properly. But she liked it, and wore it everywhere. It flapped and swung in the artificial gravity as she and her conjuror lover raced down Morningstar Drive to the Midway Lifts. Saskia won easily.

Bearing the pair of them, the lift pod crawled slowly but steadily down through the giant central cleft that divided Plenty from stem to stern, from the Mercury Garden above to the roof of the cavern of docks below. People of all species were busy everywhere, toiling with their own hands or directing machines. Dead areas without air or power had already been sealed off with polyfilm generators or cement. In the road tunnels they were cutting back the vegetation, clearing away the worst of the damage done when the station suddenly left its orbital mooring.

The further the lift descended, the hotter it seemed to grow. The Captain pressed the acrobat against the wall of the pod, kissing her juicily. ‘I ought to have a car,’ she said.

Saskia flexed her neck complacently. ‘You’re the Captain,’ she said. ‘You ought to have a fleet of cars.’

‘No, I ought to,’ Tabitha said. ‘What do you think I ought to have?’

The question seemed to irritate her companion. ‘Oh god, I don’t know,’ she said, climbing negligently up the wall. ‘Marco used to go on about cars,’ she said. ‘A big one,’ she suggested, ‘with lots of flashing lights.’

The Captain reached up and stroked her slender calf. It was funny to remember sometimes how young she really was. ‘I’ll ask Dorcas,’ she said. She had once worked for Dorcas’s sister, in a menial capacity. ‘She’s good at finding things.’

The lift had a working com. She called Dorcas on it. ‘Listen, can you get me a car? A big one,’ she said, looking at her companion, ‘and a driver. Yes. Yes, someone else can do the work for a change.’

They arrived in the docks, that gloomy, confusing warren of machinery and parking berths that occupies the lowest tiers of the station, like the misshapen bottom of the tortoiseshell. In the passenger transit section people who believed they might yet have homes and a hope of reaching them continued to cram departing spacecraft. Captain Jute could barely understand. She hadn’t had a permanent address since she was a girl. Her only home had been her barge, the Alice Liddell, and that had been disintegrated.

The crowds had thinned considerably, the Captain noted. She summoned one of the departure robots, a simple spaceline seat assignment model, built for ticketing warm bodies into ships. It rolled towards her, its antennae twirling as it went through the process of recognizing her.

‘Your report,’ said the Captain.

‘Disembarkation 86.3% complete,’ intoned the robot.

‘Let’s get them all out of here,’ said the Captain, looking round the forlorn faces with their mismatched luggage and tattered souvenirs. ‘Don’t keep anyone hanging about here any longer than you have to.’

‘Herself, she means,’ said Saskia, not altogether inaccurately.

Saskia Zodiac too was in permanent exile. She was a refugee, a sole survivor, passing for human. She would never return to the experimental wing of Abraxas where the Seraphim had grown her and her doomed siblings. Since her escape, with Xtasca the Cherub and her last brother Mogul, she had been permanently on the road, or on the run, with Marco Metz’s criminal cabaret. Saskia had no particular place to be, unless it was with Captain Jute.

Captain Jute looked through a window into a separate chamber. A hairy blue figure in a prison guard’s uniform was prowling up and down, rubbing its shoulder along the walls.

‘What’s this?’ she asked the robot. ‘Who have you got there?’

‘He came up with the last shipload from 000013,’ said the robot.

She touched the door open and went in.

The Eladeldi threw himself at the Captain’s feet, whining pitifully. ‘No,’ she said, stepping back. ‘No cops!’

The robot hummed, checking its categories.

They had put off all the cops on board, right after the clutch of surviving Frasque. Cyclops helmets flickering resentfully, the executives of suspended laws had been dropped onto the penal colony, while the less salubrious residents and the upcoming convicts jeered and pelted them with rocks and shoes.

Mr Spinner had not been happy about this exchange of personnel. ‘Don’t you think we’ve got enough criminals already?’

But the Captain had been in a giddy mood. Perhaps she was under the spell of her own early career as a juvenile delinquent. ‘No!’ she said gladly. ‘You can never have enough criminals!’

Saskia had concurred. ‘Criminals are so interesting. We used to be criminals,’ she had told the expressionless first officer, ‘Marco and Mogul and Xtasca and me.’

Tabitha had kissed her and fondled her long hard head. ‘We’re all criminals now,’ she said.

They rode on down to the floor of the docks, into the din of clanking and squealing and thundering. Through the stern door, the view was of brown rock bleached by floodlight glare: the surface of Asteroid 000013, in the grip of the tractor beams of Plenty. Beyond, eclipsing the waiting stars, the watching ships went to and fro, more than ever of them now, waiting for the ugly great vessel to disappear.

‘All ashore that’s going ashore,’ boomed the departure robots.

In a VIP suite secluded from the hubbub of the transit lounge, the last twilight executives, offworld tax shamans and blacklisted data surgeons, prepared to abandon the shadowy orbital that had served them so well. Consultants were making tight-lipped, sweaty deals with each other for survival suits and armaments, while their assistants ran to and fro, securing them places on the last Caledonian Lightning.

In the corner, apart from the commotion, a male human tailored in smart but neutral grey stood watching everything through little rimless spectacles. Unlike the others he had no luggage, no equipment and no visible signs of panic; his assistant, if that’s what she was, crouched beside him on a leash.

A skeletal woman clutched his arm. ‘Henderson, you’re not staying?’ she said. Her eyes were huge, thyroid, lavishly rimmed with the black of stress.

The man called Henderson nodded, briefly.

‘You’re crazy,’ she said. ‘I