The Carlyles had walked out. The reporters had buzzed off. There was a hiatus in the conference, filled with a low murmur as people came and went to fetch water, tea, beer, or coffee from the Knights’ commendably ecumenical catering machine. Lamont sat at the top table beside Armand and Yamata, sipped tea, and wondered if he and the two lightning-chasers, as they called themselves, formed a third party to the Eurydiceans and the Knights. Or if there were more parties here than that: the Eurydiceans all wore uniforms identical apart from their company logos, but he could tell the resurrected Returners from the rest at a glance: faces fresh out of the tank, and yet older and more experienced than the others, more primitive, more guarded.
As for the Knights, their expressions were calm but curious, their voices low, their gestures oblique. Higgins and Johnstone were looking around uneasily, but smiling.
Lamont hated this sort of thing: ambiguity, micropolitics, the presentation of self in everyday life. He decided he would have to get used to it. Morag Higgins caught his despairing glance, and returned him an encouraging smile. Now she was one straightforward person. Like the Hungry Dragon in that respect. He smiled back. He put down his empty cup with an unintended bang (still not used to gravity), shuffled his forearms on the table, turned to Armand and Yamata.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said. It came out too loud. The place hushed. ‘I detect a certain tension in the room.’
To his surprise, everybody laughed. Lamont took from it no sense of relief. One of the Returners jumped up.
‘Too right there’s tension,’ he said. ‘We were promised Return. I haven’t heard that mentioned. And I’m wondering if you haven’t sold us out again, General Jacques.’
Armand glanced sharply at Yamata, sighed, and leaned forward, elbows on the table.
‘Thank you, Lawrence,’ he said. ‘It is not a question of selling out. It is a question of doing my job.’
‘Now when have we heard that before?’ the Returner asked.
Armand cut across the chorus of concurrence.
‘Neither I, nor the Joint Chiefs, nor the Knights can prevent any of you from returning to Earth even if we wanted to. I must point out, however, that the Knights disapprove more strongly than ever of what the Carlyles call combat archeology.’ Armand glared at Lamont, Higgins, and Johnstone in turn. ‘Not to mention what the Carlyles call Rapture-fucking. I cannot imagine the Joint Chiefs taking any more sanguine view of them. What was awakened here is benign. What has been awakened elsewhere has often not been. As Eurydice moves to take full control of the wormhole skein, the opportunities for such activities will diminish. Despite our recent conflict, the Knights remain the most civilised of the powers, the one with whom we have most in common, and most to learn from, and most to give.’ He leaned back, and opened his hands. ‘Or does anyone think the American farmers or the Asian communists are more promising partners?’
‘You’re forgetting the Carlyles,’ said Higgins.
‘I am trying to,’ said Armand, to laughter.
The Returner who’d stood up now turned to face the others. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘I have to say with the Carlyles that there’s nothing here for us. For myself, I’m going back to the city. Anyone want to join me?’
A few of his resurrected comrades shook their heads. The others, about sixty in all, along with a few native-born Eurydiceans, rose and followed him out. Higgins cast Lamont an anguished, angry look, and followed them.
Lamont jumped to his feet. ‘Morag! Come back!’
A shake of her head sent a ripple down her silver hair.
Lamont hesitated, then looked at Armand and Yamata, shrugged, and made his way around the corner of the table and ran after her. He slowed to walk beside her.
‘Glad to see you,’ she said. Her glass eyes glinted, her metal hand was warm. They had gone out of the door by the time Armand had sprinted up and caught their shoulders, then kept pace.
‘Coming with us?’ asked Higgins.
Armand ignored the sarcasm. ‘You know I can’t,’ he said. ‘But don’t be fools.’ He lowered his voice. ‘You and that hothead Lawrence Hammond should have listened to what I said. How long will it take for Eurydice—or even your newly wakened AI—to take control of the skein? Days, weeks, who knows? Likewise for the Knights to harden their fortifications on Earth.’
‘And what if the Knights don’t just let the Returners leave?’ Lamont asked. ‘Or if the Joint Chiefs don’t? How long have we got then?’
‘Maybe a few hours,’ said Armand grimly. ‘Just keep it quiet and move fast. Talk to Lucinda Carlyle or Amelia Orr, they’ll know what to do. Set up a meeting, but don’t discuss anything over the comms.’ He raised his voice. ‘All right then!’ he shouted, pushing them forward. ‘Go! Go if you want! Go now!’
He stalked back in to the conference, theatrically shaking his head, while Lamont and Higgins walked after the Returners to the hypersonic transports. A starship screamed across the sky and stopped above the horizon, drifting down to land somewhere beyond the encircling range of hills.
The thing is,’ Winter heard himself shouting to Andrea Al-Khayed, as he waved a bottle in one hand and clung to a pillar with the other, outside the Bright Contrail some time about mid-afternoon, ‘the thing is, see, that General Jacques, that, that, that bastard, has sold out the Returners again! He’s done just what he done in the play last night! Just what he did back in Polarity! All over again! Son of a fucking bitch!’
‘What?’ he shouted. The music was loud. Vehicle traffic had stopped. The street was filling up with people drinking and dancing. More of the same was on the big screens, relaying views from right across the city, which was going wild with relief and exultation. It was being claimed that this would be the wildest party in the history of Eurydice. And why not, Winter thought dourly. They’d just survived what had seemed like certain disaster and emerged to find themselves—according to the more soberly reported news earlier—the potential future capital of the galaxy.
‘I said, “You’re right there!’ ” Al-Khayed shouted.
‘Oh, right.’ He nodded.
‘And you need this!’ She passed him a glass. He knocked it back. The music suddenly quietened. He could hear and see a lot more distinctly.
‘What the—’ He stopped, suddenly aware of how he’d been assailing her ears. No way to speak to a lady. ‘What was that?’
‘Iced umami tea.’
‘Ah. Thank you.’ He shook his head and looked around, realising that he had sobered up. ‘Jeeze.’
‘It won’t last,’ she warned. ‘But it’s good for hangovers, too.’
‘Thanks,’ he said. The mention of a hangover made him want another alcoholic drink. Fast, before it caught up with him. ‘Uh, can I fetch you a drink?’
‘I’m fine,’ said Andrea. ‘Catch you later.’
Evidently giving him up as a hopeless case, she swayed back through the crowd on the pavement to rejoin Ben-Ami, who was holding court at his usual table by the railing. Kowalsky was sitting beside him, Voigt opposite him and beside Calder, who’d somehow snagged her—or she him: the tall dancer, corseted and kirtled in black satin, petted him absently and intermittently as if he was a monkey. They were all talking as raucously as he had been a moment ago. Passersby, who all recognised them and might otherwise have nodded and smiled, passed tactfully on if they were more sober, or added to the press around the tables and slumped on the ground if they were more drunk.
Winter turned away, savouring his fleeting moment of moral superiority as he made his way to the drinks table in front of the cafe’s main, wide-open window. He was just reaching for a bottle of red wine and, with some surprise at his own self-restraint, a glass, when he saw Lucinda, Amelia, and a stocky, dark-skinned, black-clad man pushing through the crowd towards Ben-Ami’s table. They seemed to have a small crowd of their own behind them, a score or so—maybe more, it was hard to see in the crush—of people who looked like tourists, gawping around, wearing wild local clothes they obviously weren’t used to. As they approached, Amelia glanced over her shoulder and waved them towards the park, and with a lot of jostling they dispersed in that direction, leaving the two women Winter knew and the man he didn’t to step on to the pavement spread of the Bright Contrail. Amelia was in a very Eurydicean outfit of the day, bright blue, all carnival fronds and fringes, inconspicuous in the festivities. Lucinda wore the same off-white long dress in which Winter had last seen her, back at the gig. The effect was hallucinatory. He stared at her face, wondering if she looked different. It was hard to tell. Her appearance had always outdone his memory of her each time he’d seen her.
She noticed him just as she approached the table, and smiled and nodded briefly. She said something to Ben-Ami and seated Amelia and the man who had arrived with them down beside him, and then walked over to Winter. She was carrying the same enormous floppy hat, and a bottle.
‘Hello,’ she said.
‘It’s good to see you again,’ said Winter. ‘To see you, uh . . . back.’
‘Back from the dead!’
‘As I think I said to you once, the experience is overrated.’
At that Lucinda did look changed. There was a thrawn weariness in her face that Winter hadn’t seen before.
‘Aye,’ she said. ‘You could say that.’ She looked down, then firmly up. ‘Well. A lot tae talk about. Could we, like, start again where we left off?’
He laughed. ‘Hence the antique frock, yeah?’
‘That was the idea, yes.’ She sounded embarrassed. ‘Dialled up a copy at the skyport, from my old hotel room.’
‘It’s still not you, but it’s a nice—’
‘—Oh, shut up—’
‘—thought.’
She flourished the bottle. ‘Talisker,’ she said. ‘From the captain’s table. Well, the captain’s drexler, tae be honest. Want some?’
‘Let’s find somewhere to sit.’ He glanced at Ben-Ami’s table.
‘Not there,’ she said.
Tell him,’ said Amelia, pouring Ree a drink. His hand was shaking too much to pick up the glass. He withdrew it, looked Ben-Ami in the eye and said, ‘All my production brigade killed or dispersed and in hiding because we sold your work, Mr Ben-Ami.’
Ben-Ami closed his eyes and opened them again. ‘What?’ Everybody at the table was by now looking at Ree.
‘I owe you licence fee, of course,’ he said. ‘I am representative of Eighty-Seven Production Brigade. But I hope you will have it in your heart to defer requirement of payment.’
Ben-Ami waved a hand. ‘Forget about that. You said people have been killed for selling my work?’
‘Is my fault,’ said Ree. He sipped the neat whisky, then downed it in one gulp as if it was vodka. ‘Miss Carlyle sojourned at our brigade headquarters. She gave collected works of Mr Ben-Ami as payment. We all watched your wonderful play, Mr Ben-Ami, about great Prince Leonid. I was so moved by it that I had it transmitted as sample to several DK habitats in the same system. One of them, Man Conquers Space Collective, is very rigorous in interpretation and upholding of self-reliance idea. They took exception to it. Great exception. They were already disapproving of us because we were terraforming planet for Yank farmers. They said now we are corrupting self-reliant society with backward and decadent Yank ideas. There was ideological discussion, then dispute. They said Leonid was a revisionist. We knew this was not so, and we were even more convinced that it could not be, Mr Ben-Ami, because of your great play. We voted to continue selling your work to other brigades and collectives. Man Conquers Space Collective sent their self-defence force, aerospace militia division, to correct us. They attacked us from the sky, Mr Ben-Ami! We had no defences prepared! We did not expect this, even from dogmatists! I only escaped because I was far away, with my marine biology work, and even then they destroyed my place of work. I hid underwater and made my way through wormhole gate and waited for Miss Carlyle’s production brigade, which we already knew was going to pass through on way here to fight the Knights.’
‘What about the other production brigades on your planet?’ Amelia asked, tipping him another whisky.
‘Rest of Transformation of Nature Collective mostly afraid of Man Conquers Space,’ Ree said scornfully. ‘They have indeed become soft living on dirt like Yank. While hiding in the hills the past days and nights I have used my juche untraceable communications gear’—he tapped a pendant at his throat—‘to make clandestine agitation in DK settlements on and around Eurydice. I have made contact with many people, scores of people, who are most indignant and who are not afraid. We will fight these Man Conquers Space son of bitch bastards like Brezhnev fought Nazis and Yanks and Polacks and South African slaveholders, gaining his honourable scars.’
Ben-Ami looked hard at the strange small man, fascinated and appalled.
‘How many of these son of bitch bastards are there, do you reckon?’ Calder asked.
‘Only hundred million,’ said Ree. ‘I will kill every last one of them even if I have to die like Leonid.’
‘No,’ said Amelia firmly. ‘You will not. That’s revenge, not recompense. What you want to do is damage them, yes, kill some, yes, but gain something from it yourselves. You should think of it as collecting on a debt.’
‘Debt collection is not war,’ said Ree. ‘Is well-understood in DK.’ He gave Amelia a very ambiguous stare. ‘As we know from previous dealings with Carlyles. But conflict and debt collection would not only be with Man Conquers Space. They would not do this on their own. We suspect they are backed by the wicked Chinks.’
‘Who?’ yelped Calder.
‘Knights of Enlightenment, so-called,’ said Ree. ‘To disincentive self-reliant people from getting involved further in terraforming for Yank farmers. So we may need help from bloody Carlyles.’ He looked beseechingly at Amelia. ‘Would this be problem for you?’
‘Not for me, it wouldn’t,’ said Amelia cautiously. ‘I wouldnae object if you were tae raise a few fighters. Gie the Knights a wee payback.’
Ree shook Amelia’s hand. ‘Is done, is deal?’
‘Uh, yes,’ she said. ‘Inasmuch as it’s up to me. But . . . we have another deal to fulfil first. Maybe.’
‘Is no hurry,’ said Ree. ‘We build our forces. Gain experience.’
‘Ah,’ said Amelia. ‘Would you like to gain some experience fighting the wicked—the Knights, on, ah, some other planet?’
‘I would indeed.’
‘Amelia sucked in her lips. ‘Could you use your untraceable comms right now, to ask them to come here? Discreetly? I would like to meet them. Quite urgently.’
Ree nodded, turned away and spoke as though to himself in a language Ben-Ami didn’t know, then turned back and smiled with a thumbs-up.
‘Wait a minute,’ Ben-Ami said, leaning forward. ‘The Joint Chiefs would be most upset if Returners and Carlyles and God help us, commies were involved in an attack on the Knights.’
‘You’ve always known about this,’ said Amelia. ‘We talked about it.’
‘Not in a way I had to take seriously,’ said Ben-Ami.’ And not in a context where . . . all these other forces are involved. If the Joint Chiefs were to find out about this conversation, the consequences could be severe.’
He looked solemnly around all the faces at the table, then laughed.
‘So let us ensure that they don’t,’ he said.
Lamont sat on a bench, his legs stretched out, at the skyport concourse beside Morag Higgins as they waited for the Returner fighters to emerge from the changing rooms. Outside, on the field, the hypersonic transports of Blue Water Landings, like all the other vehicles in the parking apron, were dwarfed by two KE-built starships suspended on nothing a few metres above the landing strips. One of these ships was the Carlyles’. Other starships—AO trucks, DK batwings—hung in the sky like so many box or dragon kites. Around the perimeter of the skyport the usual bright-painted red and yellow emergency or auxiliary vehicles had been supplemented by darker, heavier military cars and tanks, bristling with cosmic-string projector guns. Nothing was going to land or take off from New Start without the Joint Chiefs’ approval, and all air and space traffic was being directed here. Whatever Armand had hoped, the Eurydicean government was already moving to take control of the skies. Even the little entopters were being grounded one by one, ostensibly for safety as the city revelled. Anyone disembarking would have to use the monorails and shuttles. The thought made Lamont break into a cold sweat of agoraphobia, but he knew he could overcome it. The only arrangement that had been made—in a very guarded in-flight phone conversation—with Amelia was to meet up at some cafe on the edge of the central park, the Jardin des étoiles. Lamont guessed Amelia had some plan in mind—perhaps to bring another Carlyle starship down on a sharp vertical descent over the park to pick everybody up.
The Returners trickled out, dressed in the scanty or elaborate costumes of the day. Lawrence Hammond, who seemed to be the leader of the handful of Eurydiceans among them as well as of the recently resurrected, was the first to walk over, quite unself-conscious in high-heeled boots and a fringed white leather suit set here and there with small shiny stones. He looked down at Lamont.
‘You ready?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you not going to get changed?’ Higgins asked.
Lamont looked along the length of his body to his boots, then at her.
‘No.’
‘You’ll kind of stand out.’
Lamont snorted. ‘I’m a celebrity now. Nothing I can do about that. What about you?’
She was getting stared at more than him, not to his surprise. Her metal features, though they looked like painted flesh, were in stark contrast to her black cotton suit.
‘I have an idea,’ she said.
She stood up and stripped off her tunic and trousers and threw them in the nearest drexler bin.
In her underwear she looked like she’d painted herself silver from head to foot.
‘There,’ she said. ‘Ready to party.’
They set off through a corridor to the monorail platform. The capsules that they boarded were empty apart from themselves, but as they swooped and soared between the towers and trees of New Start and stopped at other platforms they soon filled up. Lamont clung to a stanchion, sweating in his suit, breathing slowly. He kept his eyes closed, or looked outside. The city had changed in his absence; as he might have expected, it was the most massive and ancient-looking buildings, the ones built of stone and concrete, that were new and strange to him. The nanofactured, quasi-organic tree-like structures of towers and walkways, that could in principle be reconfigured overnight or returned to the ground, were all familiar; the city’s old growth.
The wildest party in the history of Eurydice was what had been promised, and that was what was delivered. Every light was on, every speaker was loud, every glass was full, every couple were in love for as long as it lasted. Winter wasn’t entirely sure if he and Lucinda were among them. She’d explained to him that a bunch of Returners were on their way, with some kind of plan or instructions from Armand about getting a starship in, and after a bit more conversation she’d traipsed off to the park to talk to the gang who’d arrived with her and to liase with—as far as he could see, over many heads—a steadily increasing number of what looked like DK types, if their fancily cut but drably coloured outfits were anything to go by.
Winter found a guitar in the back of the cafe, and he and Calder sat on the cafe’s pavement-edge railing, legs dangling, sweat falling, and sang and played all they could remember to anyone who cared to listen. At some point towards the dusk, Winter looked down and saw Lucinda at the table beneath his feet, talking to Ree and to Ben-Ami, who hadn’t shifted all afternoon, letting people come and go, and shouting his approbation or otherwise at the musicians.
‘Oh you daft scunner,’ Lucinda was telling Ben-Ami. ‘Of all the folks you could hae picked tae be a doomed romantic hero, it had tae be bloody boring Brezhnev.’
Ben-Ami shrugged. ‘Artistic licence, my dear.’
‘And you,’ she went on, turning to Ree, ‘you poor daft buggers, you had tae dae the same! Oh it ashames me! With all the worthless heroes of history to choose from. You could have had Mao, did you but know it. Or Guevara. Or Bonny Prince Charlie. Or even—’
She reached up for Calder’s guitar. ‘Give me that.’
She stood up, rested one foot on the chair; stooped over the guitar, strummed it, then raised her head and looked Winter straight in the eye and sang a song he remembered from Highland halls and pubs back in the 2030s. It startled him to hear it again, almost unchanged. It could have been about Guevara, or, as Lucinda had said, someone else as unworthy of the praise the song bestowed. No one had ever told him, not even when he’d sung it himself. Now that he came to think about it, inquiring after to whom the old Jacobite song now applied had not been a welcome question, and he’d learned to desist.
Sé mo laoch mo Ghile Mear
‘Sé mo Chaesar, Ghile Mear,
Suan ná séan ní bhfuaireas féin
Ó chuaigh i gcéin mo Ghile Mear.
Syne my brave darling disappeared
Naught know I but pain and sorrow
no news we heard, his death we feared
on far-off hills, in cruel caves.
That last line had been different before. Winter frowned, trying to recall it. In th’ cruel caves of somewhere somewhere. A foreign place-name. It had almost rhymed. The conversations nearby were stopping, in a spreading circle of silence. Lucinda had quite a voice, and she was throwing a lot of what sounded like real grief and yearning into it.
Sé mo laoch mo Ghile Mear
Sé mo Chaesar, Ghile Mear,
Suan ná séan ní bhfuaireas féin
Ó chuaigh i gcéin mo Ghile Mear.
Freedom’s fierce and gallant knight,
a high-flown laird with gentle eyes.
A blade of fire upon the night,
he’ll wreak destruction from the skies.
Winter joined in the next chorus, and Lucinda smiled warmly and connivingly at him, but it was to Ree she turned when she sang the rest, eyes bright and wet.
So drink his health and sing his praise
his far-famed face and sloganned name.
In every house be one who prays
he’ll scorch the tyrants with his flame.
Sé mo laoch mo Ghile Mear
‘Sé mo Chaesar, Ghile Mear,
Suan ná séan ní bhfuaireas féin
Ó chuaigh i gcéin mo Ghile Mear.
‘I didn’t know she could sing,’ Calder said.
Winter glared at him for a moment, but Calder was looking past him.
‘Behind you,’ said Calder. ‘Guy dressed like Elvis, from the rhinestones and amphetamines period. Play it cool and turn slowly. He seems to be squaring up for a fight with Amelia.’
Winter slid down from the rail and looked around. A few metres away Amelia stood with her back to him, and was indeed almost head to head with a man in a white suit. Winter expected to witness a Glasgow kiss at any moment. Beside that man stood a much taller figure in a tight, tattered space suit and with shaggy hair and beard, a man whom Winter recognised from the television as Lamont. He was leaning into the quarrel and clinging, as if for support, to the hand of a woman got up as some kind of robot sex-toy.
Winter edged closer, Calder just behind him.
‘We thought you were ready with—’ the white-clad man was shouting.
‘—fucking moron, dae ye think we hae—’
At that moment Lucinda flashed past him in a flurry of pale skirts and flung herself on the robot-like woman, hugging her and spinning her around. The quarrel abruptly halted in distraction and Lamont stepped forward and grasped both participants gently by the shoulder. Winter strode up to stand beside Amelia, who shot him a furious, about-fucking-time look. Other people, Returners and Carlyle gang and DK, were beginning to crowd around behind the antagonists, listening in and ready to back them up.
‘What’s the problem?’ Winter asked.
‘These fucking maroons,’ said Amelia. ‘They think we have a starship all set tae lift us all off. I thought your bloody General Jacques was gonnae take care of all that.’
‘What the hell can he do?’ said the man. Winter looked in his face and in a moment of disorientation recognised him as Lawrence Hammond, the Returner militant he’d last seen back on Polarity, a few subjective months and objective centuries earlier.
‘Hey, you’re—’ Hammond said.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Winter. ‘Glad to see you back too. You were saying?’
‘Armand’s stuck with the Runner Joint Chiefs and the Knights,’ Hammond was saying. ‘And you should see the skyport, it’s ringed with armour. No doubt the city too, and space defence. There’s not a thing that can move in the sky without being shot down. The only chance is to bring in a Carlyle ship hard and fast, we thought that was the plan—’
‘Aye, and have it shot down?’ snarled Amelia. ‘I don’t fucking think so, jimmie.’
Calder poked his head in and looked around the small but growing circle of tense faces.
‘You mean this whole thing is all about who was supposed to bring what to the party? He said, she said? Koresh on a fucking stick, kids. This is pathetic.’
Everybody bristled, turning on this new common enemy.
‘Thank you for that,’ said Winter. ‘But, yeah, this isn’t getting us anywhere. We—’
‘Excuse me,’ said the silver-skinned woman. ‘But, you know, we do have a starship. . . .’
Everyone looked at her, puzzled, and then Lamont grinned all over his face and said: ‘Yes!’
First there was a blue light everywhere for a moment, and then from the sky came a great rushing wind that made trees bend and chairs and tables bowl along the street. Winter clung to the rail with one hand and to Lucinda’s arm with the other. She was holding her daft hat crammed down over her head and face like some utterly inadequate armour. The wind stopped as suddenly as it had started, and every face looked up and saw what was coming down. Screams and yells rose above the loudest music that still played. People ran from the park in all directions. Winter heard Calder say, in an amused, satisfied tone: ‘Thousands flee screaming . . .’
But he, like everyone else, was looking up with his mouth open. The sight above them was like nothing anyone had ever looked on before. A kilometre-long narrow inverted cone of a mountain hung in the air, descending slowly until its relatively tiny, bristly metallic tip touched the grass a few hundred metres away, as gently as a well-balanced needle going into a vinyl groove.
Winter knew that it was no more impossible than the sight of all the other starships he’d seen; that his back-brain’s screaming question what’s holding it up? was mistaken in its premises; but at some level he could not believe what he was seeing.
‘Well,’ said Lamont, ‘I’d like to see them try to shoot that down.’
‘Don’t say that,’ said Lucinda. ‘Let’s just get everyone on board.’
They all walked, a few score of people, into the park, against the stream of everybody else, and one by one they climbed up an extended ladder to the small hatch under that enormous overhang. Winter was among the last to go. He looked down from the top of the ladder and saw Lamont and the silver-skinned woman still on the ground. They seemed to be arguing; then Lamont shrugged, shook his head, and stepped back as she scrambled up the ladder. Halfway up she swung away like a monkey, to cling head down to one of the external comms arrays. She grinned fiercely up at Winter.
‘I’ve always wanted to do this,’ she called out.
He felt a nudge on his heel. Lamont looked up from just below him on the ladder.
‘Get in,’ Lamont said. ‘She’s mad.’ It didn’t sound like a criticism.
As Winter hauled himself through the hatch the gravity field flipped over. Somebody reached to steady him; he swung around and found his feet on a bracketted metal shelf. Lamont came in, twisted around, and set off upwards, hand over hand to another aperture a few metres above. The outer hatch closed. Looking down, and therefore skyward, Winter could see every available space and place in which to sit or cling among the ship’s fittings and machinery occupied by people in incongruous gaudy finery. It was like seeing an entire contingent of the Notting Hill Carnival thrown into some overcrowded panopticon. The sound of a hundred and fifty-odd people breathing vied with the roar of overworked air scrubbers.
‘I appreciate that you are all somewhat uncomfortable,’ said a voice from everywhere. ‘Please be patient. The journey will not last long.’
Five hour later, the Hungry Dragon was parked unobtrusively, or so Lamont assured them, in the Solar System’s asteroid belt, and a Carlyle interplanetary transport was docking to take them all to New Polarity. Lamont stayed with the ship; and as the transport separated, Winter saw from its window an improbable silver-skinned figure on the side of the impossible ship, waving goodbye.