Janer took the still-warm lump of flesh and stared at it. He glanced down at Roach, who was watching him with a ratty smirk, then he took a small bite and, gritting his teeth against his rebellious stomach, chewed and swallowed. The meat slid down and seemed to settle there with a sudden heat that dispelled his nausea. He was surprised at the effect and took another bite. After swallowing this too, he tried to identify the taste.

‘Spicy… like curry… and bananas,’ he said.

‘It’s loaded with vitamins, proteins and sugars — and the virus of course, but don’t worry about that. The virus can’t survive human digestion, just as it can’t survive long exposure to the air. Your usual methods of contracting it are either through a leech bite or by sexual transmission.’ Erlin seemed uncomfortable at mentioning the latter method. ‘Are you on Intertox?’

Janer shrugged. ‘I’ll take my chances,’ he said, then remembering part of a drunken conversation the night before he asked, ‘Tell me, with food like this so easily available, why do they bring out here what they call “Dome-grown” food?’

Erlin smiled at a memory of her own, and Janer felt almost jealous of it. She said, ‘Dome-grown foods are Earth foods and the varieties grown here contain many natural germicides — toxins even — that inhibit the growth of the viral fibres. Hoopers have possessed the facilities for growing them since the days of Jay Hoop himself, and lucky they did or they wouldn’t have survived. They enjoyed more variety when the Polity finally arrived. Garlic is particularly good. Hoopers like garlic. They’ve grown it here for nearly a millennium.’

‘You’d have thought they wouldn’t want to inhibit the growth of those fibres.’

‘Slow growth is better than fast — that way you don’t go native,’ Erlin replied.

Janer waited for an explanation but none was forthcoming. He finished off the boxy meat first, and was about to pursue the matter when he heard a pitiful squeaking and looked down. Roach had opened a cast-iron bait box and was now baiting his hook. The creature wriggling in his fingers, in its attempt to escape being impaled, had the appearance of a miniature trumpet with a wading bird’s legs and webbed feet.

‘Let’s leave him to it,’ said Erlin. ‘It can be dangerous for an off-worlder to stand near a Hooper while he’s fishing.’

‘What do you mean?’

Erlin pointed at the bait box.

‘One of those things could chew into you like a drill bit. They’re difficult to remove once they get started.’

Janer nodded and stepped back. The little trumpet-things were leaping up and down in the box and, though they had no eyes, they seemed to be watching him. Roach showed no particular caution of the creature he held as he finally impaled it on a gleaming hook. As it let out a bubbling squeak, Janer saw the others in the bait box quit their squeaking and sink out of sight. He nodded to the crewman before following Erlin, but so intent was Roach on getting his line out, he did not notice.

Erlin went on, ‘Besides, there’s all the other things Roach might bring up on his line. There’s frog whelks and hammer whelks down there, not to mention glisters and prill. And there’s always leeches of course.’

Janer had no idea what most of these things were, and was not sure he wanted to find out just then.

As they came opposite the mast Erlin gestured at his belt. ‘You’re not carrying your weapon. I suggest you do,’ she said.

Janer nodded, then his attention was caught by a shoal of somethings sliding past the ship, just below the surface. At first he thought they might be dolphins, then he realized they were huge leeches.

‘Why do people want to stay here?’ he asked. ‘It seems a hellish place.’

Erlin was thoughtful for a moment before replying. ‘For Hoopers it’s what they’re accustomed to. Only in recent years have they become aware that they can leave. They stay because of the benefits they see. If they live long enough, they’ll end up like the Old Captains: practically unkillable, almost inured to pain, utterly at peace with themselves.’

‘Seems they’d have to survive for a long time to attain that,’ said Janer, still watching the leeches.

‘Yes,’ said Erlin. ‘There’s also the fact of the economy here — something that with our own benefits we tend to forget. A Hooper has to work for a very long time to be able to afford passage away from here.’

Janer turned to her, the words ‘afford passage’ registering in his blurry mind.

“I suppose this particular little jaunt is not for free?’ he said.

Erlin smiled. ‘No, I suggest you see Ron soon and negotiate a price.’

Janer looked up at the broad back of the big Captain. ‘I don’t suppose that negotiation need involve me calling him “a robber and a thief”, should it? I don’t fancy the idea of him getting annoyed with me.’

‘Old Captains infrequently lose their tempers — too dangerous,’ Erlin told him. ‘You can call him what you like so long as you pay him. I’m sure you won’t want to disembark just here.’

Janer once again studied the passing shoal of leeches. He searched for something more to say to keep the conversation going. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘do the leeches die?’

‘Yes and no. They’re preyed upon too, and as easy to kill as anything else here, but they don’t actually the of old age. When fertilized, they divide into segments, which then collapse into a large encystment, or egg. That egg will attach itself to the bottom of a sargassum, and out of it will eventually hatch thousands of cute baby leeches.’

‘Nice. What about the males?’

‘No males, really. The leeches are hermaphroditic… sort of.’

‘Same immortality as all life.’

‘Yes, it is that.’ Erlin nodded, lost to her own thoughts. Janer saw that she had now gone away from him and, thinking of nothing else to ask, he quickly returned to his cabin for his gun, deciding right then that he would be very careful here. It was apparent to him that this was a place where recklessness could soon get you dead.

On the great monolith of stone surrounded by empty ocean, Sniper reached out with one triple-jointed arm, clasped the bishop in his precision claw, and moved it halfway across the board. Keeping one palp-eye on the game he turned his other to the three objects that lay on a sheet of slightly putrescent skin spread on the rock beside the board. One of these objects was an explosive slave collar with Prador glyphs etched into its dull grey surface. A brief ultrasound scan revealed the information that the film of planar explosive inside it was still active even after all this time. This meant that at the antiquities sale on Coram this item would fetch over a thousand New Carth shillings. The two other objects were even more interesting and of greater value, as slave collars had already been found in their hundreds over on the Skinner’s Island. One of them, Sniper recognized as a very early nerve-inducer, despite the fact that most of its ceramal casing had corroded away. The other was a mass of corrosion which the war drone had identified, after scanning, as a projectile gun. This last item, despite its terrible condition, would fetch a mint, as it was likely a weapon carried by either Hoop himself or one of his comrades. Sniper hunkered down on his six crustacean legs and returned both eyes to the game as his opponent made a move.

‘How much you want for them?’ the war drone asked as he registered a possible danger to his queen in eight further moves.

Sniper’s opponent lowered to the stone the foot-talon he had used to move his knight, and blinked at Sniper with demonic red eyes. The sail, with his pink-skinned wings wadded into an intricacy of folds and spines that bore some resemblance to a monk’s habit and some to the excess of Elizabethan clothing, and with his long neck hooked like a question mark as he observed the board, grinned his crocodilian grin and exposed a kilo of ivory.