Without air conditioning, condensation had settled thickly on the glass panes, but there was enough coloured light from the disco creeping in to reveal the outline of the small room. A bed at one end, sheets unwashed for a while now. Apart from one vinyl-top table littered with electronic tools, the furniture was cardboard boxes. The kitchen fitted into an arched alcove with a plastic curtain drawn across it.

Andy hoped she wouldn’t look at it all too closely. Even in this light it was seedy. His delight at seeing her was fading as his real life began to seep back to claim him.

“Is this the bathroom?” she asked, indicating the one other door. “I got drenched. I’m still cold.”

“Um, sorry, it’s supposed to be the bedroom. I just use it to keep stuff in. Bathroom’s down the hall. I’ll show you.”

“No.” Louise stepped up to him and put her arms round him, nestling her head against his. He was so startled he didn’t respond for a couple of seconds, then he gingerly returned the hug.

“There’s been so much horror in my life today,” she said. “So many vile things. I’ve been so frightened. I came here to you because I have to. There’s no one else left for me now. But I want to be with you as well. Do you understand that?”

“Not really. What’s happened to you?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m still me. For now.” She kissed him, urgency arousing her in a way she hadn’t experienced before. The desperate need to be held, and adored, to be promised that the whole world was a fine and good place after all.

She demanded all that from Andy on his small disorderly bed. Spending the night being worshiped, listening to his ecstatic cries twist away into the disco music while the hazy dapple of iridescent light played across the ceiling. Air in the small confined room grew stifling from the heat and sweat evaporating off their skin. It made them oblivious to the Westminster dome’s giant air circulation systems shutting down.

By the time the first tendrils of thin mist were rising from the Thames to squat listlessly above the riverside buildings, their bursts of orgasmic pleasure had become close to pain as program abuse forced already overdriven flesh to continue. Finally, with the exquisite narcotic of desperation spent, they clung to each other, too senseless to know that a thin layer of cloud had started glowing red above the heart of the ancient city outside.

Liol piloted Lady Mac right up to the big spacedock globe on the diskcity rim where the MSV was parked, locking position twenty metres outside the yawning hatch. Joshua was very insistent they didn’t come inside.

Working out a procedure for bringing Quantook-LOU and five of his entourage inside the starship had taken up the entire trip from the transparent bubble to the rim airlock hatch. They eventually agreed that two of Joshua’s crew, Quantook-LOU, and another Mosdva would ride the MSV out to the starship first. There would be three shuttle flights in all, and Joshua would be the last over. That way the distributor of resources would be satisfied that the starship wouldn’t fly away as soon as its captain was on board, leaving him behind. The idea that Joshua, as commander, wouldn’t desert any crew was obviously foreign to him. An interesting outlook, the humans agreed, and a good marker for future behaviour.

The xenocs were assigned the lower lounge in capsule D, which had its own bio-isolation environmental circuit. Sarha modified it to provide a mix of gas to match Tojolt-HI’s atmosphere, not that they carried a great deal of argon, and she had to omit the hydrocarbons altogether.

Once Quantook-LOU was inside and Joshua was back on the bridge, the Mosdva would provide the coordinates of their destination.

Mosdva spacesuits were made from a tight-fitting fabric and woven with heat regulator ducts. Only the upper two sets of limbs were given sleeves, the lower legs were tucked up next to the body, making the lower section look as if it was the end of a giant stocking. The helmet was chunky, with internal mechanisms bulging up like warts and a forward glass visor that had several protective slide-down shields. Their life-support backpack was a cone whose tip flared out into a fringe of small jet-black fins. A single, thick armoured cable linked it to the helmet. An oversuit web carried electronic modules and canisters the same way as their torso jackets.

Beaulieu and Ashly watched the xenocs through a ceiling sensor as they came through the connecting airlock into the lounge. They didn’t move with quite the same ease as they did back in the diskcity, lacking the fronds to give them stability. But they were adapting fast to grab hoops and the inter-deck ladders.

When the last one was inside, Ashly closed the hatch and let the new atmosphere in. Quantook-LOU waited in the middle of the lounge, while the others conducted a detailed examination. Most of the fittings had been stripped out for this flight anyway, leaving a spartan cabin. It didn’t leave them much technology to probe, and there was certainly nothing critical they could damage. The Mosdva satisfied themselves that the lounge wasn’t actively hostile, and confirmed the atmosphere was compatible before removing their suits. They quickly transferred the electronic modules from their oversuits to their usual jackets.

Beaulieu had used a neutrino-scattering detector when they were in Lady Mac ’s airlock to scan the hardware they’d brought with them. Alkad and Peter joined her in analysing the function of various components. They were carrying small cylinders of chemical explosive, lasers, spooled diamond wire, and a gadget which Alkad and Peter thought would give off a powerful EM pulse. The internal molecular binding force generators could maintain the lounge decking’s integrity against any of their weapons should they get hostile.

More interesting were the number of implants each of them was loaded with. The central nervous column, running through the centre of the body, had a number of attachments spliced into it, artificial fibres spread out through the tissue to form a secondary nervous system. Biochemical devices were grafted on to glands and circulatory networks, supplementing organ functions. Compact weapons cylinders were buried in limb muscles.

“The weapons I can understand,” Ruben said when Beaulieu displayed the images over the general communication link. “But the rest seem redundant. Perhaps their organs still haven’t fully evolved to freefall conditions.”

“I disagree,” Cacus said. “Quantook-LOU doesn’t have the same degree of enhancements as the other five. I’d say his escort are the Mosdva equivalent of our boosted mercenaries. They’ll be able to keep functioning even when they’re badly damaged.”

“It’s probably significant that Quantook-LOU’s physiological condition is generally superior to the others’,” Parker said. “His bone structure is certainly thicker, and from what we can understand of his internal organs their biochemical functions have a higher degree of efficiency. That suggests to me that he was actually bred. Fifteen thousand years isn’t long enough for a full genetic evolutionary adaptation to freefall, there are just too many changes from a gravity environment to incorporate.”

“If you’re right, that would confirm an aristocracy-based social structure,” Cacus said. “Their whole administration class would be an elite.”

“He does have a large amount of processors hardwired into what passes for his cortex,” Oski said. “A lot more than the soldiers. They augment his memory and analytical abilities to a similar level as neural nanonics.”

“Physical and mental superiority,” Liol said. “That’s very fascist.”

“Only in human terms,” Ruben chided. “Imposing our values on xenocs and then going on to judge them is the height of conceit.”