Sitting beside him, Alice put a hand to her mouth and yawned.

"I think I know what's going on," she said. "I think we're getting altitude sickness."

"Altitude?" Ed looked out of the rear window, at the beach and the moons hanging over it. Even on top of this dune, they weren't more than ten or twelve feet above sea level.

"Trust me, I know what I'm talking about." Alice took a deep breath and pushed it out again. "It happened to me once before in Mexico City. It wasn't fun. You never forget shit like that."

"What do you want to do?"

"Well, if the air here's too thin to breathe properly, then we have a choice. We can either go on, or we can go back."

"Do you want to go back?"

Alice glanced over her shoulder, at the crisp tyre tracks they'd left on the charcoal sand.

"No, not yet."

"Then we go forward?"

Alice turned her attention to the other arches in the distance, each on the crest of its own dune. "Okay. But how do we know which one to take?"

Ed lowered his head to rest on the steering wheel.

"I don't think we've got the time to struggle over to another, not if we can't breathe properly. It took us long enough to get here, and if we get stuck..."

"So we take this one?"

"I guess it's as good as any."

He pushed himself upright. The headache made it hard for him to concentrate. His chest heaved as if he'd been running. Ahead, the new arch looked identical to the one they'd just left, its sides glistening purple and smooth, throwing complex shadows in the combined light of the mismatched moons.

He picked the St Christopher from the dashboard and draped its chain over the rear view mirror.

"Are you ready for this?"

Alice drew her knees up and closed her eyes.

"As ready as I'll ever be."

This time, the light didn't seem to fade as quickly. They passed through the arch and, when they could see again, found themselves in daylight, rolling through a flat, rocky desert beneath a swollen crimson sun. Volcanic plumes stained the horizon. Packed grit formed a makeshift road leading away from the arch. Thin sidewinders of dust and ash skittered across it. Squinting in the hellish light, Ed reached into the glove box and found a pair of Grigor's fake designer sunglasses, which he flicked open one-handed and slid onto his face. The dry desert air was warm, and he could breathe again. He wound his window down and sucked in a big, grateful lungful.

Ahead, half a dozen dome-shaped mud huts stood to either side of the road, each about a metre in height, their walls the same colour as the surrounding desert.

"It's a village," Alice said, shading her eyes with her hand. She reached for her camera. Ed said nothing. The settlement, such as it was, had long been abandoned to the encroaching sands. Some of the domes were sagging, others had already fallen in. Doors and windows stood empty to the wind.

Beyond the village, the crude road branched, and then branched again, and each branch led to another arch.

"Four of them," Ed said. But even from here, he could see that three were damaged, toppled and twisted by the sand shifting beneath them. Only one remained upright.

He brought the car to a halt, feeling himself start to sweat. The road ahead shimmered like the surface of a lake.

Alice pulled off her fleece, revealing her white t-shirt.

"And that's not all," she said. About a mile ahead, close to the upright arch, a vehicle sat at the side of the road. It was a ruggedly built tractor with fat mesh tyres, and its cab was a transparent bubble.

"What the hell's that?"

Cautiously, Ed eased the Land Rover forward again. A woman crouched by one of the tractor's plump wheels. She stood as they approached, wiping her hands on a rag. Ed pulled up beside her and wound down his window.

"Jesus Christ, am I glad to see you," she said. Her drab olive vest and matching cargo pants were grimy, and she had smears of engine grease on her arms and face. To Ed, she looked to be somewhere in her mid-thirties, with bright green eyes, and peroxide white hair chopped into a platinum fuzz.

"Are you American?" he asked.

She smiled. "I'm from Iowa. What about you? You're British, right?"

Ed stuck his hand out. "Hi. My name's Ed, this is Alice."

She finished wiping her fingers and stuffed the rag into her back pocket, then took his hand in a firm grip.

"Kristin. Kristin Cole. Very much at your service."

"What's wrong with your vehicle, Kristin?"

She looked back at it and gave a snort. "The drive unit's completely fucked."

"Can we give you a lift?"

"Just let me get my stuff."

She leaned into the vehicle's cab and pulled out a kit bag.

"Thanks for coming by," she said.

Alice moved the shotgun, and Kristin climbed onto the Land Rover's back seat, behind Ed.

"Have you been here long?" Alice asked.

Kristin stretched.

"A few days, maybe a week. It's hard to tell; the days are much longer here."

Ed looked at her in the rear view mirror. "Are you on your own?"

Kristin hugged the kit bag to her chest. "I was until you guys came along. I got separated from the rest of my unit. They went on ahead."

"They left you here?"

"I don't think they realised. If they did, it must have been too late. Once they'd gone through the arch, they couldn't have come back to get me."

Ed said, "Why didn't you follow on foot?"

Kristin looked at him. "It's a long way to where we're going. But if you hadn't come along, I guess I'd have had to try it sooner or later."

She sniffed the air.

"Say, does this car really run on gas?"

Ed leaned forward over the steering wheel, looking through the heat shimmering off the Land Rover's hood. Ahead, fat tyre tracks led to the one arch remaining upright.

"Your friends went that way." He said. "Do you want to follow them?"

"Hell, yeah." Kristin gave a frown. "Where else is there?"

Hanging over the back of her seat, Alice said, "We could take you back?"

Kristin glowered. "That's not even funny."

"It wasn't supposed to be."

The American leaned forward. "Don't you know where you are, girl? For Christ's sake, weren't you briefed at all?"

Ed undid his seatbelt and slid around to face her.

"No-one briefed us," he said, keeping his voice level. "We're here under our own steam."

"You're civilians?" Kristin sat back on the leather seat. She rubbed her face, further smearing the grease on her forehead and cheeks, and then looked at the roof. "In that case, I'm sorry to have to be the one to tell you," she said, "but there's no point trying to get home."

Alice looked puzzled.

"Why not?"

Kristin let her head rest on the back of the seat. She wiped a hand across her mouth.

"Because they're all dead."

Ed gripped the back of his seat. "Who? Who's dead?"

Kristin closed her eyes.

"Everyone," she said. "Everyone you've ever known."

CHAPTER EIGHT.

RAGGED-ASS DRIVE SIGNATURE.

Mercifully, the Ameline dropped out of jump in an empty patch of sky a good distance from the planet, and Kat shut off the fusion engines as soon as she could, hoping her transgression had gone unnoticed.

But of course, it hadn't.

As the old ship moved toward Strauli, the port authority bombarded it with outraged protests, which Kat duly ignored, squirting Ezra's letter of explanation at the Abdulov compound.

Within minutes, she received a return call from her father.

"Katherine? Is that really you?"

"Dad, listen-"

"You're alone?"

"I have passengers."

He made a chopping gesture. "It doesn't matter. I'm on the Quay as we speak. Whatever it is, whatever's happened, we can talk about it when you get here."

He looked older, the decades having taken more of a toll than she'd expected: his hair thinner and greyer than she remembered, the lines around his mouth and eyes deeper and more defined, like a pattern of cuts worked into a leather mask. But his eyes were just as bright and hard as ever, the eyes of a man accustomed to command.

"Dad, the port authority-"

He held up a gnarled hand. "Leave them to me, Katherine."

Katherine Abdulov had grown up in a villa overlooking the ocean, on the edge of the family compound. She'd spent the days studying and the evenings walking alone on the beach. The beach was her sanctuary: a place where, as long as she remained within the compound's secure perimeter, she could walk alone and undisturbed for hours at a time.

As she kicked through the warm surf, she watched the trading ships crawl across the sky, the sparks of their fusion drives burning like tiny, angry stars, and remembered the stories her father had told her about Great Aunt Sylvia, the black sheep of the family.

If the stories were true, before she vanished, Sylvia had been one of the Abdulovs' best captains. She'd been everywhere, carving out new trade routes and building herself a formidable reputation. She'd been courageous, fiercely self-reliant, and notoriously promiscuous, and Kat desperately wanted to be just like her.

On a clear summer's night, she saw the orbital docks bulking low in the hazy southern sky, their gigantic habitat wheels turning ponderously in the light of the long-set sun. Every time she saw them, they filled her with such yearning, making her wish for the far-off day when she'd graduate from flight school and take her rightful place at the helm of one of her family's trading ships, just like her aunt.

Standing there, her head full of impatient dreams, there was no way she could have known how quickly those dreams would be shattered. No way to foresee that her doomed affair with Victor Luciano would force her to walk away from everything she held dear, leaving her jumping from star to star in an old tramp freighter, cut off from her family's wealth and protection, desperately trying to keep fuel in the tank and food on the table.

Katherine Abdulov was twenty years old when she graduated at the top of her flight school class; twenty-two when she met Victor Luciano. Approaching Strauli now, at the age of twenty-six, wired into her pilot's couch and decelerating hard toward the orbital Quay, she found it difficult to take her eyes from the blue and white swirls of the planet. The colours seemed to nourish her soul. At high magnification, she could trace the familiar bays and headlands along the stretch of coast owned by the Abdulov family, and if she squinted, she imagined she could almost make out the red roofs and white-painted buildings of the compound itself.

I'm coming home, she thought, and wondered what sort of reception she'd receive. A lot of time had passed. A lot of fuel through the engine, as her aunt would say.

She supposed she should feel reassured that at least her father had, in his own gruff way, seemed pleased to see her.

As the Ameline lined up for its approach to the orbital docks, it automatically synched its databases with the local Grid. It was standard procedure and every trading ship did it. They carried googleflops of spare memory capacity in order to transport data from one star system to the next. They were couriers. Faster and more reliable than radio signals, they spread information along the trade routes at close to the speed of light, updating-and being updated by-each Grid they encountered. They carried electronic messages, books, scientific papers, breaking news stories, and market information. The local authorities paid them a small fee for doing so. They were the lifeblood of interstellar civilization. The information they carried helped stitch the scattered worlds of humanity into something approaching a cohesive whole.

Kat took a moment to scan her eyes down the list of incoming news headlines, then disconnected herself from the ship's feed, unhooked herself from the pilot's couch, wiped her face with her hands, and made her way down the ladder and back through the hatch into the main cabin, where Toby Drake and the Acolyte were still strapped into their seats.

"I thought you might like to see this," she said.