The emerald in the gloom grew smaller with every passing hour, first a marble then a pea, and finally a mote of light among an infinity of them. Essegena, and the star it orbited, were gone. Out of sight. A bad memory.

  Ian allowed himself a smile. Good riddance. Chris had thought to bind him to the planet, but he was free. He never had to see that world again, or any of the people on it. It had been the height of folly to think he could surround himself with childhood friends and still escape the past. Better to go someplace where nobody would recognise him. Where he could invent his own past, whole cloth, and never get caught in a lie.

  First step: the Hive.

  His first instinct had been to say “sod that”. He’d been to the Hive before, passing through on his way to one system or another. Even on quiet days it was a thriving hub, its daily through-traffic measuring in the millions. It would be no difficult task to make it through unnoticed. The Commissioners would be expecting someone from Essegena to arrive eventually, but even if they recognised the ship on arrival, Ian could slip by them and be gone before they pinned him down.

  But that would really leave the others in the shit. Ian hadn’t studied all the schematics and technical readouts, but he knew a ship like the Eia would eat a lot of fuel―and virgin worlds like Essegena tended not to be awash with fuel refineries. If he took the only sublight vessel they had with enough range to reach the Hive, and abandoned it, there’s no way the colony would be able to get the Eia refuelled and off the ground. They’d be stuck there, at least until the next time the Unity had grand ambitions of bringing life to Essegena. It had been centuries after the last failure before they’d had the nerve to try again, and that had been a tightly-kept secret. Thousands had been watching as the Eia left Belaboras; if Essegena lost contact, the whole Unity would know if its failure. Ian might be stranding the colonists and their descendants for hundreds of years to come.

  In the end, it was a moot issue. Ian’s resignation from the Foundational Council meant that―even if he was still technically acting in his capacity as Corrack until he reached the Hive―he couldn’t go alone. Arthur Mannion had seen fit to invite himself along, so that the waiting Commissioners could speak to an actual, bona fide member of the Council. And then there were the soldiers. Sergeant Pratley would never have let Ian go alone; had he not been asked, he’d probably have bashed Ian over the head to knock him out, so he’d have to rely on Sergeant Pratley to carry him aboard. Elmer Pratley being Elmer Pratley, he’d insisted on more soldiers. He’d worn Ian down over successive visits to the Tavern until Ian agreed that it was a splendid idea.

  But not from the personal security. They weren’t his soldiers any longer, and whoever took his place would need them more than he did. Sergeant Pratley had delved into the ranks of the reserve, the several-hundred soldiers habitually engaged in other duties, with no assigned unit, ready to be brought in to plug any gaps that may emerge. Most of the soldiers Ian had come across on Essegena had been some combination of incompetent and inexperienced, and in theory the dregs filtered into the reserve division were even worse―but somehow, Sergeant Pratley had managed to find a decent pair.

  Gideon Grindle was thick-set, with broad shoulders and a receding line of short blonde hair framing a square face the colour of sour milk. In the days before Essegena, he’d played hurney at a professional level for several middling sides in the Manaser league; by his mid-twenties, Grindle had come to the realisation that once his hurney days were over, he’d have nothing to fall back on, so he’d corrected course to enter soldiering. Sergeant Pratley had apparently spotted him while watching him play hurney against Corcoran’s team. “Grindle has a deadly throw, sir,” Pratley explained. “You need something thrown, he’s your man.” Ian had no idea what possible dangers might arise on the trip to the Hive that would require a man with an aptitude for launching projectiles, but he didn’t complain.

  Accompanying Grindle was Collifer Paice, a beanpole at six feet tall, with curls of black hair and olive skin. His utility was much more immediately apparent. He’d spent the early days of his career with the Monitor, Unity’s elite and secretive investigative branch. For eight years, Paice had traversed the Theiran network in the name of crime-prevention―and more than that, he was fully trained in the tools the Eia’s sublight ship had built in. “You’ll find nobody better-equipped than Paice, outwith the Constabulary themselves,” Sergeant Pratley assured Ian.

  It was easy to slip, undetected, past pen-pushing Commissioners who knew neither what Ian looked like or when he was coming. Much harder to ditch four people who knew exactly what Ian looked like and had a vested interest in making sure he didn’t abandon the colony. So his mind was made up before he had the chance at a tumultuous internal debate: he would do as Chris had asked.

  Nobody had ever named the sublight ship. The Eia had been named for the Mother herself, and much ceremony had been made of it. Its little partner had been overlooked in comparison. They’d realised on the first day. Preparing to depart, they’d been met with a prompt to ‘input a designation’. While Master Mannion and the soldiers had discussed a series of increasingly risible suggestions, Ian had quietly gone ahead and named the ship: Innocence’s Ghost. It hadn’t needed thinking about: Dani had been innocence, and since she died, her ghost had hauled Ian from pillar to post.

  He hadn’t said this when the others asked him about the name.

  Innocence’s Ghost was a shade slower than the Eia, even if its smaller size meant it was much sleeker. It meant a journey of just over a month, provided uninterrupted travel in a straight line. In practice, it was smart to allow for twice as long. All manner of things could belay their progress, forcing them to slow down or detour. If there were comets or stellar showers, they’d have to navigate around―and more than that, there was the fact that a large stretch of the trip was through the Dead Zone.

  For centuries, the Dead Zone had been the very boundary of Unity space, accepted as fact as the apex of human civilisation. It completely encircled known space, a hollow sphere of dust and darkness several million miles thick. Wild stories said that pirates sometimes made their base in the Dead Zone, but accepted wisdom had held that the whole zone was impassable. Even the Eia, the finest ship ever built, specially made for the journey to Essegena, had held to a tightly-plotted course that had taken a decade to calculate. All but the essential flying crew had been offered a week in cryo-sleep before the Eia entered the Dead Zone―that way, if something went wrong, at least they’d die quickly in ignorance.

  Ian had declined the cryo-sleep, and wished he’d taken it. The six days in the Dead Zone had been six days haunted by the ghost of Dani Carrigan, and that spectre had never really let go again.

  On the second day of the outward journey, Ian had vowed to never let himself be conscious in the Dead Zone again. A promise kept for the greater part of a year.

  They were close, now. With Essegena entirely out of sight, it couldn’t be more than a few hours before those first reaching wisps of Dead Zone dust curled around Innocence’s Ghost.

  Something thudded overhead. Ian jerked his head upward―Innocence’s Ghost was nothing like the Eia. There weren’t another dozen floors over him here; there was a tight mechanical crawlspace, and the thick plates of metal that kept him from the cold of space. Noises were far more unusual here. He stared at the ceiling, in case something had fallen off. Everything looked perfectly fine, though.

  Perhaps one of the others was checking all the systems were in working order. It made sense: the last thing they wanted was to find out, when they were halfway through the Dead Zone, that Innocence’s Ghost was fatally crippled.

  A knock at the door took Ian’s attention. He swivelled his chair. “Yes?”

  Sergeant Pratley peered in at him. “Message from Paice, sir. We’re just entering the Dead Zone now.”

  “Already?”

  Pratley nodded.

  Blimey. Faster than expected. Ian took a deep breath, and braced himself for what might come.

  On a ship as small as this one, loneliness was a difficult thing to come by. Ian could lock himself in the cramped room that passed for a cabin―a metal cot carved into the wall, and a toilet carved into the opposite―but he was never more than thirty seconds’ walk from the nearest person. Worse, the more time he spent in his cabin, the more the others got it into their heads that he was somehow in need of company. If he wanted any time to himself, paradoxically, he had to go to the command deck, or one of the other communal areas.

  The Eia had been a large ship, to look at, but not especially so given all that was required of it. Six thousand people had taken up a lot of space, even if most could barely even dream of having the luxury of a quarters with four separate rooms, such as Chris and Caroline had had. And then there was the hospital, the eateries, the hundreds of communal areas which made long-distance travel bearable for all these people. Half of the ship had been taken over by the hydroponics deck, vast swathes of artificial field where food crops were grown. Access there was strictly limited. Even in his capacity as Corrack, Ian had only entered twice, both times at the express request of Oliver Wrack. With so much space devoted to other things, it was little surprise that the Eia had a very small fleet. It didn’t really even count as a fleet. Six short-range flying vehicles, none of them space-worthy, and a single ship that could just about reach as far as the Hive. Perhaps on purpose, it was designed such that it was as small as a ship could possibly be and still be able to do what was required of it.

  Smaller vessels such as this one required manual control at all times. That was the main reason Ian had relented to Pratley’s suggestion that Grindle and Paice come along. They could do the flying, so Ian didn’t have to.

  If it weren’t for that, and if Ian had been able to get away with it, he’d have left them both behind. What did he care for security, now? He was done with the whole ‘Corrack’ thing, done with Essegena. It was only as a favour to Chris that he’d even agreed to bear the data for the Theiran link―that, and this cramped little ship was currently the only way for him to leave Essegena. The moment the data was in the hands of the Hive technicians, Ian was done. Signing out. He’d find some way to ditch Sergeant Pratley, and hop a link to... well, he was still figuring out where. Nowhere he might be recognised. Better to go somewhere he could pretend there was no Ian Fitzhenry. On Arvila, he might find Armand Heramey. Tol Manase was home to a number of old acquaintances from his days with the Unity, foolish days as they were. And the backwaters were just as risky; if he dared go to Malindei or Kelsiern, he’d be spotted a mile off. Nick Aspian had never been a part of the gang, really, but he’d grown up in Borrowood just like the rest of them and he was forever desperate to find favour with them. Desolate as Malindei might be, Aspian was there somewhere, and if he caught a glimpse of Ian he’d not leave Ian alone.

  The question, therefore, was where could he go?

  The Hookbill had been right all along. Ian had dismissed him as a crank, at the start, but that was foolish. He couldn’t outrun his ghosts. For as long as Ian Fitzhenry still lived, the ghost of Dani Carrigan would be attached to him. Which was why Ian Fitzhenry had to die. Why he had to become somebody else, start afresh.

  Guards would only get in the way.

  Sighing, he reached for the book beside his bed. You could always count on reading to take your mind off things. Flicking idly through, he found himself once again looking at a familiar poem. Dani, why must you haunt me so? Sometimes it seemed he had no escape. She came to him all the time, keeping her memory fresh through portents.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  ‘I’ll bury you beneath the dirt

  I swear to you it will not hurt

  I promised that it wouldn’t hurt to voyage through the gloam’

  And yet here he was, in the gloam, in the very depths of darkness. Nowhere to run but cold space. Dani was still with him. Her ghost hurt.

  Shaking his head, Ian turned the page. It didn’t matter what was on the other side, he had no appetite left for reading. He just needed to hide her ghost away. Trap her with the poem. Imprison her beneath the folds of the page. Then, he could pretend she didn’t exist at all.

  He found himself nurturing his odd melancholy in front of a viewscreen. Ships always had them, in any room where navigational crew went and any cabins which might have the need to accommodate senior leadership. It didn’t matter whether your cabin was on the outside of the ship or not. The viewscreens weren’t really windows. Real windows would be stupid; even the most firmly-reinforced glass would shatter if it got hit by a pea-sized rock hurtling through space. Ships would be filled with people dying as their atmospheres were compromised. No, viewscreens were illusions. Thin sheets of steel, mounted to the wall just as a picture would be, displaying through special circuits and an array of tiny coloured lights the feed from a camera outside the craft.

  That knowledge didn’t make Ian feel any less insignificant, watching out at the infinite blackness. It really did feel like there were just a few centimetres of glass between him and the endless abyss.

  On a galactic scale, the inches of galvanised steel weren’t much more.

  Never, in all his life, had Ian known a place so aptly named as the Dead Zone. Everything about it seemed to be a leftover, a remnant, of an age long gone. Caught in a miasma of idly drifting gas, asteroids held in the blackness of space, unnaturally still. Even the gas seemed heavier. It was as if some unseen force was acting on everything in the vicinity, holding it into shape as this vast wall of... well, of dead.

  A whisper.

  Some celestial voice, perhaps? Or ventilation from the pipes on the ship? Ian didn’t need any of it to drive his imagination into overdrive. He just knew the ghost of Dani was there somewhere. She never left, and she never would.

  In a bid to escape the slowly-creeping dread which was filling him, he left his cabin and wandered to the navigation room. Perhaps the ghost would quieten in the back of his mind if he occupied himself in conversation with the others. There would always be people there. The Innocence’s Ghost had automated systems as good as anything the Unity had produced, but of all places in the breadth of space, the Dead Zone was the sort of area where you didn’t leave the ship unmanned for even a second. So much of the Dead Zone was unknown, and so many were the lethal whorls of dust and fast-flying rocks, that to trust in the automated systems was to give yourself to your faith.

  Ian couldn’t help but picture Molly Bradshaw. She’d given herself over to her faith, he thought wryly―and it hadn’t done her all that much good in the end.

  The dim lights in the corridors somehow felt as though they were darker than if the corridors had been entirely unlit. That was just a trick of the mind, of course―but Ian’s mind was very open to tricks of late.

  He found both Grindle and Paice in the navigation room, leaning back in their chairs, as the catatonic orbit of the Dead Zone’s many bodies drifted idly by in the viewscreen projected onto the front of the room. They turned to the door as Ian entered.

  “Ah, the Corrack,” said Paice.

  “Collifer and I have just been discussing the Dead Zone,” said Grindle. “It’s spooky, too silent. Don’t you think?”

  “There’s no sound at all but the hum of our own engines,” said Paice.

  “That’s how space works,” Ian pointed out. “Sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum.”

  “Point taken,” Paice conceded. “But even so... the way everything’s just drifting about, it’s like this whole segment of the universe is in suspended animation or something. It freaks me out. I bet you’d go insane if you stared at it for long enough.”

  “Is that why the two of you are lounging around, rather than focusing on the way ahead?”

  “The course is plotted,” Grindle shrugged. “And the speed this stuff’s going, anything smaller than a planetoid is just going to be batted away by the shields. It’s unnatural, I swear down.”

  The conversation died then, for a time. Ian found himself once again transfixed on the view. Some distance ahead of them, a small space-rock was doing a slow-motion somersault, drifting head over heel at a painfully slow pace. Floating without purpose.

  Ian knew how that felt.

  “There’s something out here with us,” said Paice, suddenly. “Look: the readers are going haywire.”

  Grindle peered over at the machines. They were beeping―but they’d been beeping all the time; as far as Ian was aware, that was just standard function. “Could it be interference?” Grindle asked.

  “Could be, I suppose,” Paice agreed. “The right asteroid, at the right angle―it might hit our own signals in just the right way and bounce them straight back to us. But the odds would be stacked against it.”

  “The Dead Zone’s full of asteroids,” said Grindle. “Roll the dice enough times and you’re sure to get a twelve.”

  “I want to run a full scan. This feels too clean to be a reflection.” Paice fiddled with a knob on the console in front of him, and some gubbins Ian had assumed was just decorative plastic suddenly came to life.

  “What is it?” he asked. “What have you seen?”

  “Ships have a signal,” Grindle explained. “Mostly just a radiation trace―anything spacefaring leaks the stuff. But other things too. Transponders. Any messages a given ship happens to be broadcasting. The sort of thing you expect when you’re flying near Belaboras, or one of the mining colonies, but there’s a reason they call this the Dead Zone. Not exactly much traffic out here.”

  “The signal’s holding firm,” said Paice. “If it was just an asteroid, the angle should have changed by now.”

  “There’s billions of the things,” said Grindle. “Trillions. That many asteroids, one’s bound to be the right shape.”

  “And the right yaw? The right momentum?”

  “You have any other suggestions?”

  “We send a message,” Paice offered. “We’re basically just broadcasting our presence at the moment. Any old rock can bounce that back to us. But if we try language... Hang on.” He typed away at his keyboard for a little while, before leaning back in his chair. “There. And now we wait.”

  Ian wasn’t exactly sure what Paice was doing, but the man seemed to have everything under control. Of course he did. He came recommended by Sergeant Pratley, and Sergeant Pratley was a good judge of character.

  “This is a waste of time,” Grindle complained. “We could be making haste for the Hive. I don’t like being in the Dead Zone.”

  The feeling was mutual, Ian thought. The chills hadn’t left him since they got here.

  “Sending transmission. And there we... oh shit.” Paice was suddenly staring very intently at the screen. “There was a blip. Tell me somebody saw that.”

  “I saw it,” said Grindle. “And the signal’s gone back to constant again?”

  “It sure as fuck isn’t the message I sent out,” said Paice.

  “That’s a good thing, isn’t it?” asked Ian. “If it’s not communicating with you, that means it is just a rock at a funny angle. Problem solved. We can just keep on going.” Away from the Dead Zone, where Dani seemed to haunt him more than ever.

  Paice shook his head, almost disdainfully. “If it was just our own trace rebounding off a surface, we should have received the same message we sent out. Inverted in some aspects, but in a broad sense the same transmission.”

  “There’s a mirror in your cabin, right?” said Grindle.

  Ian nodded. Every time he looked into it, he half expected to see Dani looming over him, the irrepressible weight on his shoulder.

  “The mirror only reflects the light that goes into it,” said Grindle.

  “I know how mirrors work.”

  “And signals work kind of the same way. This signal holding its form is the equivalent of looking in the mirror and your reflection isn’t there.” Grindle sighed. “So either the laws of physics are somehow different in this little pocket of the universe, or whatever we’re picking up isn’t just our own signal bouncing back.”

  “It gets worse than that,” said Paice. “The message I sent out was an old code-phrase from when I flew with the combat corps. Simple call-and-response thing. You send out half of the note, and a friendly ship finishes the message―easy way to tell who’s on your side without giving yourself away to possible foes. The blip was the response.”

  Ian frowned. “There’s another ship out here?”

  “There’s not really any other possibilities I can think of,” Paice said. “But on the bright side, it’s friendly.”

  “Friendly to the combat corps,” Ian muttered. “Not necessarily to us.”

  “Either way, they’ll probably be grateful to see us,” said Paice. “No doubt they figured they’d never see another living soul. It’s their lucky day today, that’s for sure; you could hide out in the Dead Zone for a trillion years and not expect to cross paths with somebody.”

  “Well, apart from the old age thing,” Grindle added.

  “Apart from that,” Paice agreed. “Now, do I have the Corrack’s permission to deviate from our present course and have a closer look at the bogey?”

  Ian nodded. Why not?

  Paice slowed the engines, their familiar hum becoming muted. At the speed they were going, it took a few seconds to notice the change in direction as Paice pitched them to a relative left, and began to home in on one particular large asteroid. It had an irregular shape, bowed sharply in the middle. “That’s where the signal’s coming from,” said Paice. “Give or take a tiny fraction.”

  “Well, that just looks like an asteroid,” said Ian.

  Paice nodded. “But what’s inside the asteroid?”

  “Rock, one would think,” said Grindle.

  The Ghost crept towards the asteroid, and as it continued to move Ian realised that his sense of scale was entirely messed up. He’d thought it was a similar size to the Ghost and quite close up. In actuality it was considerably bigger. It had taken up the viewscreens entirely before the proximity alert on Grindle’s panel told them they were getting too close.

  Grindle pressed something to silence the alert, and Paice pulled back on the twin joysticks in front of him. The Ghost turned, soaring around the asteroid. Slowly. All eyes on the rock.

  Every breath held.

  “Now would you look at that?” said Paice, breaking the tense silence that had overtaken the room. He was pointing at the viewscreen, at a point where a long and deep shadow fell over the nearby asteroid. “I see something round and corrugated,” he said. “And a little too shiny to be space-rock. I daresay that’s our bogey.”

  “I can’t see it,” Ian told him.

  “Just tucked into that little cleft,” said Paice. “Hiding in the shadows. Crafty bastards.”

  Grindle frowned. “What are they doing this far out? That’s what I don’t get.”

  “Lost, perhaps,” Ian suggested.

  “Can’t be,” said Paice. “Where would they have come from? Nearest planet’s Meneges, if you discount our own precious home. Take best part of a year to get here even at light-speed, and you can rule that out unless the Dead Zone got a Theiran node or they had a parileon to give it a boost.”

  At last, Ian could see the ship. The Ghost came a few degrees round the asteroid that was concealing the vessel, and suddenly he could see a shiny mass of silver. Engines, foils, even the sun-bleached remnants of the Unity’s figure-eight symbol painted on the side. There was no mistaking it.

  Paice moved them closer, keeping a finesse finger on the sticks in front of him. The slightest adjustments to their pitch, to keep them clear of the asteroid.

  “Look at those rotos,” said Grindle, awestruck. “That’s a sojourner-class, it has to be. What in the name of the Heretic is a sojourner-class doing in the Dead Zone? How did it even get here?”

  Sojourners were a lighter vessel than the interstellar titans that the Eia traced its lineage from. Even small shuttles like the Ghost were far better equipped to cross from system to system than a sojourner. They were big, almost obnoxiously so, but the size was deceptive. As was the name, really. Sojourners were made for sublight trips from one planet to another within the same solar system. Maybe, with a particularly skilled and crazy crew, one might go from, say, the Belaboras system to the Opteris system. This one must have come at least ten times that distance.

  “I’m preparing a transmission,” said Paice. “One of those is out here, it’s got to have a crew. And unless the crew wants entanglements it’s not equipped to deal with, it’ll identify itself.”

  “Do you want to trust in the Ghost’s guns?” Grindle asked.

  “Not really,” said Paice. “But more than the sojourner’s captain will want to trust in the guns failing.” He pressed buttons, his keypad beeping frantically. “Sojourner, this is the Innocence’s Ghost, peregrine-class companion shuttle―trace code attached to this transmission. Requesting that you identify yourself.”

  The sojourner gave no reply. Paice sighed, and began typing again.

  “Sojourner, this is the Innocence’s Ghost. If you do not identify yourself, we will have to board.”

  Again, the sojourner remained silent, spectral, in its orbit.

  Paice swore.

  “What is it?” Ian asked.

  “The signal’s gone,” said Paice. “Now that can’t be possible―the ship’s still there, but there’s no trace. Nothing at all. Even a lump of dead rock has something. This... it’s like the sojourner’s not there. Like it’s a ghost.”