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Com­ing from Free City and from Jupiter Orbit as I did, I wasn’t par­tic­u­larly acquainted with con­cepts such as “rust” and “grime”. At Jupiter, I was a net­work tech, my world abstracted as far as pos­si­ble from the real world. Our offices and labs were spot­less, as the only tools we ever used were right inside our heads. Back on Free City, it was quite a shock to be thrust back into semi-skilled labour, and more of a shock to be work­ing with real things — meat, veg­eta­bles, knives and saucepans and so on. But apart from dur­ing actual food prepa­ra­tion, it was just as clean as my offices used to be. Nanopar­ti­cle flu­ids had long ago removed any dif­fi­culty from keep­ing sur­faces clean at the mol­e­c­u­lar level.

All of this is the rea­son why step­ping into the Maria’s cargo hold was pos­si­bly the clos­est I’d come to cul­ture shock in the pre­vi­ous twenty years. It was rusty, the kind of deep all-the-way through rust that makes one ask ques­tions about struc­tural integrity. It was dusty too, with bare metal just about show­ing through in the areas where large crates had been pushed around seem­ingly by hand.

An inter­com crack­led into life, sound­ing just as decrepit as the rest of the ship.

“Wel­come aboard, Jenny! How do you like her?”

I shouted back, assum­ing there was some sort of two-way com­mu­ni­ca­tion involved in the system.

“How do I…? José, how old is this thing?” I could hear Junko chuck­ling in the background.

“Two hun­dred and fifty-seven years if she’s a day!”

“Two hun­dred? This thing flies?”

“Sure she does! Found her in a heap one day, restored her myself. Now she’s good as new!”

“This is restored? What was it like beforehand?”

“No hull.”

“Oh, shit,” I said, clearly not qui­etly enough.

“Heard that!” said José. “It hasn’t killed me yet. Look, if you want to go back to your café, you know where the door is. On the off-chance you want to make some­thing of your life, come up to the bridge. You’ll find the way.”

The inter­com clicked, I assumed mean­ing the con­ver­sa­tion was over. Not exactly the best start to our jour­ney; clearly the guy was pretty touchy about this old rust-bucket. Still, I fig­ured Junko was sane, and if she put up with it then I prob­a­bly ought to too.

I cast a cau­tious eye over the mea­gre con­tents of the cargo bay on my way past, won­der­ing if per­haps they were cart­ing me around just because they’d fallen on hard times and couldn’t find any­thing else of a dubi­ous nature to trans­port. Not so, though. Next to one crate reas­sur­ingly and child­ishly labelled “JOSÉ’S STUFF!” sat another three, shorter and fat­ter and cov­ered in warn­ing labels. ‘Cor­ro­sive’, ‘harm­ful’ and ‘explo­sive’ were all there, topped off by one I’d never seen before: ‘Active nanoma­chines’. Well, that just topped it all off. These were the crit­i­cal tech­nol­ogy inside mak­ers, and inside the Celes­tial Fleet’s waste repro­cess­ing facil­i­ties too. Nanoscale robots, pro­grammed to assem­ble and dis­as­sem­ble mat­ter molecule-by-molecule, turn­ing one thing into another. Of course, such were the poten­tial haz­ards of these things going wrong, that you had to have a spe­cial and very expen­sive licence just to pos­sess them, let alone to use them. Chances of José and Junko hav­ing that kind of licence? Pretty much zero, though I sup­posed that some­where out there, some com­puter or other thought they did.

José was right, I did find the way to the bridge — mostly because there wasn’t really any­where else to go. Once I’d headed up the walk­way out of the cargo area, there was only one cor­ri­dor. To either side, cab­ins and a mess room declared them­selves from fad­ing labels on rusty doors, leav­ing only the unmarked one at the very end. It opened as I approached.

Inside, the bridge was a mess beyond any­thing I had encoun­tered on the rest of the ship, and I strug­gled to remem­ber ever in my life encoun­ter­ing some­thing so dis­or­gan­ised. It must have once been designed for at least four or five crew each with their own con­sole; big lit-up screens and touch pan­els. These archaic-looking pre-Angel era con­soles had been stripped out, but not to be replaced with some more effi­cient con­trol mech­a­nism. It looked like they’d sim­ply been moved over to the Captain’s chair by hack­ing together any­thing that was lying around. Above the Captain’s con­sole, sev­eral lay­ers of touch pan­els and teleme­try data screens rose up in an arc, welded to big steel pipes that stuck out of the floor at odd angles. Con­nect­ing them to their orig­i­nal posi­tions were wires, often bare, some­times so long that they coiled on the floor, some­times so short that they hung taut in mid-air. One of the lat­ter had laun­dry hang­ing from it. The whole setup, mer­ci­fully exclud­ing the wet clothes, was caked in dust and oil. It gave the impres­sion that one day José decided that fly­ing the ship was too easy, so he fired the rest of the crew and just moved their con­soles over to his seat so he could do it all him­self. This was, of course, pretty much the case. The cap­tain him­self was vir­tu­ally lying down on a tat­tered old reclin­ing chair, star­ing up at his five peo­ples’ worth of screens and tap­ping away on pan­els. He didn’t look up as I entered.

“Pre-flight checks,” said Junko, beck­on­ing me over to where she was sit­ting in the bridge’s only other seat. She must have noticed my bewil­der­ment at José’s rapt atten­tion to the dangerous-looking array of con­soles. “The only thing I’ve ever seen him take seri­ously. Come over here a minute, let me show you something.”

Junko sat on her own, no con­sole in front of her, look­ing for all the world like a pas­sen­ger, but a white box above her head — trail­ing bare wires, as every­thing seemed to here — made it pretty clear what her func­tion on the bridge was. It was marked with the hand-written phrase ‘ANGEL RELAY 1′.

The other woman must have noticed my curios­ity once again. “Turn your Angel on,” she said.

“But won’t they-”

“Know where you are? No. Trust me, try it.”

What did I have to lose? Not a lot, I sup­posed. If they could locate me here, Junko and José would be in much deeper trou­ble than I could ever be. I turned my Angel on.

Noth­ing.

“It’s not work­ing!” I exclaimed.

“Ask for ship schematics.”

“But-”

“Try it.”

“Okay,” I said, and thought about ship schemat­ics. Sound­lessly, a model of the Maria appeared in the cen­tre of my field of vision, and pro­ceeded to de-construct itself into neatly-labelled parts.

“It is work­ing! Sort of. So why don’t I get my nor­mal dis­play?” I asked.

“You’re not on the net­work as you. The relay routes your Angel data through the ship’s con­nec­tion into Free City.”

“But the ship’s relay should get my pro­file, shouldn’t it? As soon as I switch on here, it ought to fetch my pro­file from the peer net­work. Unless…” Knowl­edge was com­ing back to me, bit by bit, mem­o­ries that had been worn away by twenty years of drudgery. “Oh, that can be dis­abled, can’t it? At the relay level, so it just comes through as anony­mous traf­fic. But isn’t that ille­gal out­side of the military?”

Junko gave me a look.

“Yeah, good point,” I said, her mean­ing hav­ing been plenty clear with­out the need for words.

“I sup­pose,” I con­tin­ued, “that I’ll have to avoid look­ing up any­thing per­sonal, right? Even though we’re routed through the ship, if we start search­ing for Lance, they’ll trace it to Maria at least.”

“Not nec­es­sar­ily,” Junko said with a smile. She was clearly in her ele­ment here, much as I would have been back on Jupiter Orbit. “Not while we’re docked, any­way. We route straight through to the Explor­ers’ HQ under crypto. Search all you like for you, him, even us two. Noth­ing sus­pi­cious about that com­ing from cor­po­rate HQ, we’re all sup­pos­edly their employees.”

“But won’t they be able to trace your crypto stream? They must employ dozens of peo­ple just to look out for that kind of hack.”

“They do,” said Junko primly. “And I am bet­ter than all of them.”

There was an uneasy pause for a while after that, and Junko went back to what­ever dubi­ous busi­ness she had on Free City’s Angel net.

“Junko, fin­ish up,” said José, sit­ting up and peer­ing out between two sec­tions of what would once have been the Navigator’s console.

“One step ahead of you,” she replied, tap­ping a lit orange light on the wall next to her seat. “I wired this light into the Nav com­puter, remem­ber? It tells me when a course is plot­ted, which is always the last thing you do pre-flight.”

José grum­bled, unim­pressed at hav­ing such a pre­dictable rou­tine, then reached back to the Navigator’s con­sole and delib­er­ately deleted then re-entered a course. The light blinked. More grum­bling ensued from the Captain’s seat.

“Any­way,” said José, “we’ve got launch clear­ance. Buckle up.”

It was a fig­ure of speech, of course — nei­ther of their seats had any kind of safety fea­ture what­so­ever, and in my fif­teen min­utes on board I had not even heard any hint of there being a third seat any­where. Clearly they didn’t often have passengers.

José counted down from three, and with an uncer­e­mo­ni­ous thud of the dock­ing clamps, cen­tripetal force car­ried us out of Free City and into the carbon-black night of the universe.

As the ship banked out of her spi­ral course and headed for the ship­ping lanes I felt blood rush up to my head, and I instinc­tively grabbed for the near­est solid-looking bit of metal. “Shit. Of course,” I mut­tered to myself as I strug­gled to stay what I con­sid­ered to be the right way up. Not only did that heap of junk pre-date Angels, it pre-dated arti­fi­cial grav­ity, too.

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