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of scaffolding by a computer-controlled hinge on each side, so it could be rotated downward to cut through the Teng steel. One of these hinges had broken and the barrel had swung sideways and was hanging off the remaining hinge at an angle that was slowly bending the metal scaffold of the fork. The feedback relay that would have cut the beam had come loose when the hinge broke, and the thing was burning a hole in the floor.
    “I didn’t want to suffocate, so I started climbing up the side of the machinery toward the synchrotron. I was terrified that I was going to get electrocuted, or burn myself and fall into the beam, but I managed to get the maintenance cover off the side of it, and I pulled out one of the circuit boards. This did the trick. The synchrotron immediately lost power and I was standing on this bloody great thing looking down on this blackened crater in the middle of the floor.”
    “Then what happened?”
    “I tried to climb back down but I lost my footing and fell. I hit my head on the scaffolding and passed out. The foreman found me there with the board still in my hand and shouted, ‘Pilgrennon’s arse!’ and dragged me up to the station manager, who said I deserved some sort of recognition for saving the day. He wouldn’t set me free, but he said, since I seemed to have something of an understanding of machinery, he would allow me to join a salvage team. This was a privilege, and if I abused it, it could be easily taken away.”
    Jed looked up from picking flecks of lint from her tunic. “And I suppose you abused it, then?”
    “I had learnt a valuable lesson since I’d become a bail slave, one that the ship’s captain had been unable to make sink in. I wanted to get myself out, and when I was offered responsibility, I respected that. So no, I didn’t abuse it.
    “So I ended up living and working with an older man, Rogan. It turned out he was in there for murder. He’d been castrated and bailed for life on the mitigating circumstances of having computer qualifications and the man he’d murdered having provoked him.”
    “Why is being qualified in computing a mitigating circumstance?”
    Wolff shrugged. “It’s saleable. A bail slave’s cheaper than hiring someone and paying them a wage. He seemed to warm to me after a while. I think he learnt a few things about computers from me as well.
    “Anyway, that was how I spent the final two years, working on the ships that were brought in. Often they were damaged and we had to dash through the corridors and check everything was safe before the paid labourers who started dismantling everything could come aboard. Sometimes the computers had gone haywire and thought they were under attack and being boarded, and we had to deactivate them safely.
    “It never occurred to you to steal one of the ships?”
    “’Course it did. Me an’ Rogan used to talk about it all the time. First thing, all the ships that came in were shot to pieces and had come to be broken up for good reasons. And when we’d boiled down the argument, Rogan always said it wasn’t worth it. I would be out, eventually, a free man still with my youth. It wasn’t even worth it for a lifer like him. Rogan was a great arguer—I don’t mean in a squabbling sense—I mean we debated . He had the stroppy temperament of a menopausal female and he used to stink out the cell when he took a shit, but he was a good man.”
    “He sounds delightful,” said Jed sarcastically.
    “I digress. The most startling thing I saw there, indeed, the most startling thing I’ve ever seen, was an Archer’s ship.”
    Jed scowled. “Archers’ ships do not get sent to filthy wreckers’ yards.”
    “This was one that had been found floating dead in the void by chance. The discoverer had towed it here and sold it to the salvage station. Hauled up, we saw its name was the Larkspur , but nobody could tell what was wrong with it. It seemed to have been abandoned. All of the systems were shut down. When