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the black rocks, on the water of the bay, on the wizards and Lancelot Askia and Junot Johnson and Tony. Ten minutes after the fire had guttered out, leaving only a smear of sludgy soot on the rock, everyone was aboard the ship. The wizards and the tanks containing half a dozen live stromatolites were locked down in the cargo bay. Junot Johnson and Lancelot Askia were locked down in their cabins. And Tony was back in command.
    The ship’s bridle reported that the claim jumpers’ frigate hadn’t changed its heading, said that as far as she could tell it hadn’t deployed any assets around the mirror or sent drones to scout the slime planet ahead of its arrival. ‘But I’m afraid that my surveillance ability is very limited, and the frigate may possess superior security and stealth tech.’
    ‘There is only one way to find out,’ Tony said, and dropped the go command.
    The bridle counted down from ten in the traditional way, booted at zero. As the ship jolted away in a long rising arc above the dark sea and its archipelagos of bruise-yellow foam, Tony detonated the thermobaric bombs he had planted in every stromatolite colony, glimpsing the chain of flashes just before the coastline dropped below the horizon. When the claim jumpers arrived, they would find only a couple of dozen flooded craters floored with baked mud and rubble.
    The ship punched out of the atmosphere, fired off a package of tiny cube satellites, and continued to rise. The horizon rounded and the dull spark of the slime world’s solitary moon rose above it, a skull-shaped chunk of rock fifty kilometres across, with an erratic retrograde orbit. Fred Firat had believed that it was an asteroid that had been moved into orbit by some Elder Culture for some unclear purpose; deep radar scans had revealed that it was riddled with tunnels, including a shaft that pierced it through its rotation axis.
    After
Abalunam’s Pride
matched the little moon’s orbital velocity, Tony took control for the final manoeuvre. Blipping the ship’s drive, setting her on a trajectory that would intersect with the moon’s surface. This was the fun part. The target area was relatively small, and there was only a narrow window before the frigate appeared over the horizon of the slime planet.
    The moon swiftly grew, its lumpy cratered landscape raked with fault-line scarps.
Abalunam’s Pride
swung around it, dawdling towards the flat top of a debris cone: the north polar entrance to the shaft that pierced the moon, created by unimaginable energies that had vaporised fifty kilometres of rock. Much of that vapour had boiled away, escaping the grip of the moon’s feeble gravity; a small fraction, cooling, had fallen back to the surface and formed symmetrical cones at the poles.
    Tony mirrored the visual feed to his passengers so that they could watch some real piloting skill, killed the last of the ship’s forward momentum as the cone’s flat top slid past, and dropped into the black circle of the shaft’s entrance. He fired off a package that would anchor itself to the shaft’s lip and allow him to keep in touch with the cube sats, and then
Abalunam’s Pride
was falling between smooth melt-rock walls, slowing, slowing, until it was floating freely at the midpoint of the shaft, balanced at the null point of the asteroid’s feeble gravity.
    ‘We will wait here until the frigate puts down,’ he explained over the common channel. ‘And when it does, we’ll make a run for the mirror.’
    He had to wait almost twelve hours, half a day in old money, while the G-class frigate swung around the slime planet in a near-polar orbit that would enable it to scan almost every part of the surface. No doubt they had checked out the little moon, too, but Tony was pretty sure that his hiding place was safe. Radar scans could render the moon transparent, but their resolution was limited. The claim jumpers would not see his ship until he wanted to be seen.
    At last, the frigate fell out of