The young woman had not earned Djaer’s favour. An agitator, prone to uncontrolled behaviour, changeability, pernicious independence. He was minded to tear the head off her body; but could see from her eyes that she'd offered the same fate to others.

The apparatus they'd brought on board threatened his ship. On some level he knew it. Panic, something the woman before him had clearly never experienced, threatened to overwhelm him. He would have to flush it out of his mind.

“We've brought some...people with us,” she said and spat on the floor, again demonstrating a mentality fundamentally incompatible with respect for superiors. “I placed them in cryo-suspension too; I decided you might like company on your journey. Collecting truths outside the system is lonely business sometimes.”

She smiled a smile that was warm and bitter in equal measure, and frozen tears glistened on her cheek; memories stirred within Djaer's head as he tried to think of what to say next. He wished she hadn't brought frozen people on board; it made him think about deceased loved ones, about being en route through space, about worms wriggling inside his buried mother's corpse, about when he'd last had a drink of wine. Reality became difficult to tell apart from imagination.