'This little one has dogged my footsteps these last four months. He'll come with you. I feel he will desert me soon anyway.'

The ig jumped from the phnobe's arm and settled around Dom's neck, where it replaced its tail in its mouth and began to snore. Dom smiled, and the smuggler answered with a brief mucus grimace.

'I call him my luck,' said the phnobe. 'It's an indulgence, maybe.' He glanced up at Widdershins's one bloated moon, rising in the south.

'Tonight will be a good night for hunting,' he said, and in two strides had disappeared into the thickening mists.

Dom opened his mouth to speak, then stood silent for a moment.

He turned and dived into the warm evening sea.

The heavy hull of a security flyer rocked in the swell beside his own craft. A figure appeared on the flat deck as he hauled himself aboard. Dom found himself looking first at the crosswires of a molecule Stripper and then at the embarrassed face of a young security man.

'Chel! I'm sorry, sir, I didn't realize...'

'You've found me. Good for you,' said Dom coldly. 'Now I'm going home.'

'I've got orders, er, to take you back,' said the guard. Dom ignored him and stepped aboard his own craft. The guard swallowed, glanced at the stripper and then at Dom, and hurried into the control bubble. By the time he had reached the radio, Dom's flyer was a hundred metres away, bouncing lightly from wavetop to wavetop before gliding up and over the sea.

Extract from 2001 and All That: an Anecdotal History of Space-Travelling Man, by Charles Sub-Lunar (Fghs-Hrs & Calligna, Terra Novae)

'Mention should be made of Widdershins and of the Sabalos family, since the two are practically synonymous. Widdershins, a mild world consisting largely of water and very little else, is one of the two planets of CY Aquirii. Its climate is pleasant though damp, its food a monotonous variation on the theme of fish, its people intelligent, hardy and - due to the high-ultraviolet content of the sunlight - universally black and bald.