“Please; I’m blushing.”

“Three of your team died in your last action, at the very end of the war while the surrender was being negotiated. Your own craft was seriously damaged and you crash-landed on Nachtel’s Ghost, suffering near-fatal injuries on top of the extreme irradiation and already serious wounds you had sustained during the original engagement.”

“Nothing by halves; should be the family motto.”

“You were cut from the wreck and treated under the warinternment regulations in the Tax-neutral hospital of a mining concern on Nachtel’s Ghost-”

“Ghastly food.”

“- where you lost the fetus of the child you were carrying by another of your team, Miz Gattse Ensil Kuma.”

She stopped for a moment and looked up to see the hydrofoil, twenty metres away. She pursed her lips, breathed deeply and walked slowly on. “Yes; terribly complicated way of going about getting an abortion. But then I was sterilised at the same time, so it was practically a bargain.”

“You spent the months immediately after the war in Tenaus prison hospital, Nachtel. You were liberated-on your twen-tieth birthday-under the terms of the Lunchbar Agreement; you and the four surviving members of your team formed a limited company and undertook occasionally legal commercial surveillance and industrial espionage work, then branched out into Antiquities research and retrieval, a profession you shared with your sister, Breyguhn.”

“Half-sister. And we never got caught.”

“Your team’s last successful contract was the location and disposal of what is believed to have been the second-last Lazy Gun, which resulted in the Gun’s auto-annihilation while under deconstruction in the physics department of Lip City University.”