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given her something she could have found without ever leaving the Angel Station, if only she had known. It was one of life’s ironies that she’d had to spend a while going quietly crazy in a flying hermit’s cave before she could discover that.
    Kim had, so to speak, fallen asleep at the wheel – if only the Goblin had a wheel to guide it. She had passed out, entering one of those frequent waking dreams she’d long been suffering, a kind of relapse into the memories that the Books brought to her.
    The Angel Station showed itself on two subsidiary screens as well as on the main viewscreen. One of these screens – nestled in a nook just above her left knee, glowing brightly from its niche between the co-pilot’s seat and hers – revealed the Station as a computer-generated torus with an empty centre. The other, smaller screen, situated at head height, displayed a star map. One of the thousands of dots represented there glowed a different colour than the rest. That was the Kasper Angel Station she was about to dock with. Another brightly glowing dot represented Earth and the home system, several thousand light years away. An arrow pointed in the opposite direction, towards the Galactic Centre – which might well have been the next stop from this system, if anyone had ever found an Angel Station that led that far in.
    She glanced up. Only a few seconds having passed, she still felt groggy and confused. She’d already had an inkling this was going to be a really, really bad day.
    First, Bill had stopped answering her calls. Kim had tried contacting him previously during her long weeks of approach, but nothing. She had checked in with some other people in the human-habitable portion of the Station, and they’d confirmed having seen him around. So she knew Bill hadn’t checked out and caught a shuttle back through the Station’s singularity to some other system – which begged the question, why was he ignoring her?
    And the whole time, her air and rations were running lower and lower, and now if she got back and Bill wasn’t there . . . she wasn’t sure what she would do.
    And then she noticed a red light was blinking at her. She’d never seen it blink red before, but then she’d never functionally passed out on an approach vector before, either. Kim reached out with an unsteady hand and hit a button. A stream of dialogue had been trickling along so quietly as to be almost subliminal. Hitting the button knocked the volume up and, with a cold rush of fear and horror, she wondered just how long she had been floating along effectively dead in space, with only the autopilot to keep her alive.
    ‘. . . Damn it, Goblin 4PX, do you read? I . . .’ The voice grew briefly fainter as another voice interjected. Kim couldn’t quite make out what they were saying, but she recognized the tone: angry, worried, someone in charge. ‘No, I’m not in the habit of blowing anyone out of the sky. She’s on auto, okay? We’ll just bring her in. No, there’s no danger, I—’
    ‘This is Goblin 4PX,’ Kim said rapidly, the blood draining out of her face. Stupid girl. Stupid, stupid girl! ‘I’m sorry, my comms system has been having problems. I don’t know what happened.’ She swallowed, her throat suddenly dry. ‘I, uh – sorry about that.’
    ‘We hear you, but you know the rules. I’m afraid we may have to insist your ship undergoes a thorough overhaul before you can go out again.’ The voice was reproving, but not too harsh. Kim had met the man behind the voice, once, not long after she’d arrived there. A gentle bear of a man who confessed to her one drunken night that he’d had enough of civilization and living in crowded hives, while alien diseases killed off entire continents. He’d put on his official voice this time presumably for the benefit of whoever was standing next to him. One of the military guys, almost inevitably.
    They called it the debriefing room, but it looked a lot like a cell.
    ‘Thing is,