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ever get used to this sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach when he thought about Elarn being dead.
     
    ‘And?’ prompted Nual gently. ‘Was there another reason?’
     
    ‘Yeah. I found something out about the Sidhe, something big.’
     
    ‘What sort of something?’ Nual leaned forward between the seats.
     
    Jarek realised that she probably knew as little about her own people as the average human, who was happy to believe the Sidhe’d died out a millennium ago.
     
    ‘I found half a conspiracy. The kind of thing put about by those unreasoning paranoids who believe the Sidhe lived on after the Protectorate just because they have to believe in something. Except I’ve only got part of the story.’
     
    ‘Explain, please.’
     
    He stared out into the darkness. They had plenty of time; he’d programmed an indirect course back to Kendall’s Wharf to avoid running into anyone coming out to investigate the incident at the cliff-house. He just wasn’t sure he was ready to discuss his recent experiences. But he’d invited these two on board, and maybe talking it through with others might help him work it out in his own head.
     
    Still not looking at his passengers he began, ‘After I left you on Vellern all those years ago, I tried to find out more about the Sidhe. I made discreet enquiries and collected what data I could. I hoped I might find allies, but most people were the kind of nuts I mentioned earlier: never mind finding evidence or coming up with reasons, let’s just blame everything on unseen monsters. The Sidhe must love people like that: there’s nothing like an endorsement from a kook to make the truth seem kooky.
     
    ‘Anyway, I kept my eyes and ears open, but freetrading’s a marginal living at best and I couldn’t afford to go off chasing rumours all the time. Then, a few months back, I made a killer deal - the kind that doesn’t come along often in my line of work - and that gave me a bit of freedom to poke around, follow some stuff up. To be honest, the lead I was investigating wasn’t directly related to the Sidhe; I’d heard about this freetrader outfit who left the shipping lanes every twenty-five years or so and I thought they might be using an unregistered beacon.’
     
    ‘Unregistered beacon?’ interrupted Taro. ‘So what’s one of them?’
     
    ‘You know what a beacon is?’
     
    ‘’Course I do,’ Taro said. ‘You need beacons to transmit beevee communications and to allow ships to make transits between star systems.’
     
    That was memorised too. The boy must’ve led a very sheltered life. Jarek went on, ‘Well, in some ways a beacon is more like a door between reality and shiftspace, one that’s been left ajar. You’ve been through shiftspace to get here, so you know what a fun place that is.’
     
    ‘We spent the transits between Vellern and Khathryn in stasis,’ Nual broke in.
     
    I’ll bet you did , thought Jarek, and now I know why . ‘Given how chaotic things were after the fall of the Sidhe Protectorate, there’re plenty of rumours about beacons - whole systems, even - whose locations have been lost. Finding just one would open up new shipping lanes and beevee capacity, not to mention new resources and markets, and for a freetrader that’s real treasure! This ship I’d heard about only took its little trip every couple of decades, which sounded a bit odd if it was exploiting an untouched system, but I decided it was worth looking into. So I lurked around in the system they made their transit from, and a few weeks later the Setting Sun - that’s the name of the ship - turned up. When it went into the shift, I slipstreamed it.’ He’d only found out how big a risk he’d taken later. ‘I was right, sort of. It did go to a lost system - except it wasn’t exactly lost, more like deliberately hidden.’
     
    ‘By the Sidhe?’ asked Nual.
     
    ‘By the Sidhe. There’s an inhabited planet there, really lo-tech, and with no idea the rest of