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"You’re planning an expedition?" My stomach had clenched. "Get me a place on it, damn you!"

"Why do you think I’m calling?" He’d sounded slightly miffed. "I need you to report within three hours though, if you’re going to go."

"I’ll be there," I’d said, scrambling out of bed. "And, listen, thanks."

"That’s all right." His voice had softened a bit. "I knew you’d want to go. I’ve seen the look in your eyes often enough, whenever anyone discusses this ship. It’s a labour of love with you, not just a job, and that’s so rare these days. It wouldn’t have been right to keep you from it."

"Lucky the technology’s developed enough to let us go down now," I’d said.

"Yes...we’re catching up to the Empire in some ways, at last. In other ways, of course, it’s better if we never do."

That had been four weeks ago, and half a system away.

"My grandfather was a slave of the Empire," the sergeant says.

We’re suiting up, as we await our turn for the airlock. She’ll remain with me all through. Officially she’s my bodyguard and protector. Unofficially, we both know she’s there to keep watch on me, and that’s her only real purpose.

"Oh?" I glance at her with new interest. No wonder she was so tense on the way down. The Empire’s slave camps are notorious, even now, so long after the last of them was captured and its pitiful load of prisoners liberated. "A slave labourer?"

"I don’t know. Labourer, farmer, what does it matter? The records were destroyed when the Empire collapsed. My family never traced him again after they conscripted him." Her mouth twists, angrily. "I grew up with my grandmother never quite admitting that he wouldn’t come back again. She was waiting for him till the day she died."

"I’m not favouring the empire," I try to explain. "I just find the history of this ship a subject of fascinating study, that’s all."

She shrugs, tightening the harness over the padded expanse of her chest. Her head looks tiny on top of the bulky suit, as mine must surely be. Lifting my helmet, she secures it to my suit by its clips and gaskets before looking to her own. She has to do almost everything for me, because there has hardly been any time to train on the way out.

"It doesn’t really matter whether you favour the Empire or not," she says, her voice in my earphones. "It’s gone, and it’s not going to come back, ever again."

We step into the airlock, which is only just large enough to accommodate us both. The tiny chamber fills rapidly with black as the curdled atmosphere outside is pumped in. Just in time, before the sergeant reminds me, I turn on my suit light. The darkness turns to a swirling yellowish blur.

"It’s going to be better outside," Sergeant Ajekwo says.

I want to ask how she can be sure. After all, we’re the first to make planetfall since the end of the Empire. But, of course, going by the pictures the robots sent up, she’s right. The airlock’s already going through its cycle, the outer hatch opening. I step outside, stumbling slightly. The wind lashes at me, but the weight of the suit is so great I feel only a faint buffet.

"This way." The sergeant crosses my field of vision, carrying a case of instruments and recording media. "You can see the lights."

The shuttle has settled on the top of a low hillock. Not far off, I can see a glow, where the robots have switched on the visual floods for us. The first of the expedition members to have left the shuttle have already set off down the hill. I can see their suit lights bobbing in the gloom.

As I go down after them, I try to retain this moment in my memory. Everything that’s happening now, every step I’m taking, is taking me closer to the thing that’s occupied my waking hours for going on twenty years. I’ve even dreamt of it, more times than I care to remember.

I’m down on the flat at the bottom of the hillock when the winds whip the clouds away, for only a moment, but completely. And even though I’ve known it was coming, even though I’ve been expecting it, the sight still takes my breath away.

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