You wake up with the subliminal hum of engines in your head. Shifts are changing. Hot-bunking. Space is at a premium, the notion of which loses its humorous appeal after a few days and nights on the ship. Not that you can tell day from night here. There are no windows in the pressure hull. There is nothing to see beyond the infinitely shaded greys of bulkhead and console, beyond the mnemonics, codes and glyphs that shine upon screens and control pads. Star-shine seen with the naked eye, burns retinas to a crisp. And then alarm bells ring. A weary looking head appears, poking through the curtains that screen your bunk bed from this grey-green world beyond. Rough hands nudge you awake. You pull the curtain fully back and see a gaunt face covered in stubble and grime.

We live in world where regular time is measured by eight hours on and eight hours off, an endless rotation of bodies filling spaces too small to be anything other than a brief and fitful respite from the grind of the watch. Life on board is about orientation. You learn quickly not to sit up. The bulkhead above the top bunk dents your skull. After a couple of days nursing a headache, basic instinct cuts in. One man rolls onto his front, swings his legs out of the bunk and another man climbs into the stinking warmth of the bed. Eventually you become so tired that you’re asleep before your head hits the saliva-stained pillow. This is daily life on K-47, a Hunter-Killer, Dirigiste Seventh Fleet, on convoy attack patrol right out at the edge of the Kuiper Belt, a lone wolf hunting amid the ice worlds. We are all at sea in a silent storm, on the very edge of our slowly revolving, ecliptic star-ocean, where our still intrinsically flat earth civilisation meets the terrible, mechanistic reality of the Outworlds...