Genar-Hofoen shook his head slightly, grinning to himself. In all his life he had never been anywhere as unequivocally alien as here, inside a giant torus of cold, compressed gas orbiting a black hole - itself in orbit around a brown dwarf body light years from the nearest star - its exterior studded with ships - most of them the jaggedly bulbous shapes of Affront craft - and full, in the main, of happy, space-faring Affronters and their collection of associated victim-species. Still, he had never felt so thoroughly at home.
