Sajaki led them through gloomy grey-green lit corridors, huge and perhaps mutant janitor-rats scrabbling away as their footfalls neared. What he took them into resembled the inside of a choleraic’s trachea—corridors thick and glutinous with dirty carapacial ice; venous with buried tentacular ducts and power lines, slick with something nastily like human phlegm. Ship-slime, Volyova called it—an organic secretion caused by malfunctioning biological recycler systems on an adjacent level. Mostly, though, it was the cold of which Khouri took heed. “Sylveste’s part in things is rather complex,”
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