"What in the name of Jesus Christ are you talking about," asks David, who flinched away when she attacked because apparently his reflexes aren't calibrated for ghosts.

"I'm an idiot!" she wails. "And you knew I was an idiot, and that you were the one doing my job and half of a dozen others too, and you got yourself suspended over your stupid bloody cat! And I didn't know a drive plate from a dim bulb, and - I couldn't do it alone - and everyone -"

She leaves off the tirade in favour of more sobbing. It's faintly tinny, owing to her mostly intersecting the console he was sitting at.

...God.

She's an idiot and an entitled little twerp, but does that actually mean she's wrong? He was holding this ship together, Hollister said so when she was ranting at him. But - it was like one of those stupid lifeboat ethics problems he was so bad at. Do you let them kill your cat before her kittens come because she's sneezing and they think it might be zoonotic, or do you kill the hundred and eighty-three souls aboard by consigning them to do the work they were hired to do?

And it's not like Snowy would have survived. Not with that kind of radiation.

He puts his head in his hands.

"Ding dong!" H0LLY says. "Ding dong! There is an unknown nonhuman lifeform entering the living quarters! Emergency! Ding dong!"

"...an unknown nonhuman lifeform?" David asks.

Ding dong? he thinks privately.

"It has been crawling through the vents. The grating underneath it gave way moments ago, releasing it into the body of the ship. Ding dong!"

Lecker sits up, half of her face making it out of the console. "Did the grating give way, or did you open it deliberately?"

"Ding dong!!!!!!!!"

David rises from his seat. "I... suppose we should check that out."

"You should, certainly," Lecker says. "And I'll tag along for moral support! Because I can't touch anything, and that means I'm about as useful as a condom dispenser in the Vatican."

"Perhaps we'll build you some kind of robot body," David comments as they walk.

"A robot body! What a fascinating idea! I can't believe that in three million years, neither I, an enthusiastic student of engineering, nor H0LLY, a tenth-generation shipboard AI with a mind of unfathomable power, thought of that!"

"Well, I thought you might be less blocked on the ideas side and more on the thumbs."

"...it is possible that you could help some of our previously discarded ideas. What with the thumbs."

Walking, walking. It's a fairly large ship. For all that most of it could be conveyed by half a dozen plywood sets.

"...what's it like?" he asks, helpless to stop himself. "Being. Dead."

"Like being on holiday with a crew of Germans."

"Isn't half your family German?"

"Hence my first-hand familiarity."

They turn the corner, and happen upon a... remarkably human-ish woman. Her ears are triangular and furry; her teeth are disconcertingly pointy; she has a long, lashing tail. Also she's a metre tall. But other than that, she's spot on.

Also, she's wearing a pink silk suit, of remarkable quality and a style that went out of fashion slightly over three million years ago.

She's paused at an unusually reflective wall, and is admiring her own ass. "If God existed," she muses, in a completely unremarkable South London accent, "I'd tell her she could retire now. Not much more point, is there?"

"H0LLY."

"Yes, Dave?"

"Is that a smegging catgirl."

"The suffix seems unnecessary. You don't call yourself a humanboy."

"She's a biped. Cats aren't."

"At the beep, you will have gone 2.987 million Earth standard years without having seen a cat."

Pause.

"Beep."