"If you need to talk to someone directly, there's always their epistolary receptacle," Ammond replies absently, as she finishes her note. "Or, you know, just going and making a godawful racket on their liminal platform until they agree to talk to you. But we haven't got any kind of technological network out here yet, so short of calling a hivecluster meeting - which, you know, we'd do via the noticeboard anyway - this is about the best we've got for addressing things to the group at large."

Having finished writing, she looks up, capping her yellow pen and sticking it in the pocket of her jeans. "That sounds an awful lot like one of the languages one of my friends speaks," she comments. "Where you from, originally?"