Stealing Light

Twenty

At first, when Dakota quietly entered the surgery, Corso had been staring down at a workscreen he held in both hands, a faraway look on his face. One shoulder was encased in a flexible med unit that kept his damaged tissues anaesthetized, while repairing the damage beneath at an accelerated rate.

Both Corso and Kieran Mansell had been brought back to the Hyperion a few hours previous, since it apparently had better medical facilities than the base on Theona.

Empty medical caskets were stacked up on either wall, in steel racks extending the full length of the medical facility. Udo was still encased inside one of these, but he was likely to be back out in a day or two. The external readings made it clear he’d been undergoing a slow and difficult recovery.

His brother Kieran was in better shape, but only just. He was in the intensive treatment bay, an adjustable palette with an autodoc suspended from the ceiling above his deeply sedated form. Its articulated arms were at the moment curled up and at rest, like some enormous metallic spider.

Dakota studied Kieran’s life-signs monitors and wondered what would happen if she smothered him with one of his own pillows. At the very least it would be a mercy killing.

Corso, on the other hand, was conscious and sitting up. His complexion was pale, as if the blood had been drained out of him.

She stared at him, full of nervous energy, until he finally looked up and became aware of her presence. He blinked in surprise as if he wasn’t sure her presence was a good or bad thing.

‘How are you?’ she asked.

He took a moment to think about this. ‘Been better.’

‘I heard about what happened, how the derelict attacked you. What went wrong?’

‘Nothing.’ Corso shook his head, no longer looking at her, an abstract expression on his face. ‘That’s the whole problem.’

Dakota went silent in blank incomprehension.

Corso elaborated. ‘I mean, I did everything right. What happened… shouldn’t have happened. It was like… sabotage.’ He shrugged. ‘I swear, it was like deliberate sabotage.’

‘Did you know the derelict sent a transmission the exact same moment we lost contact with you?’

Corso was clearly taken aback by this.

‘The signal was very tightly focused, aimed towards the inner system,’ Dakota explained. She nodded at his workscreen. ‘Any ideas?’

Corso glanced down at the workscreen, clearly confused. ‘I don’t know anything about a transmission. They didn’t…’

He stared up at her dumbly.

Dakota decided there wasn’t any more time to waste.

‘We’re going to have a long talk, Lucas, somewhere where we can’t be found. A lot has happened over the past couple of hours, and that’s why they’re keeping information from you.’

She put a hand under his arm and tried to guide him off the cot. Indicators flashed red on the wall behind him and he jerked his arm back.

‘Hey-’

‘Do you want to get out of here alive or not?’ she hissed. ‘I don’t like to be the bearer of bad news, but the fact is we’re both as good as…’

She glanced to one side, seeing Kieran was still unconscious in his bay. Even so, speaking seditiously like this anywhere near him made her deeply uncomfortable. She grabbed Corso’s arm again, this time violently wrenching him sideways across the cot until his feet slid towards the ground. He pushed her away.

‘Shit,’ he said with a grimace. ‘What the fuck is the matter with you?’ he scowled. ‘Just… wait a minute.’ He stood up, carefully.

‘No time,’ she replied, pulling him towards the door. He stumbled after her in a daze. She shoved him through into the corridor beyond and pushed him up against a wall. ‘Now listen,’ she said, her voice still a low whisper. ‘I’ve been monitoring tachyon-net traffic between the Agartha and Redstone, and if what I’m nearing is true you and I might be as good as dead. Now tell me: who exactly is Senator Martin Corso? Is he a relative of yours?’

Corso stiffened, his eyes growing wide.

‘How about Mercedes Corso?’ she tried.

‘Where did you hear those names?’ he demanded.

‘You once told me the Senator and the rest of them were your enemies. You also said you were coerced into coming here. Care to elaborate on that?’

Corso made a move to grab her by the throat, but she caught his arm and held it away. ‘I’ll tell you how I know, but first you need to calm down,’ she hissed. ‘I think you’re in almost as much trouble as I am, and I can prove it.’

He laughed, the sound bitter. ‘You’ve barely said a truthful word since I first set eyes on you. You came on board under a false ID-’

‘And you know why? Because I’m a machine-head. I trained to be one all my life. I come from Bellhaven. It’s a job that came with serious prestige, until everything turned to shit and the Consortium shut down the development programmes.’

She swallowed hard. This wasn’t easy for her to talk about. ‘And, ever since, I’ve had to deal with people who treat me like I’m some kind of monster. I wasn’t responsible for what happened on Redstone but every machine-head in the Consortium, most of whom probably hadn’t even heard of Redstone, got punished for it. Every single day that I wake up, I remember what happened there. In detail. So yes, Lucas, I came on board under a false ID, but that’s mainly because I was getting on board a ship filled with Redstone Freeholders.’

Corso reached up and gently prised Dakota’s remaining hand away from his shoulder. ‘Senator Corso is my father, and Mercedes is my younger sister. They’re all the family I have, and they’re hostages to a faction within the Freehold government that’s headed by Arbenz. If I don’t do exactly what Arbenz wants, they’re both as good as dead.’

‘You’re being blackmailed?’

‘Yes.’

Dakota felt the blood drain from her face. In a moment, everything had changed. Everything. She glanced back through the door to where Kieran still lay comatose. Colour-coded displays of his nervous, respiratory and muscular systems flickered from moment to moment.

‘There’ve been some recent events back on Redstone,’ she explained. ‘I don’t think Arbenz or the rest of them were likely to go out of their way to tell you.’

‘What happened?’ Corso demanded, pushing her away. ‘Shit, is it my father?’

Dakota realized Corso was already heading for a comms panel by the medical bay’s entrance.

‘Lucas! If you talk to Arbenz, he’ll be aware I have a way of getting around his censor blocks. And there’s more news besides. Some kind of fleet is on its way here.’

One hand up to the panel, Corso turned and stared at her. ‘What?’

‘Just listen to me, will you. I’ve been tapping into what’s supposed to be an encrypted tach-net transponder on board the Agartha. That’s how Arbenz is staying in touch with Redstone, but they’re incredibly sloppy with the encryption.’

Corso was fully facing her again, a hard look on his face. Everything she said to him sounded stunningly incriminating, she knew, but she didn’t have any choice. It was a drastic way to gain an ally.

Corso turned back to the panel and touched his fingertips to its surface. Ident codes and authorizations flickered briefly, before several screens appeared in response.

‘I can’t access any tach-net transmissions more than a few days old,’ he said after a moment. ‘Yet the networks aren’t down.’

‘I told you, they’re trying to keep something from you. I can prove it.’

He glared at her balefully. ‘I’m finding less and less reason to trust you an inch.’

‘Then who do you trust?’

He didn’t answer at first. ‘I don’t know,’ he finally admitted.

‘The only reason I can think of for any fleet turning up here is because they know about the derelict. They aren’t here yet, but they will be soon, on board another coreship. Maybe it’s the Uchidans, or maybe it’s someone else. Either way, they get here in less than a couple of days, which means this whole salvage operation is in deep, deep trouble.’

‘You know, it’s funny, but I believe you. Or at least I think I do.’ He had a faraway look in his eyes that made Dakota realize his anti-shock medication was beginning to wear off.

‘Can you walk properly?’ she asked.

‘Sure, I guess so.’

‘Good-because I meant it when I said you’re in as much trouble as I am.’

‘Are they dead?’

‘Who?’

‘My father and my sister.’ He took hold of her upper arm, gripping her painfully. ‘Tell me.’

‘First, we get somewhere safe-’

‘I’m not going anywhere, Dakota. I’ve got to-’

‘It’s over, Corso!’ she yelled at him, her voice echoing from the bulkheads around them. ‘It’s over,’ she said more quietly. ‘Think about it. This whole thing was compromised from the start. Your secret is out. Your boss is a murderous nutcase with wild delusions of grandeur who wants to go up against a civilization that controls a fucking galaxy. When it all goes tits up and the Senator goes looking for someone to blame, who do you think they’re going to start with?’

Corso’s lips grew thin. ‘There’s nowhere we can go.’

‘Wrong.’ She peeled his hand off her upper arm with some difficulty. They were now in the Hyperion’s gravity wheel. She led him down a corridor towards the centre of the wheel, the gravity dropping to zero the further they moved away from the wheel’s rim.

To her surprise, Corso followed her with little protest. His eyes still had that faraway look.

‘At least tell me where we’re going,’ he grumbled eventually.

‘The cargo bay.’

‘What the hell’s there that’ll make any difference?’

She hesitated for a moment, and felt her resolve wobble. He’s still a Freeholder, she reminded herself.

‘Trust me,’ she replied.

Corso gazed through a window overlooking the interior of the cargo bay, seeing the assemblage of weapons and equipment stored there. Then he frowned and nodded towards the far wall.

‘Over there. It looks like…’

‘That,’ Dakota replied, ‘is my ship.’

He glanced to one side, as if trying to remember something. ‘This is what you wanted me to see? What’s it doing here? How the hell did you even get it on board?’

‘Anything we want to talk about, we can say it aboard my ship without any fear of being overheard. If there’s any attempt at surveillance, I’ll know immediately. As far as the manifest is concerned, the Piri Reis doesn’t even exist, and it doesn’t show up on any external surveillance systems either.’

‘You can still eyeball it, though,’ he replied, looking thoughtful. ‘Assuming anybody happened to look through this window and spotted it?’

‘Nobody has, yet.’

She drew him towards an airlock complex that led further into the cargo bay’s depressurized interior, and there had him pull on a light pressure suit. She did the same herself: letting him know about her filmsuit felt like a step too far just yet. Then she cycled the air out of the lock and moments later they were floating towards the Piri Reis.

It felt strange having someone else inside her ship. Once they were on board, he looked around the Piri’s compact interior with an astonished gaze.

He finally turned to Dakota as he peeled off his pressure suit. ‘Frankly,’ he said, ‘I still think you’re the one who needs to do the talking.’

‘This craft is the Piri Reis, and I brought it on board. Apart from me, you’re the only one who knows about it, and I’d like things to stay that way.’

Corso nodded carefully. ‘You said Arbenz was sending and receiving secret communiquйs to and from Redstone.’

‘Use that screen,’ she said, pointing. ‘You’ll find it won’t block you when you try to access the latest tach-net updates.’

Corso grabbed a handhold and swung himself up into a sitting position on a fur-lined bulkhead, then waited a moment as the screen turned itself towards him. Dakota watched as a series of icons appeared on the screen: the latest news updates from the interstellar tach-net transponder network. She chewed nervously on a finger as he read.

Piri, is there any reason to doubt the information from Redstone?

‹None. Independent Consortium observers present in the Freehold capital have filed separate reports of a coup.›

Corso became very still as he concentrated. Eventually Dakota got tired of waiting and went over to where he squatted intently, putting a hand on his shoulder.

It seemed it was all over for Senator Arbenz. The assault on the Rorqual Maru and the Uchidan encroachment on the Freehold capital had proved the tipping point for a coup led by Senate members with more liberal leanings-liberal, that is, by the standards of the Freehold.

‘I should be there,’ he said, sounding stunned.

‘But you can’t be. Look, they don’t say who was executed…’

He turned to gaze at her, and she fell silent. ‘They don’t need to. According to this, the pro-war faction -and that’s basically Senator Arbenz-killed every hostage they held when the Senate was stormed. That means my father and my sister.’ He shook his head in wonder. ‘They’re dead.’

‘You don’t need to do what Senator Arbenz tells you any more. He doesn’t have any-’

‘Yes, I know that,’ he snapped, and Dakota decided that erring on the side of silence might be the better option.

He stared off into space for a while, his expression bleak. ‘I knew this would happen, you know. It’s not even a surprise.’

‘What do you mean?’

He gazed at her levelly. ‘Arbenz and the Mansell brothers were all connected with death squads. They wanted to achieve political change through terror. It’s an old, old political stratagem. I’m just…’

He shrugged and sighed. ‘I’m just not surprised,’ he said, and pushed himself away from the screen. T need to go.’

‘Go where?’ she asked, alarmed.

‘I need to… I need to get some things.’

She looked at the expression on his face. It was much like she’d imagined her own expression might have been, following the mandatory removal of her original implants. A look of loss and betrayal-and something else there weren’t quite the words for.

‘Do you want me to-’

‘No,’ he said abruptly. ‘But you should know I won’t be telling the others about this. You’ve got my word on that.’

She nodded mutely in reply, then watched as he pulled his pressure suit back on and re-entered the Piri’s tiny airlock.

‘And then you’re coming back?’

He looked at her strangely, but nodded after a moment.

Half of her was sure he would come back, but the other half was even surer he wouldn’t.

All dead.

It hadn’t quite sunk in. He knew from past experience-from Cara’s death-just how long that could take.

He considered the possibility that, in a very real way, his life was over. He hadn’t missed the look on Dakota’s face when he’d departed her ship, but if he’d told her what was going through his mind, she might have tried to stop him.

Even worse, he might have let her stop him.

Disregarding some kind of coup, they were still under Senator Arbenz’s thrall so long as they remained within the Nova Arctis system. Yet the fact remained both Corso and Dakota were still essential to Arbenz’s plans.

There was a series of observation bubbles ringing the Hyperion’s hull, about halfway along its length. They were tiny clear blisters that looked out on the stars and Theona’s frozen surface far below. These bubbles were the only places aboard the frigate where you could look directly out at the universe beyond the hull and be absolutely, unwaveringly certain that what you were seeing was real, and not-assuming you were sufficiently paranoid to let it concern you-merely a deluge of false information fed through the ultimately fallible conduit of the Hyperion’s sensor and communications arrays.

As soon as he was back in the Hyperion’s pressurized corridors, Corso made his way immediately to one of the bubbles, letting his mind empty of thoughts, regrets and the pains of loss even as he went.

Despite this, he felt the tears streaming down his cheeks as he made his way down hollowly clanging drop shafts. But the frigate was so vast, there was little chance of running randomly into another human being, even with the half-dozen crewmembers Arbenz had now installed.

Finally he reached one such blister, and pulled himself up a ladder and into a low-ceilinged room with a clear roof that looked out on the stars. He ignored the automated warnings that spoke quietly as he entered. The lights dimmed automatically as the hatch closed beneath him and he let himself slide into the comforting warmth of an observation chair that automatically tilted to better accommodate his view of the universe.

Music played automatically, a soft swelling and ebbing of notes more like the rising and falling of the ride than anything orchestrated by human beings. He couldn’t summon the mental energy even to tell the Hyperion to turn the damn noise off.

What he had in mind was very simple.

The observation blister was a weak point in the hull, and the ship was old. The maintenance work done prior to its departure from Redstone had been the bare minimum necessary, given the restrictions of time and funding.

The automated warnings had made it clear that relatively little effort would be involved in destroying the clear blister before him and exposing himself to the vacuum of deep space. A series of switches under a panel within easy reach by the side of the reclining chair gave him control over explosive bolts that could blow the blister clear away from the hull, thus providing an emergency escape route. By the time any alarms could bring the ship’s crew running to the observation blister, it would already be far too late.

He touched a button and the chair dropped a little, giving him a still better view. He got as far as flipping open the panel, tapping in the same default code that most equipment on board still used (Dakota had been right about the appalling lack of appropriate security), and rested his finger on the emergency release button that would blow the bolts.

Then he slowly brought his hand back up and closed the panel.

Even with him dead, there was at least a chance Arbenz could still use the protocols he’d created to negotiate the derelict’s guidance systems and take it out of the Nova Arctis system. Corso knew the work he’d done was flawless. But if the derelict’s assault on both him and Kieran was then a deliberate act of sabotage, who was responsible for it?

He sat beneath the blister’s curving dome, with the lights up, staring up at his own reflection staring back down at him for what felt like a long time. His hand dropped again towards the panel by the side of the chair.

He already knew he wasn’t going to do it. If the Senator could still win even with him dead, that made the whole notion of killing himself pointless.

Sal came into his thoughts. Corso was pretty sure Sal was dead by now, but as is so often the case with people who constitute a large part of your life for enough years, his old friend’s physical presence was far from necessary in order for Corso to have a laborious, albeit primarily silent, imaginary argument with him, as if they sat there together beneath the curving transparent dome.

Sal won, of course. He usually did.

Corso tapped a button and the hatch in the floor next to the chair irised open once more, revealing the ladder. He climbed back down and went looking for Dakota.

Arbenz stepped into the moon base’s centre of operations, still feeling foggy from a lack of sleep. Anton Lourekas, the base’s medician, had been giving him shots to keep him awake, but there was only so long before he’d end up losing his grip on events. Things were starting to run out of control badly enough as it was.

He was not pleased to find Gardner waiting for him.

‘What do you mean by telling me I can’t communicate with my partners?’ Gardner nearly shouted in his face. Arbenz winced, too tired to be as angry as he really should be. ‘Your communications staff are downright refusing to patch me through the tach-nets-’

‘With good reason,’ Arbenz muttered, pushing past Gardner and nodding a greeting to the three technicians working at the opposite end of the room.

‘Don’t ignore me, Senator. I demand-’

Arbenz turned around. ‘If you continue to make demands in front of my own people, Mr Gardner, I’ll have you permanently confined to quarters on board the Hyperion. Do you understand me?’

Gardner looked apoplectic. ‘You can’t.’

‘But I can, David. And if your partners decide they don’t like that, then they can come and find me themselves. Once this is all over.’ He gestured over Gardner’s shoulder to a guard, who stepped forward from his station by the entrance to the ops-centre.

‘Now listen,’ Arbenz continued, softening his voice a little. ‘I believe some form of expeditionary force is on its way here, on board another coreship. That means we have to accept the fact our little secret has been compromised.’

Gardner’s eyes were already bugging out. ‘We have to contact-’

^‘No, Mr Gardner. We run silent until they actually get here, otherwise we risk the possibility that they also find out about the derelict, assuming they don’t already know about it.’

‘But they must know, if they’re on their way here.’

‘This is all we know: they’re on their way here, and our time is limited. Anything else is just an assumption.’ No need to let him know just yet about the coup on Redstone. ‘So no more demands, Mr Gardner. Is that understood?’

Gardner’s lips trembled, his face so red it looked ready to explode. Then he glanced at the waiting guard nearby, and clearly thought better of any further protest. He turned on his heel and stormed out of the ops-centre.

Arbenz immediately felt more relaxed.

‘Sir?’ He turned to find a technician called Weinmann standing by him. ‘The signal emanating from the derelict. We’ve narrowed down the target.’

‘Go on.’

‘The signal is extremely tightly focused, on a very low-power beam. It’s aimed at this system’s innermost world, sir. Just here.’ Weinmann tapped at the screen before him.

Arbenz leaned in to take a look. ‘But that’s just a ball of rock.’

Ikaria drifted a few bare tens of millions of kilometres from the surface of its sun. So what was there, that the derelict could want to signal?

‘Ikaria has minimal rotation around its axis, as you’d expect from a body that close to its parent. The signal was directional enough for us to isolate a series of valleys that have just emerged into the planet’s dark side. There’s meanwhile been regular transmissions about three thousand seconds apart each. And each of those is being adjusted to match the planet’s rotation.’

‘I would have thought anything down there would have been burned away long ago,’ Arbenz mused.

‘Those valleys are extremely deep. And we’re lucky because they’re just emerging from the terminator line. They’re going to be on the planet’s dark side for a while.’

Arbenz sighed. ‘But do we know what’s down there, in those valleys? Is it possible, perhaps, that we might find other ships like our derelict there?’

Weinmann shook his head, clearly not prepared to speculate.

One of the largest problems they faced with the derelict they’d already found was digging it out of the ice. Excavation had indeed been proceeding ever since they’d discovered the craft, but the sheer scale of the project meant this exercise was taking far, far longer than originally hoped.

But if there was now the chance there were indeed other transluminal ships further in-system, perhaps sitting out in the open and ready for the taking…

If action were to be taken, it would have to be soon, before the unknown fleet arrived. Their best bet therefore was to take either the Hyperion or the Agartha to Ikaria with all due haste, and retrieve whatever they could find-even if it meant abandoning their efforts under Theona’s dense ice.

Time was running out all too quickly.

‘I want to know everything,’ Corso said on his return to the Piri. ‘Everything you haven’t told me.’

‘What makes you think there is anything else?’ Dakota replied, her voice shaky.

He thought she looked like she’d been crying, but he couldn’t be sure. At the very least her eyes were red-rimmed and clouded, her body pushed into a fur-lined nook inside the Piri Reis.

‘Because there’s too much at stake here for any more bullshit,’ he snapped back. ‘We’re in serious trouble here. If there’s anything else I should know, you tell me now, otherwise I find out later and then you’re on your own. Completely. Do you understand me?’

‘I haven’t gone out of my way to do anything I shouldn’t-’

He laughed. ‘There’s a wake of death and destruction following you wherever you go. I can understand why you’d hate the Senator, and now he doesn’t have a hold over me I’m going to do everything I can to take the transluminal drive away from him, but I know I can’t do that without your help. So start talking, Dakota. I want to know everything. From the beginning.’

He could see the acquiescence in her eyes, in the way her body relaxed. After a moment, she began to talk.

She told him about the Shoal; about Bourdain’s Rock, and the alien’s gift, about the system surge when she’d placed the figurine on the Hyperion’s imaging plate. About her conversation with an AI version of the alien, which had apparently penetrated the Hyperion’s systems.

It came spilling out in a cathartic rush, as if some mental logjam had finally given way, and a black tide of memory had pushed through like a swollen river spilling into an empty basin. She told him yet more: about the loss of her first set of implants, and the misery and pain that followed; about the alien’s offer to wipe the slate clean if she only agreed to help it destroy the derelict…

Corso’s anger gradually faded, and in the end he slumped in a corner facing her, a look of defeat coming across his face. Then suddenly he smiled.

‘What’s so funny?’ she demanded, annoyed he could find anything faintly humorous in their predicament.

‘It would almost be worth it to tell Arbenz all of this, just to see his face, don’t you think?’

‘Funny,’ she scowled.

‘Do you have any idea why this Shoal creature picked you for all this? It seems more than a little fortuitous, don’t you reckon, that it would seek you out on the Rock, hand you this thing just on the off chance…’

‘Don’t assume I haven’t thought about it-a lot. But, outside of the Shoal being able to see into the future, your guess is as good as mine.’

‘There’s a lot of unanswered questions, though,’ he continued. ‘For one, the idea that some kind of artificial intelligence is lurking inside the Hyperion’s computer systems-I find that hard to believe.’

‘How so?’

He stared at her like she was stupid. ‘Come on. The Shoal having the secret knowledge of how to create true artificial intelligence I could accept. But on the Hyperion’s computer systems? I guarantee you’d need something far more advanced than you’ll find anywhere within the Consortium. And why wait until now? Why not grab us while we were on their own coreship on the way here, sitting right under their noses?’

Dakota shrugged. ‘I thought about that, too. I think that the Shoal-member I spoke to-the thing inside the Hyperion’s stacks-is working alone for some reason. I can’t think of anything else that makes sense.’

She looked up and saw the sceptical look on his face. ‘Corso, everything I’ve told you is true. If you can’t figure that out, you’re a bigger fool than I originally took you for.’

Corso raised his hands in mock defeat. He pulled out his workscreen and held it up before her for a moment as if it were a glittering prize. Then he balanced it on his knee and began tapping at its screen.

‘Since we’re sharing, I’ve been analysing fresh information pulled from the derelict. One of the big questions we need to answer is, what was the relationship between the Shoal and the Magi? Was it a meeting between two species that had separately developed a transluminal drive?

‘In fact,’ he said with a grin, ‘the evidence makes it more likely the Shoal stole the transluminal technology from the Magi.’

‘You’ve got to be joking.’

‘It’s all in here,’ he continued, still with a faint smile, tapping further at the workscreen. ‘I think I’ve even stumbled across a potted history of the Magi. Trust me, though, when I say I’m making some wild leaps of interpretation.’

Dakota remembered that sense of witnessing the passing of entire civilizations while she’d been in the interface chair on board the derelict.

‘Interpret away,’ she said.

‘I managed to narrow down the time the derelict was built by a little more,’ he continued. ‘And it was created at least a few millennia before the Shoal claim they developed the transluminal drive.’

‘So that nails it pretty conclusively. Some other species possessed the transluminal drive-’

‘And then they encountered the Shoal, who now claim to be the only species in the entire Milky Way to have the technology,’ Corso confirmed.

‘And you’re sure about that?’

Corso shrugged. ‘Hard to say without getting a lot more time to go over the data. There’s decades of work still in there.’

An overwhelming sense of weariness came over Dakota. She was still badly rattled from Kieran’s assault, and there were times when she felt overwhelmed by the constant flow of recent events.

‘Fuck it,’ she said, her voice small and quiet, and pushed herself over to where Corso sat. She laid her head against his chest. After his initial surprise, he let one hand fall down to rest on her shoulder.

‘You know,’ she murmured at length, ‘I hate Freeholders. I mean, I really, really hate the fucking lot of you. You realize that, don’t you?’

‘I could tell,’ came Corso’s dry response, ‘from the way you seem to have your hand on my dick.’

It started with an awkward fumbling during which Corso managed to bash his elbow hard on the corner of the seat. Then they both slid further down, both laughing, and Dakota pressed her face against his. That was how she remembered it: a classic first-kiss scenario after a stumbling beginning, so different from the artificial attentions of the Piri’s faux-human effigy. From the enthusiasm with which Corso responded to her advances, it was clear it had been some time for him too.

In fact, over the next several minutes, her suspicion grew that it had been a very long time indeed for Corso. His technique didn’t exactly match his enthusiasm, but Dakota couldn’t care less. She shouldered her way out of her clothes in record time while Corso still fumbled with his belt, a hilariously embarrassed look on his face.

In the end, once he’d finally got out of his clothes, she climbed on top of him, despite the look of clear puzzlement on his face. She guessed he wasn’t very likely to be familiar with sex in zero gravity.

He grunted with surprise when she twisted her hips in a practised way (some things, she mused, you never really forgot) and found himself deep inside her.

Corso cleared his throat in between deep, shuddering breaths. ‘Back home, you know, usually the man-’

‘Where I come from, usually the man shuts the fuck up,’ Dakota gasped.

Completely nonplussed, Corso looked so ridiculous she giggled, as if the air in the cabin had suddenly been flooded with nitrous oxide.

Shame, she thought, to have forgotten how good sheer, wild abandonment feels. Revelations of the senses: a cool flush presented itself deep between her thighs and she realized he’d come already. Yet she didn’t feel disappointed: she stayed where she was, balanced on top of him, leaning forward to put her hands on his chest for traction while he gripped onto a furry bulkhead (having almost floated off him a couple of times to begin with), and after several more seconds she came herself.

The orgasm rattled through her, peaking in an explosion somewhere behind her eyes and deep within her brain. Her skin was now flushed and beaded with perspiration. She held onto him for a few more moments, despite the pained expression on his face as her fingernails dug in.

When she finally let go, he emitted a small, almost silent sigh of relief.

‘Sorry, didn’t mean to hurt you,’ she breathed.

Corso cleared his throat. When he finally spoke, his voice sounded thick and broken. ‘I… no problem. I didn’t even notice.’

‘Liar.’

The beginnings of a grin tweaked the edge of his mouth. ‘Harlot.’

She grinned back. ‘Yes?’

A while later they floated together in the deep cocoon darkness of Dakota’s sleeping quarters.

‘What’s the problem?’ she asked, sensing his restlessness.

‘Can’t sleep easily in zero gee,’ he explained. They floated against one fur-lined wall. ‘And to be honest, this fur stuff creeps me out a little.’

‘That’s all?’

‘Well, no,’ he admitted. ‘Haven’t really been able to sleep ever since I got on board the Hyperion. I keep waking up and thinking I’ve fallen out of bed back home-but I’m still falling…’

‘Yeah. That’s a familiar one.’ By now, sleeping in zero gee felt like the most natural thing in the world to Dakota. The only possible improvement on it was having a warm naked body next to hers, so all her bases were pretty much now covered.

‘You know, I’ve been thinking,’ he mumbled.

‘Yeah?’

‘If the Hyperion is compromised the way you say it is, any data I’ve recovered from the derelict is probably accessible to your alien friend by now.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘Perhaps it was the Shoal-member that somehow caused the derelict to attack us, by using what it found in the Hyperion’s stacks. But that’s all conjecture: there’s no way of being sure.’

‘Remember what I told you, Lucas. The Piri Reis is stealthed to the eyeballs. There’s no reason you couldn’t read the same data into the Piri’s stacks, and bypass the Hyperion altogether.

‘Think about it.’ She really had his attention now. ‘You could query the Hyperion’s stacks from here, even send low-level commands from here direct to the derelict. Everything would be disguised as routine subsystem comms and, frankly, your people don’t have the means to spot the deception.’

Corso unravelled himself from her, clearly thinking hard. ‘You know, I wasn’t entirely being honest when I said we couldn’t pilot the derelict just yet.’

Now he had her full attention.

‘Do you mean…?’

‘I lied, yes.’

‘Because?’

‘Because I wanted to make things as hard for the Senator as possible. Maybe you can understand that. But you could hypothetically control the derelict from the Hyperion’s bridge. I mean, you could link the Hyperion’s interface chair to the one on board the derelict.’

‘But that chair was torn apart by the derelict, the same time it attacked you. I saw the recordings.’

‘That’s one reason I said “hypothetically”. And, for what it’s worth, every time a team has gone back on board the derelict following previous attacks, they found that any pieces of equipment left behind were still completely intact. The Hyperion doesn’t appear to recognize inanimate objects like interface chairs as hostile, possibly because they’re inorganic. Technically, you could set up a direct chair-to-chair link from the bridge and control the derelict that way.’

‘So what are you saying?’ she asked him excitedly. ‘We could just… fly it out from under Arbenz’s nose?’

He frowned. ‘Whether it’s practical or possible is another matter. And even if we could somehow pull it off, there are other things we’d have to think about, such as what to do with the derelict if we got away with it? And that’s not even taking into account the fact we’d still need to get ourselves on board the derelict in order to make an escape. And we already know that it can be lethally dangerous, even at the best of times.’

Dakota’s eyes gleamed with the possibilities. ‘I don’t have to be inside the bridge interface chair to control the Hyperion, you know.’

Corso looked confused. ‘You don’t?’

‘Look, there are good reasons for using interface chairs. If anyone with the appropriate implants is able to control a ship without resorting to its interface chair, then you’re faced with the risk of an enemy machine -head slipping on board and taking it over instantly. So the chairs are there as a kind of security measure, to prevent that happening. But that’s not to say one can’t be bypassed. However, the only one who has the necessary stack permissions to do that is a ship’s designated pilot.’

‘Which is you.’

‘Which is me.’

‘And that way you can control the Hyperion without actually being anywhere near the bridge?’

‘More than that. If I can run the Hyperion from elsewhere, it means that once I have a ship-to-ship link set up from the bridge, I might be able to run the derelict remotely as well.’

Corso laughed and shook his head in wonder.

‘Things have come a long way since the Hyperion was built,’ she explained. ‘The interface chairs we have now are a lot newer and more advanced than anything else originally existing on the bridge. We can take advantage of that fact.’

‘OK,’ he said, thinking ahead. ‘That still doesn’t get us on board the derelict without risking another attack from it, though.’

She’d already managed to think of this problem in a sudden blaze of creativity. ‘The Piri is tiny next to the derelict. Why not secure the Piri to the derelict’s hull before we use it to make a transluminal jump? There are buckytube cables on board for securing it to small asteroids, or to the surface of larger ones. No reason I couldn’t do the same, in this case.’

‘But that’s not all we’d have to do,’ he argued. ‘Even if you manage all this, and create an uplink with the derelict, it doesn’t matter how stealthed the Piri Reis is, because everyone on the Agartha, on the Hyperion and on Theona will soon know what you’re doing. And that doesn’t even take into account how the alien hiding in the Hyperion’s stacks would react. Or the fact you’ll still have to be physically on the bridge and in the chair before you can create the uplink in the first place, and that means somehow getting past the crew.’

Corso had momentarily forgotten the incongruity of the situation: the two of them discussing life and death matters while floating naked together in a fur-lined spaceship. Dakota took his face in her hands, an almost feral expression of glee on her own.

‘You’re altogether too much of a defeatist. If we induce a general systems failure in the Hyperion’s stacks, same as the one I had to deal with just after I got on board, every sensor, every security system and every piece of recording equipment on the Hyperion is going to have a brainstorm. The Shoal-member would be deaf, dumb and blind for at least a couple of minutes, while the stacks were down. That would give us just enough time to create a cloaked uplink before the Hyperion’s systems have time to reboot.’

‘You’re still taking a hell of a risk,’ Corso argued, trying to sound calm and reasonable but in fact clearly more stressed with each passing second. ‘You still haven’t told me how you’ll get past the crew.’

‘There’s no reason they wouldn’t assume I was just doing my job if I got in that chair.’

She sat back and studied Corso’s glum expression. He wasn’t happy-but she knew she’d won this one.

Dakota could feel the Shoal-member’s presence as she found her way back into the main body of the Hyperion, navigating a central drop shaft running the entire length of the ship’s spine on her way to the bridge.

‘You,’ she said quietly to the empty air, ‘have got something to hide.’

‘Blunt accusations, much foaming of water,’ the reply boomed through hidden speakers in the walls of the shaft. ‘To accuse is to diminish within eye of beholder fish.’

She grabbed hold of a rung and made a right-angle turn, letting herself drop at a steady, graceful pace down another shaft until she snagged a convenient handhold with one foot.

She wondered if the crew could hear the alien speaking to her over the comms system, and why he would therefore choose to announce his presence in this way. If they could hear him, they’d probably be panicking by now, which meant she’d find it that much harder to slip by them. She began to really wish she’d kept her mouth shut.

‘You know, I think you’re trying too hard. Care to answer a riddle?’ she asked, adrenalin pumping through her head. She felt like she could climb outside the hull and run sprint marathons around its circumference. But she was terrified beyond words.

‘Riddles, yes? A conundrum to while away eternity’s hours,’ came the answer.

‘Two riddles, really. Here’s the first one. There’s been very little real contact with individual members of the Shoal since we first encountered your species-probably no more than a couple of dozen times in all. Everything pivotal that’s ever happened in the history of the Consortium, there’s been one of your kind present, almost as if you’re somehow making things happen.’

It was a popular conspiracy theory, and not one Dakota might normally subscribe to. However, under the present circumstances, she found herself prepared to entertain wilder ideas than she might do otherwise.

‘First you boot the Uchidans off their homeworld without explanation. Then they land on Redstone and try to throw the Freehold off theirs, something I’d have thought way beneath your interest. Yet one of your people was present, for some reason, in the Central Command ring the day before the massacres at Port Gabriel.’

She continued: ‘Then the next time I see one of you, it’s on Bourdain’s Rock, and people want to blame me for what happened there. And now, suddenly, here we are almost literally in the middle of fucking nowhere, a derelict but viable alien starship under our feet, and… big surprise, here you are, too. It was you every time, wasn’t it?’

‘Enquiry to elucidate, with pleasure?’

Dakota gritted her teeth. The alien’s word games were really beginning to get on her nerves. ‘You’re the one that calls himself Trader. You were there on Redstone, and then Bourdain’s Rock, and now you’re here, like a bad shadow following me everywhere. What’s your full name again?’

She already knew it, but somehow she needed to hear the creature repeat it. ‘Trader-In-Faecal-Matter-Of-Animals,’ he replied. ‘And you are correct.’

‘You know,’ she said, relishing the opportunity to give vent, ‘it really gives some indication of how little you regard us as a species that the name you use when you’re around us is a seriously tasteless joke.’

‘This one is forced to point out that circumstances remain unaltered from present: vis-а-vis relationship you and I, no change. Agreed?’

She was almost at the bridge by now. She slowed her progress, taking her time in case she ran into any of Arbenz’s skeleton crew. She had no idea what she was going to say to them when the time came, but could see no reason for them to keep her from the interface chair. If she was wrong about that… well, she’d just have to deal with it when the time came.

‘What happened to the race that built the derelict?’ she asked, realizing the creature was baiting her. ‘Where are they now? It has a transluminal drive dating from long before your species were supposed to have developed the technology, so just what are you trying to hide here?’

A secure link via her Ghost allowed her to observe Corso’s handiwork as he covertly hacked away at the Hyperion’s stacks from inside the Piri Reis. She had to hand it to him: he knew exactly what he was doing. Any lingering concerns faded regarding his expertise with computer systems.

Trader refused to be drawn, though. Instead of answering, he continued blithely, as if anything she had to say was of little or no concern to him.

But then she reminded herself that the alien very much had the advantage. Everything she and Corso had planned for the next few minutes depended on him not picking up on their attempt to take control of the derelict.

‘Of highest tantamount importance in approaching task of cataclysmic destruction is appreciation that the object of our concern, in order to be rendered nonexistent, cannot be destroyed by means conventional. Ergo, consideration of alternatives is necessitated.’

Dakota reached the gravity wheel and pulled herself up a series of rungs, feeling the tug of centrifugal force from the rotation of the Hyperion’s wheel segment, the higher she got. She climbed into a corridor in the wheel’s inner rim whose floor curved out of sight.

‘Who built the derelict, Trader? You’re holding all the cards. Why not just tell me?’

‘Please regard that derelict in question rests-chance and circumstance be thanked-upon the very precipice of a mighty abyss. A most advantageous and opportunistic means of destruction is thereby presented: to be sent tumbling into welcoming and bottomless embrace of mother ocean, is also to be squeezed and squeezed until boom! Derelict is at an end. How so, therefore, to reach accomplishment of this mighty and noble task? Placing of explosives conventional, certainly. Or activation of secondary propulsion systems, to allow such an unfortunate event to most merrily happenstance. All to be considered by this one called Dakota. Rescued, recall, please, from certain blackness of death aboard space-bound asteroid by this one. Surely, to indicate refusal in our current concern is equivalent to expression of churlishness, given my life-saving kindness?’

Keep him talking. Anything, to divert the majority of his consciousness away from Corso’s hacking.

As it turned out, she had little to worry her, once she entered the bridge. The crew were dead.

It was unusual in itself to find the emergency seal on the entrance to the bridge activated when she got there. She reached up and deactivated it by hand, using a panel on the wall.

When the seal slid back, revealing the bridge’s interior, she stared at the scene before her with numb horror.

It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out that Trader must have locked the crew into the bridge deck, sealed the emergency exits, and then voided the life-giving atmosphere.

By the looks of things, two of the crewmembers had made a concerted effort to open the emergency seals from the inside. They lay just inside the doorway, staring sightlessly upwards, their tongues protruding from their mouths.

At least I have my filmsuit. Trader couldn’t possibly know about that. Even if he did, he’d still have to be a lot more inventive than this if he chose to hurt her.

She slowly picked her way past the two corpses. The other four crewmembers were all huddled by an open floor panel. Dakota averted her gaze from their faces, frozen in terror, guessing they’d been desperately trying to access bypass circuits as they’d died.

‘An unfortunate matter, but necessary,’ the alien’s voice boomed from the bridge’s comms system. ‘For them to be allowed interference in requisite destruction of derelict would be unforgivably remiss.’

Dakota nodded, still unable to find her voice. Her throat felt like something large and heavy had been lodged halfway down it, and she had a particularly nasty taste in the back of her mouth.

She watched as the petals of the interface chair began to unfold, unbidden.

‘Look, they’ll know by now, on the Agartha. and down on the moon, that the crew are dead. I’ll never be allowed to get as far as the derelict and do what you want. And you know I can’t do anything from up here.’

‘Interface, contrary to clear untruth, awaits your embrace, and is linked in readiness to identical device aboard derelict. Sufficient control for destruction may be manifested from here.’

Her heart sank as she realized the alien was a step ahead of them. ‘And what happens when Arbenz comes back up here? Who do you think he’s going to blame for… for this carnage?’

Of course.

She was being set up-had been set up, ever since Bourdain’s Rock.

The alien was covering its tracks, so that it would appear only she was responsible for the destruction of the derelict and the murder of the Hyperion’s crew: a wake of death and destruction, indeed. Corso hadn’t been so far off the mark then.

‘In order to achieve maximized disaster,’ the creature continued, ‘and to prevent immediate discorporation of Dakota most delightful, absolute cooperation is presently necessitated.’

Her Ghost flagged up a message from Corso. But before she had a chance to read it, she felt something pressing in on her thoughts…

She shook her head, feeling dizzy. She looked up and saw a computer-generated image of Trader, floating in the screens arranged all around the bridge.

‘My life won’t be worth shit if I do what you want. I…’

She stopped. There was something she had to do, something very urgent. She -

– was standing next to the open interface chair, one hand resting on the folded shape of a steel and plastic petal. She couldn’t even remember having crossed the bridge to reach the chair.

There was another message from Corso now, this one marked highest priority. She faltered, and there it was again, pressing in on her thoughts -

– she found herself in darkness.

Dakota reeled, and realized she was seated inside the activated interface chair, with no memory of having climbed inside it or of the petals enfolding her. She gasped with the shock of this sudden dislocation. It felt like being buried alive.

More, she was mind-linked into the second interface, the one on board the derelict. For a moment it lay wide open to her, a universe of data waiting to be pored over -

And then it was gone.

She gasped as the connection was suddenly, deliberately cut.

‹Dakota!› It was Corso, speaking from inside the Piri Reis. ‹I went ahead and activated the systems crash myself once you were in the chair. What happened up there? Why didn’t you respond? I thought I’d lost you.›

I’m not sure. I… I just blacked out for a second, or something. The Shoal-member was talking to me from inside the stacks. The crew are all dead.

‹What? Hang on a second while I… oh shit.› Clearly he’d accessed the bridge video feed recorded a few moments before crashing the onboard systems. ‹What happened in there?›

Nothing to do with me, I assure you.

‹I-shit, have you made the uplink yet?›

No. But I will now.

‹Listen, it’s not about to get any better. There’s a shuttle up from Theona, way ahead of schedule. It should be docking about now.›

They’ve probably come looking for the crew. I don’t even know how long they’ve been dead.

‹Then you’re going to have to get the hell back here before they find you.›

There. Barely a thought and the derelict was now linked directly into the Piri Reis, without first passing through the Hyperion. In data terms it was like turning a tap and getting a trickle compared to the ocean of data she’d just tasted for one mesmerizing moment. It was a bare snatch of what she’d experienced while on board the derelict itself.

Even so, she reached out with her senses, and felt the control data from the interface chair aboard the derelict smoothly mesh with her Ghost. It felt like gaining a new set of limbs-but limbs that felt numb and weak and sluggish in their response.

But she still had control of the derelict.

It’s done, Lucas. The uplink is in place.

Except, against all her expectations, nothing felt different. Instead of feeling victorious, Dakota felt mildly disappointed.

The chair’s petals unfolded from around her. The image of Trader had gone. Overhead displays and status lights around the bridge had fallen into grey, unresponsive dullness. Pale red emergency lighting lent an awful, surreal quality to the horror and carnage that surrounded her.

‹All right. Looks like we’ve got more problems,› Corso informed her. ‹The Hyperion is recovering far faster than I’d have expected.›

Are you serious?

At that moment, she sensed the Hyperion’s few still-active systems disappearing out of reach of her Ghost.

‹Never been more serious. There’s what looks like a list of potential trajectories and orbits being run through the stacks right now. There’s something big in there sucking up most of the processing power, which I guess proves what you were telling me about the Shoal AI.›

She gripped the arms of the interface chair in shock.

Well, it’s nice to know you believed me in the first place.

‹Fine, I apologize. The question now is, how much control do you actually have over the derelict?›

I can’t be sure, Dakota replied. It feels… different.

‹You don’t say›

Shut up, Lucas. I can…

Dakota closed her eyes and concentrated on the uplink: a long and fragile chain of communication.

The derelict became like an immense presence, brooding and dark, like a haunted house waiting to be explored. Immense energies flowed through it, yet it responded only sluggishly to her mental queries.

If I didn’t know better, she told Corso, I’d say something was deliberately trying to block my control of the derelict.

Corso snarled with exasperation. ‹I’m going to pull as much data off the derelict as I can in the meantime, in case we lose the link. Guess we underestimated your friend. The best thing you can do is get back here before whoever’s on that arriving shuttle finds you.›

Corso watched as a tsunami of information poured up and into the Piri’s stacks from deep under the moon’s ice. Yet, rather than celebrating, he felt merely haggard, run down and exhausted. The few hours he’d spent asleep, curled up with Dakota, hadn’t been nearly enough. That, plus nearly getting killed on board the derelict-and that following the torture and beating of Dakota herself-conspired to wipe away his remaining ability to concentrate.

He located the Piri’s autodoc menu and dialled up an amphetamine concoction, hoping it might do the trick for him. Dakota’s little ship could do a hell of a lot on its own, but there were limits to all things. He had to be awake and aware in order to supervise the uplink as long as it lasted.

The Piri pinged him a minute later. He’d earlier programmed it to let him know if it stumbled across anything particularly interesting, or plain coherent, among the data delivered from the derelict. He touched a screen and scanned the information appearing there. Ah.

It had found what appeared at first glance to be a narrative: a myth cycle, perhaps, or maybe a simple record of events. It possessed the grandeur of the former, yet the brief, synopsized facts before him now suggested the latter.

He took a closer look, and what he saw appeared to confirm the Magi had, indeed, originated from a specific section of the Larger Magellanic Cloud.

Come on, come on. He rubbed his hands impatiently through his hair as he waited. There were gaps of inactivity, lasting seconds long, as the Piri jumped from one set of incoming data to another.

Corso could discern that whatever was lurking deep within the Hyperion’s data stacks was recovering a lot faster than he could possibly have anticipated. He meanwhile sat at a console, muttering, as he tried to coax the Hyperion’s emergency support systems into accepting his override commands, in an attempt to prevent or at least stall the alien intelligence inside the stacks…

The Piri spasmed. A screech of static lasting perhaps all of a second burst out through the speakers, and the main screen went black for several moments before reasserting itself.

‘Piri! Status report!’

‘All systems operational,’ came the verbalized reply.

‘What just happened? Everything went crazy for a second.’

‘All systems operational,’ came the Piri’s reply again. ‘Levels of data being drawn into my stacks are sufficient to cause resource allocation problems. This is forcing periodic outages.’

Sweat prickled Corso’s skin. The Piri’s primary systems were like nothing they had back on Redstone; its inherent skills of machine deduction and analysis were light years ahead of anything Corso had ever worked with before. It was possible the Piri was having problems with the sheer quantity of data available to it, but somehow he found it all too easy to believe Dakota’s invisible intruder was trying to subvert the Piri.

‘Piri! Use the interpretation protocols to grab anything else deemed relevant, download it now, and abort the rest!’

Better safe than sorry, he had decided, and, besides, time was running out before the alien would regain control of the Hyperion and then realize that the termination point for the current flood of data lay in the cargo bay.

‘Cease interface in a maximum of fifteen seconds, no traces. Got that?’

‘Understood,’ came the reply.

Now he just had to wait for Dakota to make it back aboard.

He cast his eye over the fresh data drawn from the derelict and, as he read it, almost forgot how to breathe.

Dakota made to exit the bridge, and found Udo Mansell approaching down the corridor towards her. A long scar cut across his forehead, now pink and smooth from an autodoc’s booster treatments. Patches of skin on his face looked new and shiny.

She gasped in astonishment, taking a step back as he moved in on her.

‘When did you-’

He punched her hard, and she stumbled back in surprise, sprawling across the metal grilles that comprised the deck of the Hyperion’s bridge.

She rolled on all fours and put a hand to her nose in shock. At least, she thought, it wasn’t bleeding.

Udo looked unfocused, clearly still fighting off the side-effects of his medication. She guessed that he’d climbed out of his medbox only in the last few minutes. How stupid, exactly, do you think I am?’ he roared, bunching his fists again. ‘How often do you think you can pull off shit like this and get away with it?’

‘I haven’t-’

Udo stepped forward, then swung his leg back and delivered a tremendous kick to Dakota’s ribs. She bounced off a bulkhead, too little air left in her shocked lungs to scream.

‘Oh, I’m up to date on everything that’s going on around here, and you can thank my dear brother for that. He came and visited me in the medical bay and we talked. How we talked. He told me of all your deceptions, even your murder of one of your own. Now he’s in the medical bay himself and barely able to stand. So, tell me,’ Udo screamed, ‘where is Corso? Where-the fuck-is-he?’

‘I don’t know, Udo,’ she pleaded. ‘For God’s sake, did Kieran tell you to-’

‘I don’t need my brother to tell me anything, you implant-ridden whore. Where is Corso?’ Udo bellowed, fists clenched at his sides. ‘He doesn’t appear on the monitoring systems, so where the fuck is he?’

Corso stepped back from the console, feeling stiff and sore after spending long minutes rigid with shock.

He rubbed at his eyes, thinking it strange how the woman who owned this ship had started out as his enemy, yet he now felt closer to her-felt more in common with her-than any other human being he’d ever met.

That was when he noticed the figurine for the first time.

Dakota was far from being tidy-natured. Anyone moving through the cramped interior of her ship was continually banging into things: small decorative items pinned to the walls, or bizarrely floating on strands of fine filigree. Other mementoes and objects that might be tiny pieces of artwork had been epoxied, apparently at random, to every surface. Others floated free, waiting to smack the unwary in the head when least expected.

He instantly recognized the figurine as of Uchidan origin, and suddenly recalled Dakota telling him how she had received it on her first encounter with the Shoal-member on Bourdain’s Rock. It was clearly modelled on the famous statue of Belle Trevois.

Belle Trevois herself had been a thirteen-year-old girl born to a family on Leverrier II during the Diaspora Conflict, more than a century before. Her parents, previously devout members of Moscba Org, lost everything they possessed during the siege on the Hubbard Spaceport, and then converted to the Uchidan faith, which required accepting the Light Of Truth implants central to the Uchidan belief system.

That could hardly have been an easy decision, considering several other Uchidan converts had already been murdered on Leverrier. It was the height of the war, and Uchidans in general were widely suspected of being spies. Yet their conversion could easily have been an entirely pragmatic decision, since the Uchidans had no involvement in the Org’s conflict, and therefore could obtain free passage into orbit.

Unfortunately for Belle, her parents made the stunningly inept decision to permit the Uchidan medician-priests to also place implants inside the skull of their daughter. These implants subsequently took control of Belle’s limbic system, generating the same technologically induced sense of perpetual spiritual ecstasy that her parents had already embraced. Word got out, and what had been merely sporadic violence against the Uchidans on Leverrier II escalated exponentially over the following weeks, fuelled by moral outrage.

Up to that point, Belle and her family had been taking refuge in an Uchidan temple in the heart of Leverrier’s capital city, Ville d’Aiguille. Consortium-mediated negotiations failed to resolve the political situation and wide-scale rioting broke out. As things turned rapidly ugly, rioters broke into the temple and murdered everyone they found, including Belle and her parents, a few hours before they’d been due to finally be lifted into orbit aboard neutral tugs.

Overall, it had been an ugly, nasty business and, in the following decades, Uchidans everywhere had raised Belle Trevois to the status of a martyr, a symbol of their repression. Statues of her, with arms flung outwards, could be found in most Uchidan temples throughout the Consortium, or at least in those still allowed to exist. Even Corso, a loyal Freeholder, had to admit that the crimes committed against the Uchidans were far worse than those they were accused of.

And here she was again, on Dakota’s ship of all places. Belle Trevois, in the form of a simple religious icon…

He stared at the figurine. Something wasn’t right.

‘Piri,’ Corso asked aloud, ‘where did Dakota acquire this?’

‘On Bourdain’s Rock.’

‘Remind me how.’

‘It was given to her by one of the Shoal race.’

Corso exhaled long and slow. ‘Was that interaction recorded in any way? Sight and sound, visuals, anything like that?’

‘Yes,’ the ship replied with typical machine-like pedantry.

‘Can I see those records?’

‘No. Dakota’s direct permission is required.’

Scratch that then. But so far the ship had supported what Dakota had told him.

Let me think. Let me think… Belle was an involuntary martyr, because she hadn’t chosen her faith. Instead, it had been imposed on her, like a kind of mental rape.

‘Port Gabriel,’ said Corso. ‘Dakota was at Port Gabriel, correct?’

‘Yes.’

‘There was a massacre.’

‘Correct.’

Feeling fairly hopeless, Corso tried acting on a hunch. ‘Piri, is there anything at all in that incident pertaining to Belle Trevois?’

‘A Uchidan military transport named the Belle Trevois crashed there during the first war with the Freehold, but some years prior to the incident in question.’

Corso nodded, finally recalling old, half-forgotten history lessons. The Uchidans had long ago placed a small statue of Belle on the exact same spot where their transport had crashed. The statue still stood, even now, having become famous after the massacres. For years afterwards it kept cropping up again and again in news reports and articles about the Port Gabriel incident.

‘How about records of when Dakota placed that figurine on the imaging plate in the bridge?’

‘Those records have been deleted.’

He hadn’t expected that. ‘Deleted by whom?’

‘By Dakota.’

‘Don’t you think it’s strange that an alien would give a statue of Belle Trevois, of all people, to a woman whose implants had been forcibly compromised by Uchidan ideology? Why would it do that?’

‘This question is not understood.’

Corso had forgotten he wasn’t talking to a true intelligence, just to a machine. He carried on thinking aloud regardless. ‘None of this would be remarkable except for her telling me she didn’t know what the figurine represented or where it came from. But how could she not know?’

If there was any one image most commonly associated with the Port Gabriel disaster, it was that statue.

‘Piri, is there any way to insert a contact virus into inert matter, something that could get inside a machine-head’s Ghost circuits the same way information can be read through an imager plate?’

‘There are research papers on record concerning such speculative technology. However, all attempts at identifying a reliable delivery method, without the use of imaging technology, have proved extremely inconclusive.’

Corso couldn’t rid his head of the idea that something had got inside Dakota the same way it had wormed its way inside the Hyperion. This felt like an unusually fragile chain of logic, yet it appealed precisely because it made perfect sense of Dakota’s more unusual behaviour.

Corso pulled the pressure suit back on and headed towards the bridge as fast as he could.

Even so, as he hurried, he misjudged angles in the zero gee environment, nearly knocking himself out at one point when he cannoned off a bulkhead after launching himself hard down a drop shaft. He’d been locked away in sleepless research in his quarters so long he’d never properly learned how to navigate the gravity-free areas of the Hyperion.

Crashing against a wall at the far end of yet another drop shaft, he kicked his way into a connecting corridor, then, finally, felt a familiar tug deep in his bones as he pulled himself up into the gravity wheel.

He heard people yelling as he approached the bridge, and tried to put out of his mind the terrible secret he’d gained from the derelict.

The sight that confronted him upon his arrival there was so ghastly, so morbid, it belonged in the realm of the surreal. Half a dozen bodies lay scattered in various states of contortion, the expressions on their faces making it clear their deaths had been far from peaceful.

In the middle of it all stood Udo, panting hard, one fist gripping the lapel of Dakota’s jerkin while she slumped beside him.

It looked like the man could barely stand. After a moment he turned and saw Corso, staring hard at him for long seconds before raising his other hand and pointing towards him.

‘You. You’re next.’ Udo’s extended hand wobbled, his index finger drawing patterns in the air.

‘Let go of her,’ yelled Corso. ‘She’s the one shot we have left at recovering the derelict. Arbenz will kill you if you harm her.’

‘Fucking machine-head bitch!’ Udo snarled, his lips curling in anger.

As he turned his attention back to Dakota, his fingers clenched into a fist. Dakota appeared to be awake, but no longer aware of her surroundings. Her blank gaze, surveying the bridge and Corso, was clearly seeing nothing.

Corso ran forward and tried to pull the girl away from Udo. The other man slammed him to the ground with ease, but in the process he’d let go of her.

As Corso pulled himself up, he saw Dakota looking straight towards him with that same calm, unfocused expression. Whatever she was seeing now, it was somewhere a long way from the bridge of the Hyperion. It was the same look she’d given him that time near the airlocks.

‘We don’t need her at all,’ Udo slurred. ‘She’s better off dead.’

Dakota suddenly came to life. Moving with inhuman fluidity and speed, she leapt up and spun around to face towards Udo, who barely had time to open his mouth in dazed surprise. Yet her face remained blank, empty of emotion.

Udo’s knife appeared in his hand as if from nowhere and he swung it towards her, but Dakota slithered out of reach so fast he might as well have been a motionless statue.

Corso stared, appalled, as she leapt on Udo’s back, gripping his neck between her thighs and wrapping her arms tightly around his head. She twisted around on his shoulders with brutal efficiency in that same moment, and Corso heard a sickening snap.

Udo hadn’t even had time to reach up towards her. Even in the lower-than-normal artificial gravity of the bridge, the skill and speed with which she had moved was startling.

Udo jerked violently and his knife fell to the floor. Dakota landed with delicate grace behind him as he collapsed to the deck, his head lolling at a strange angle as his body slumped lifelessly.

She focused on Corso with bright cold eyes, giving him the unpleasant realization that whatever was now looking at him through her eyes had decided to kill him next.

Suddenly her attention snapped away from Corso, to a point immediately behind him. She darted forward and he stumbled out of her path, turning just in time to see Gardner appear at the entrance to the bridge. Dakota slammed into the man and they both went down in a mess of tangled limbs.

Corso looked around desperately for anything he could use as a weapon. He spotted a box of stack components left lying next to a partially disembowelled control console, and headed unsteadily towards it. The components within appeared to be individually encased in solid steel, and felt good and hefty in his hands when he lifted one of them out.

Gardner was desperately fighting to push Dakota away from him, filling the air with his terrified screeching. When Corso went over and grabbed the edge of her jerkin, she suddenly peeled away from Gardner and leapt towards him instead. There was absolutely no sign that she recognized him at all.

Corso landed hard, felled by a punch he hadn’t even seen coming. Her long fingers-those same fingers that had recently slid along the curve of his back in a lover’s embrace-reached down to grab him hard by the testicles.

Corso choked and then screamed, lashing out with the reinforced component. By luck as much as by intention, it connected heavily with the side of her head. A clicking noise emerged from deep within Dakota’s throat, and she floated free.

But she appeared to recover almost immediately, heading straight towards him again, her breath hissing harshly between bared teeth.

Corso waited until the last second, then decided any attempts at a gentle approach would probably end up getting him killed. He flung the stack component and it connected with her head a second time. She was knocked entirely unconscious and crumpled on the deck.

‘Oh God.’ Gardner was literally shaking with fear as he stood up. ‘I thought… I thought she was going to kill me.’

‘She was certainly aiming to,’ Corso snapped. ‘I need to…’

Need to do what, he wondered: take her to the med bay? No, Arbenz would surely have come up on the shuttle, bringing enforcements of some kind with him -assuming others weren’t already on their way from the Agartha.

The Piri Reis was still the best bet he had. But even if he did manage to haul her back to her ship without being intercepted, what would happen when she finally woke? Would he be dealing with Dakota again, or something far more malevolent?

‘Where are you going?’ Gardner demanded, as Corso began dragging her out of the bridge.

‘If Kieran Mansell or any of the rest of them get their hands on her, Mr Gardner, you can kiss your transluminal drive goodbye.’

‘Stop, damn you. Stop!’ Gardner’s face was like thunder. ‘Stop or I’ll-’

Despite the pain lancing through him, Corso laughed as he watched Gardner’s fists twisting at his sides in impotent rage. But Corso had long pegged him for a physical coward.

‘There’s nowhere for you to go,’ Gardner almost pleaded, his voice breaking up. ‘There are worse things than death, Mr Corso. They’re your own people-you should already know that.’

‘The two of us were already dead the moment either of us set foot on the Hyperion,’ Corso replied. ‘And you know it, so shut the hell up.’ He finally managed to wrestle Dakota out into the corridor adjacent to the bridge. ‘And you’re just as expendable to them, Mr Gardner. Perhaps you should know that too.’