‘You’re going to have to leave your ship behind.’

Dakota’s eyes snapped open, staring at Josef in disbelief. ‘You mean in storage?’

He sighed and sat down next to her. ‘Dakota, right now that ship of yours is like a big glowing arrow pointing at your head saying “dangerous criminal here”. Anyone who wants to find you just needs to look for your ship. Yourself you can disguise, but not the… what’s it called?’

‘The Piri Reis.’

‘Yeah, that. I set tracer systems on the Piri, to keep an eye on it, and it responded by attacking our databases. Where the hell did you get that ship?’

‘It’s a very valuable piece of hardware, Josef, and that’s all you need to know. That, and the fact there’s absolutely no way I’m going to leave it in storage. I can stow it in the cargo hold of whatever ship I’m piloting to this Freehold system.’

‘Uh-uh.’ Josef shook his head. ‘In case I wasn’t sufficiently clear, I mean you have to destroy it, Dak.’

‘Fuck you.’

‘And fuck you too,’ Josef echoed back at her. ‘You’ll leave it here, and it’s going straight to scrap. Stop!’ he yelled, as Dakota pulled herself up, her mouth open to argue. ‘Just think for once in your life. Right now you’re public enemy number one-and I mean that literally. Right now I’m the only bridge you haven’t completely burned, and the Piri Reis is going to lead everyone straight to you. You take that ship along with you, when you’ll be spending probably weeks on board a coreship, that’s plenty of time for Bourdain and the Consortium to set their bloodhounds on your trail. And believe me, every coreship leaving this system for months to come is going to be filled with agents looking for you.’

Dakota stood up and pulled on her coat. ‘I don’t like it,’ she protested weakly.

Josef shrugged and spread his hands. ‘I’m open to alternative suggestions.’

Dakota responded with silence.

Several hours later, when she found herself back on board the Piri Reis, it felt like attending a wake.

She had Piri knock together something warm and alcoholic for her in the kitchenette, something loaded with the kind of neuro-adjusters she normally derived from her implants. As the shaking she had felt build up in her hands edged off, she began to feel better.

Here’s to you, Piri, she toasted.

The possibility that she might have to ditch her ship after the destruction of Bourdain’s Rock had always been there in her mind. But she felt like a hermit forced to leave her cave after a lifetime of solitude-and ever since Port Gabriel, the Piri Reis had been a pretty good substitute for a hermit’s cave.

She curled up against the warm fur inlay that coated the interior of her ship and felt like an agoraphobic who’d just woken to find someone had strapped a parachute to her back and thrown her out of an aircraft.

‘Dakota?’ She heard the effigy calling her name softly. She stood up and walked through into the welcome darkness of her sleeping quarters, and let the effigy slide its warm, flesh-like arms around her. Its fingers pried at her clothes, gently peeling them away before tugging her downwards and planting soft, dry kisses on her belly and breasts.

She stroked the smooth, hairless dome of its head as it pulled itself up and slid her arms around its shoulders, feeling its weight press down on her. All the while she couldn’t help thinking that there had to be a way to get around Josef’s demands.

It was her they were hunting for, not the Piri Reis.

When the solution finally came to her, she had to wonder why it took her so long to think of it.

Nine

Redstone Colony

Consortium Standard Date: 01.06.2538

3 Days to Port Gabriel Incident

An arrhythmic thump beat a tattoo inside Dakota’s head, and she closed her eyes until its migraine-like effect passed. It was still the middle of the night, but the street lighting beyond the window projected dappled stripes through the blinds of her quarters, painting them across the wall opposite.

Chris Severn shifted beside her. ‘What’s up?’ he asked sleepily, shifting naked beside her in the narrow cot. She watched fascinated as the tattoos covering his back twisted like something alive, animated by the shifting of the muscles beneath. Along with a lot of the other machine-heads, they had been put up in a building originally intended to house the maintenance staff for the skyhook. ‘Headache again?’

Dakota nodded, unwilling to speak in case it brought back the pain. It felt like a bad hangover, except she hadn’t been drinking.

It was obvious from the pained look on his face that Severn was suffering in precisely the same way. This worried her, even though that kind of synchronicity between machine-heads wasn’t so unusual: get enough machine-heads together in one room, and it was like being stuck in the middle of an electronic shouting match. Their Ghosts remained in continuous intercommunication, even when they themselves were asleep. This constant sharing of information and data sometimes manifested as shared minor tics or physical reactions amongst machine-heads in close proximity.

But one advantage lay in the fact that whatever one of them learned, pretty much all the rest would know, or could be granted access to. It was the development of technologies such as these that had helped make Bellhaven-and a man like Howard Banville-so very essential to the Consortium.

And if Severn was suffering in the same way as she was, it was reasonable to conjecture that everyone else in the building would be too.

Dakota was about to slide back down alongside his lithe nakedness when she heard voices from somewhere outside. So instead she slid out of the cot and stepped over to the window, whereupon Severn grunted in annoyance and twisted around until he faced the wall, burying his head in a pillow.

From the outside their building was an unremarkable grey concrete block set in a radial street a kilometre or so from the skyhook’s main base. Peering out, she saw two groups of men standing together at the junction with a side street about fifty metres away. Something about their gestures made it clear they were involved in some kind of argument with each other.

‘They’re crazy, you know,’ muttered Severn from somewhere behind her, his voice muffled by the pillow. ‘Totally fucking nuts.’

‘How do you know it’s Freeholders out there?’

‘Who the fuck else is it going to be?’ he mumbled.

Dakota scanned the network of active Ghost circuits throughout the town and noted that the Consortium security services were already aware of the gathering. She’d been initially worried about Uchidan infiltrators, and had immediately glanced round to locate her side-arm, but it looked like this disturbance was something relatively innocuous.