She realized Josef was saying something to her.

‘… all the security and guidance systems remain in lockdown until you’re ready to take the helm. The passengers themselves will be telling you where to go, but you-Mala Oorthaus, that is-will still have the usual legal right of override. So if they order you to dive into the atmosphere of a star, you can stick them in the brig and still get paid. That kind of thing.’

‘But dumping them into space as soon as we get there and lighting off on my own isn’t approved behaviour, either?’

Josef grinned, but Dakota was pleased to see an edge of nervousness there too.

‘Everything I need is right here.’ She indicated a small bag by her foot.

Josef shrugged gamely as they arrived at the mass transit elevators leading down to the docks. ‘Guess this is it, Dakota,’ he said, coming to a halt. ‘Anything else you need to know?’

Dakota stretched languorously, tired after her long bout of reprogramming the Piri Reis, and enjoyed the way Josef’s eyes took in the shape of her under her clothes.

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘What are the chances of them figuring out who I really am?’

Josef smiled reassuringly. ‘Your identity is secure, I can assure you.’

She shook her head. ‘I’m glad you’ve helped me, when I really don’t think you needed to’-Josef started to speak, but she put up a hand to shush him-‘but the Freehold hiring a machine-head for any reason at all kind of stretches credulity, doesn’t it?’

‘What’s your point?’

‘I’m saying perhaps they’re holding something back, something they’re not mentioning. I’ve seen these people in action, Josef. They’d rather go down in flames than face the dishonour of using someone like me as an ally, even as a paid ally.’

‘Look, all I know is that careful enquiries were being made about machine-head pilots, starting maybe a few weeks ago. Not through official channels, obviously. Then you came along looking for a way out, and it just seemed’-he shrugged heavily-‘fortuitous, I guess. Outside of Gardner and the people on board that ship, nobody but me knows about you. That’s all that matters.’

‘Thank you.’

She glanced at him and saw a tiny pinprick of light appear, somewhere above his left shoulder, just on the edge of her perception.

Piri, run a scan on my implants. I’m getting some very minor visual distortions showing up-like a spark of light.

‹Your Ghost systems are running at optimal, Dakota, but I will be vigilant.›

Thank you.

She had the overwhelming sensation there was some kind of unfinished business she still had to take care of, but she couldn’t quite remember what it was.

A little while later, just as she was about to board the shuttle that would take her to the Hyperion, it came to her.

Things didn’t look much better inside the Hyperion than they had from the outside.

The frigate was a dart-shaped missile more than a thousand metres in length that flared out to the aft, where a fusion propulsion system powerful enough to push it across a solar system in no more than a few days of heavy acceleration was located. A heavily armoured gravity ring, where the command bridge was located, slowly revolved towards the ship’s fore. Yet there were museum pieces docked in some of the Consortium’s grandest orbital cities at Tau Ceti that looked in better shape than the Hyperion did.

Every few minutes a fresh cascade of systems-failure notifications came crashing down into Dakota’s thoughts like an all-consuming tidal wave of information, before being near-instantaneously tidied away by her Ghost, and becoming once again reduced to little more than a vaguely distracting background hum tinged with the machine equivalent of hysteria. It was easy to picture the Hyperion as a wounded dog howling its distress through a broad-spectrum network.

‘Quarters,’ Dakota-who was now Mala-muttered out loud, hanging on to a rung at the junction of two of the Hyperion’s access corridors, one of which plummeted away into what would have been terrifying depths if there had been any gravity present in this part of the ship. There was a barely perceptible-and therefore worrying-pause before glittering icons appeared in Dakota’s vision, leading the way.

If the ship had been up to date, finding her way around it would have been second nature: with the information already uploaded into her back-brain, it would feel as if she had been finding her way around the Hyperion for decades. As it was, too many data systems were either damaged or corrupted through lack of maintenance. Even the icon-projections reminded her just how old this frigate was.

‘Bridge,’ she said next.

In response, the first set of icons vanished, to be replaced by another.

She sighed. This was still better than nothing. She pushed herself forward, floating along a corridor, and watching the icons flicker into a new configuration as she came to a y-junction.

Halfway to the command bridge, her Ghost allowed Dakota to sense the presence of several people up ahead. Her employers.

Initially, Lucas Corso wasn’t sure what to make of the woman as she entered the bridge for the first time. Short dark hair curled around her ears. Her face was small and round, her frame slight and gamine. This is what the Freehold are meant to be scared of?

Perversely, he was nonetheless relieved to see her. He didn’t enjoy spending any more time in the company of Senator Arbenz and his cronies than he absolutely had to, but the request for his presence on the bridge had been unambiguous.

With any luck, this would be over quickly, and then he could return to the safety of his research, as far from the Senator as possible.

He glanced over at a bank of dataflow indicators and was shocked to realize how much information was passing between this initially unremarkable-looking woman and the Hyperion, as if she were a black hole drifting through the digital corona of the frigate’s star, bending and warping computer systems to her will.

‘Miss Oorthaus.’ Gardner guided the machine-head woman towards Senator Arbenz.

All Corso knew about Gardner came from random snatches of overheard conversation, most frequently between Arbenz and Gardner himself, but also from casual jokes and disparaging comments shared between Arbenz and his two bodyguards, the brothers Kieran and Udo Mansell. From this it was clear neither the Senator nor the two brothers had much respect for David Gardner: he was an outsider, not part of the Freehold, a resident of the old, impure world the Freehold were supposed to have left behind and which had resolutely failed to destroy itself in the centuries since. Gardner, then, was a necessary evil, as much as the machine-head woman-a businessman, free of honour and morality, but able to part-finance such an enormous undertaking as a planetary survey.