‘How old?’

‘I’d say about a hundred and sixty thousand years.’

‘A hundred and sixty thousand years,’ she repeated. ‘And we know why that’s significant, right?’

‘Why don’t you tell me?’ Corso pressed her in a low whisper, a peculiar look on his face.

It was too much information, too quickly. She needed to curl up in the warm dark of the Piri Reis and think about everything she’d seen and experienced.

‘Forget it,’ she replied with a sigh. ‘I just thought of the Magellanic Novae for some reason.’ That memory of peering through Langley’s telescope, even after so many years and with Bellhaven so far away, was as strong as if it had happened only the day before.

Corso still had that same intense look on his face. It made her uncomfortable.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘the derelict dates from about the same period. But that’s no reason to assume they’re connected with something else that happened in another galaxy.’ She wondered why he was staring at her so hard. ‘Unless you’ve got other ideas?’ he added.

‘You’re looking at me like I just tried to bite your nose off.’

Corso made an exasperated noise and lowered his voice, so he was barely audible over the sound of the submersible’s engines. ‘Mala, I saw you on the bridge of the Hyperion, studying a map of the Magellanic Clouds. You’d drawn lines of trajectory connecting them to this part of the Orion Arm. To as near as damn it to this system, in fact, as makes no difference. Why do that? Do you have some special interest in the novae?’

‘I don’t remember doing anything of the kind. Frankly, I’d say you’ve been working too hard. You’re starting to imagine things.’

He held her gaze for a few seconds more, tight-lipped and angry-looking. Dakota was completely baffled.

‘This isn’t over,’ he said.

‘I. Don’t. Know. What. You’re talking about,’ she hissed.

‘Fine.’ He waved his hand dismissively. ‘Forget it.’ He settled back in his seat and closed his eyes for a few moments, taking a deep breath. When he opened them again, he seemed a little calmer.

‘Look,’ he continued, ‘before we get to the derelict, a word of warning. There’s some kind of defence systems running on board, and so far we haven’t tried to bring it to the surface in case it activates suicide circuits. It uses artificial gravity fields to mash up anyone or anything it considers a threat, though we’ve managed to get a fair bit of a way inside it, regardless.’

‘I appreciate the warning, but I still want to know what’s going to happen to me when we get on board that thing, before I risk my fucking life.’

‘I guarantee nothing is going to happen to you, Mala,’ Corso replied.

The lie was startlingly clear on his face.

Something broke inside Dakota. ‘Take me back up,’ she demanded, lifting herself out of her seat and making a move towards the control console. ‘Whatever you’re up to here, I didn’t sign on for any of it.’

Arbenz quickly nodded to Kieran. Mansell stood up, punching her hard in the face. She caught a passing glimpse of Corso’s pale, shocked features as she crumpled. The next thing she knew she was on her knees, and Kieran had one of her arms twisted painfully behind her back while she was forced forward until her face was almost pressed into the deck.

Something acid and foul twisted deep in her stomach and she resisted the urge to vomit. Kieran put just the tiniest bit of extra pressure on her arm, but it was enough to make it feel like he was trying to wrench it off at the shoulder. She screamed.

Gardner looked down at her from where he sat, twisting around in his own seat, a mixture of pity and revulsion on his face.

‘All this time, Miss Merrick, and you thought we wouldn’t find out what you were up to. Did you really think we wouldn’t notice how badly you wanted to get out of the Sol System, just a day or two after the collapse of Bourdain’s Rock? Or that we wouldn’t figure out that the assassin who tried to kill you, and nearly killed one of the Senator’s own men, worked for Bourdain?’

Eyes wide, Dakota stared down at the submersible’s deck, millimetres from her nose. Her breathing was sharp and shallow.

‘It wasn’t hard to figure out the connections once I knew where to look,’ Gardner continued. ‘Marados was part of the conflict at Port Gabriel. So was Severn. That made it easy to draw conclusions about your own past.

‘I believe you killed Josef Marados and then used your remarkable skills to cover your tracks,’ Gardner continued. ‘That way you removed one more inconvenient link between yourself and your past. You removed details of Marados’s death from the stack processors to make sure we didn’t become suspicious. But I have my own lines of enquiry, outside of the official channels.’

‘We know you were there at Port Gabriel, Dakota,’ said Kieran, his voice filled with rage. ‘In the eyes of the Freehold you are a foul and bloody murderer-less than vermin.’

‘That’s not true, and you know it. I didn’t kill Josef or anyone else,’ Dakota managed to gasp. ‘I don’t know who killed him. I…’

She heard Arbenz mutter something indistinguishable. A moment later her forehead slammed off the deck. The world went white for a few moments, and then the pain hit.

‘Careful, we want her conscious,’ she heard Arbenz say through a haze of agony. ‘Dakota?’ His voice sounded closer now, and she guessed he was kneeling beside her. ‘We’re very nearly there. Can you hear me?’

Dakota moaned, then nodded, tasting bile in the back of her throat. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Gardner and the two men who’d joined them from the surface complex. Gardner stared away from her, his expression stiff and mask-like. The two Freeholder scientists eyed her with curiosity and mild revulsion.

‘OK, now here’s the deal. Unfortunately, we still need you and, as much as Kieran would really love otherwise, politics and war often mean compromise. Once you understand exactly what’s going on here -and Mr Corso will fill you in on the details-you might even find you’re on our side.’

Somehow I really, really don’t think so. But she said nothing.

‘We brought you here for a purpose, and you will fulfil that purpose. And just in case you think there’s any chance you can remain defiant, well, Kieran will be constantly available to make sure you understand just how bad an idea that might be.’

Something sharp dug into her lower spine and Dakota screamed. It was the worst pain in the world, an entire universe of suffering compressed into a few brief seconds. She heard herself, as if from a distance, begging for mercy. A part of her she had thought could never be breached shrivelled under that unendurable agony.