‘Fine.’ Arbenz nodded. ‘Meanwhile we’ll return to the surface. Kieran, I want you to stay here with Corso and keep an eye on things. Anything unusual happens-anything you suspect might be life-threatening-I want you to evacuate immediately. There’s no sense in taking unnecessary risks if you don’t have to.

‘As for you,’ he said, turning finally to Dakota, ‘you’re going back on board the Hyperion until we need you again. Don’t try anything that would make us unhappy, as you’d only get hurt.’

She couldn’t keep the quaver out of her voice. ‘You can’t kill me, Senator. You need me too much.’

‘That’s true,’ Arbenz replied with a mirthless smile. ‘But we can make things bad enough that you’d wish we had.’

Nineteen

Dakota sat still as a statue aboard the submersible as it rose back up through the frozen inky depths. She felt numb, withdrawn, while Gardner and Arbenz chatted quietly together in their seats. She now sat alone, to the rear of them, ignored and happy to be ignored.

What if she was wrong, she wondered? What if, despite their barbaric, murderous ways, the Freehold could actually pull this off?

People had long dreamed of finding some way to steal the transluminal technology from the Shoal or, better yet, develop their own. It was almost a childhood dream, a power fantasy brought suddenly screaming into real life.

Yet the only certainty Dakota could see was the one Arbenz was avoiding the most: that eventually the Shoal would become aware the Freehold had found a derelict starship, and that they would retaliate.

The sub thudded into place in the main base, and Dakota soon found herself back on the other side of the airlock.

An automated supply shuttle took her back to the Hyperion, accompanied by two troopers who looked like habitual steroid abusers.

To her dismay she found a new skeleton crew of half a dozen had been installed on board the Hyperion, running their own systems checks with an alacrity that alarmed her. The Piri Reis reassured her via remote link, however, that none of her hidden alterations within the memory stacks was likely to be uncovered or detected.

She wished she could have shared the machine’s confidence.

To her surprise, the troopers abandoned her to her own devices once they boarded the Hyperion, rather than confining her to her quarters as she’d expected. At first she wondered if this represented some unexpected level of trust, until it occurred to her that both the Hyperion and the moon base were now little more than unusually roomy prisons.

She found her way, undisturbed and unchallenged, back to the cargo bay and the comforting embrace of the Piri Reis. No matter where she went, Dakota knew, this would always be her home, the one constant in her life, unchanging and ready to yield to her every demand.

She let the Piri’s effigy-form stroke her hair as she lay with her head in its lap.

It didn’t take long for the tears to come.

For a while, she might even have slept.

She dreamed of escape from a building where every exit was blocked. Something was chasing her.

A monster came roaring out of the darkness and killed her. But not before she hurt it, badly. She woke and lay in the darkness for a long time, staring out at nothing, full of a sudden determination.

It’s not over, Senator. Not by a long shot.

When she was finally ready, she opened her Ghost to an ocean of information.

Establish a data link with the machine-head interface aboard the derelict, she ordered Piri Beta. Route and encrypt via Piri Alpha. [Piri Alpha: encrypt and wipe data path post-encryption. No trace.]

‹Dakota, I have placed a block on Piri Beta as of this moment. I believe it has become corrupted and may infect this ship’s systems if a full data exchange is allowed.›

But who-

‹Miss Merrick,› Piri Beta replied. ‹Delightful harmoniousness in multiple greetings. Trumpeting of delight at reacquaintance after many adventures.›

Dakota came to full alertness, adrenalin surging through her.

I knew you were in there, you fucking fish. It’s you, isn’t it? The one that gave me that damn figurine. I knew it. How did you do it? How the fuck did you get in here?

For the first time in her life, even the enclosing walls of the Piri Reis felt like a prison.

‹It was the simplest challenge: to integrate my ethereal self within the confines of a bauble, a trinket gifted by this one to your most estimable self, in preparation and expectation of this journey of journeys, this laudable search for that which must not be discovered, the purest of fires, the most essential of knowledge, most precious, oh yes, to us, your silver-finned friends.

‹Thence, from the confines of said bauble within which a representational mirror of my soul was encoded, complete with the finest qualities particular to this individual, it was a simple matter of transference once more to the far greater realms of this ocean of thought and steel, the Hyperion, within which I now reside and-investigate and study in order that the balance of all things may be maintained.›

Dakota absorbed this information in a state of shock. She realized whatever it was that was speaking to her had almost certainly been transferred into the Hyperion’s systems when she’d placed the statuette on the imaging plate.

She’d been right in thinking there was a spy on board the Hyperion. She’d carried it on board herself, without ever being aware.

But that didn’t explain the niggling sense of significance she felt every time she thought about the figurine. It didn’t explain what was so damned familiar about it.

Piri Alpha, how safe are we from that thing?

‹My systems are far more secure than those of the Hyperion,› her ship replied.

It was only her imagination that imbued those words with a sniffy tone.

‹It is attempting to trace a physical location for the Piri Reis,› it continued. ‹However, we remain effectively invisible to outside forces bar direct visual observation by any crew.›

Dakota thought hard for several seconds, her mind working overtime.

‘I thought artificial intelligence wasn’t possible,’ Dakota said out loud, choosing her words with precision. She needed to get as much information as possible out of whatever was residing within the Hyperion’s stacks. If it had wormed its way in deep enough, it might be able to override the life-support systems and send her, the ship’s atmosphere, and everyone else flying out into space. It could fill every room, shaft and corridor with deadly radiation… there was no knowing what it could do, or what it had already been doing all these long weeks. ‘At least, that’s what your lot always claimed. I thought Ghost technology was the only…’