‘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.