Corso unravelled himself from her, clearly thinking hard. ‘You know, I wasn’t entirely being honest when I said we couldn’t pilot the derelict just yet.’

Now he had her full attention.

‘Do you mean…?’

‘I lied, yes.’

‘Because?’

‘Because I wanted to make things as hard for the Senator as possible. Maybe you can understand that. But you could hypothetically control the derelict from the Hyperion’s bridge. I mean, you could link the Hyperion’s interface chair to the one on board the derelict.’

‘But that chair was torn apart by the derelict, the same time it attacked you. I saw the recordings.’

‘That’s one reason I said “hypothetically”. And, for what it’s worth, every time a team has gone back on board the derelict following previous attacks, they found that any pieces of equipment left behind were still completely intact. The Hyperion doesn’t appear to recognize inanimate objects like interface chairs as hostile, possibly because they’re inorganic. Technically, you could set up a direct chair-to-chair link from the bridge and control the derelict that way.’

‘So what are you saying?’ she asked him excitedly. ‘We could just… fly it out from under Arbenz’s nose?’

He frowned. ‘Whether it’s practical or possible is another matter. And even if we could somehow pull it off, there are other things we’d have to think about, such as what to do with the derelict if we got away with it? And that’s not even taking into account the fact we’d still need to get ourselves on board the derelict in order to make an escape. And we already know that it can be lethally dangerous, even at the best of times.’

Dakota’s eyes gleamed with the possibilities. ‘I don’t have to be inside the bridge interface chair to control the Hyperion, you know.’

Corso looked confused. ‘You don’t?’

‘Look, there are good reasons for using interface chairs. If anyone with the appropriate implants is able to control a ship without resorting to its interface chair, then you’re faced with the risk of an enemy machine -head slipping on board and taking it over instantly. So the chairs are there as a kind of security measure, to prevent that happening. But that’s not to say one can’t be bypassed. However, the only one who has the necessary stack permissions to do that is a ship’s designated pilot.’

‘Which is you.’

‘Which is me.’

‘And that way you can control the Hyperion without actually being anywhere near the bridge?’

‘More than that. If I can run the Hyperion from elsewhere, it means that once I have a ship-to-ship link set up from the bridge, I might be able to run the derelict remotely as well.’

Corso laughed and shook his head in wonder.

‘Things have come a long way since the Hyperion was built,’ she explained. ‘The interface chairs we have now are a lot newer and more advanced than anything else originally existing on the bridge. We can take advantage of that fact.’

‘OK,’ he said, thinking ahead. ‘That still doesn’t get us on board the derelict without risking another attack from it, though.’

She’d already managed to think of this problem in a sudden blaze of creativity. ‘The Piri is tiny next to the derelict. Why not secure the Piri to the derelict’s hull before we use it to make a transluminal jump? There are buckytube cables on board for securing it to small asteroids, or to the surface of larger ones. No reason I couldn’t do the same, in this case.’

‘But that’s not all we’d have to do,’ he argued. ‘Even if you manage all this, and create an uplink with the derelict, it doesn’t matter how stealthed the Piri Reis is, because everyone on the Agartha, on the Hyperion and on Theona will soon know what you’re doing. And that doesn’t even take into account how the alien hiding in the Hyperion’s stacks would react. Or the fact you’ll still have to be physically on the bridge and in the chair before you can create the uplink in the first place, and that means somehow getting past the crew.’

Corso had momentarily forgotten the incongruity of the situation: the two of them discussing life and death matters while floating naked together in a fur-lined spaceship. Dakota took his face in her hands, an almost feral expression of glee on her own.

‘You’re altogether too much of a defeatist. If we induce a general systems failure in the Hyperion’s stacks, same as the one I had to deal with just after I got on board, every sensor, every security system and every piece of recording equipment on the Hyperion is going to have a brainstorm. The Shoal-member would be deaf, dumb and blind for at least a couple of minutes, while the stacks were down. That would give us just enough time to create a cloaked uplink before the Hyperion’s systems have time to reboot.’

‘You’re still taking a hell of a risk,’ Corso argued, trying to sound calm and reasonable but in fact clearly more stressed with each passing second. ‘You still haven’t told me how you’ll get past the crew.’

‘There’s no reason they wouldn’t assume I was just doing my job if I got in that chair.’

She sat back and studied Corso’s glum expression. He wasn’t happy-but she knew she’d won this one.

Dakota could feel the Shoal-member’s presence as she found her way back into the main body of the Hyperion, navigating a central drop shaft running the entire length of the ship’s spine on her way to the bridge.

‘You,’ she said quietly to the empty air, ‘have got something to hide.’

‘Blunt accusations, much foaming of water,’ the reply boomed through hidden speakers in the walls of the shaft. ‘To accuse is to diminish within eye of beholder fish.’

She grabbed hold of a rung and made a right-angle turn, letting herself drop at a steady, graceful pace down another shaft until she snagged a convenient handhold with one foot.

She wondered if the crew could hear the alien speaking to her over the comms system, and why he would therefore choose to announce his presence in this way. If they could hear him, they’d probably be panicking by now, which meant she’d find it that much harder to slip by them. She began to really wish she’d kept her mouth shut.

‘You know, I think you’re trying too hard. Care to answer a riddle?’ she asked, adrenalin pumping through her head. She felt like she could climb outside the hull and run sprint marathons around its circumference. But she was terrified beyond words.

‘Riddles, yes? A conundrum to while away eternity’s hours,’ came the answer.

‘Two riddles, really. Here’s the first one. There’s been very little real contact with individual members of the Shoal since we first encountered your species-probably no more than a couple of dozen times in all. Everything pivotal that’s ever happened in the history of the Consortium, there’s been one of your kind present, almost as if you’re somehow making things happen.’