The Piri pinged him a minute later. He’d earlier programmed it to let him know if it stumbled across anything particularly interesting, or plain coherent, among the data delivered from the derelict. He touched a screen and scanned the information appearing there. Ah.

It had found what appeared at first glance to be a narrative: a myth cycle, perhaps, or maybe a simple record of events. It possessed the grandeur of the former, yet the brief, synopsized facts before him now suggested the latter.

He took a closer look, and what he saw appeared to confirm the Magi had, indeed, originated from a specific section of the Larger Magellanic Cloud.

Come on, come on. He rubbed his hands impatiently through his hair as he waited. There were gaps of inactivity, lasting seconds long, as the Piri jumped from one set of incoming data to another.

Corso could discern that whatever was lurking deep within the Hyperion’s data stacks was recovering a lot faster than he could possibly have anticipated. He meanwhile sat at a console, muttering, as he tried to coax the Hyperion’s emergency support systems into accepting his override commands, in an attempt to prevent or at least stall the alien intelligence inside the stacks…

The Piri spasmed. A screech of static lasting perhaps all of a second burst out through the speakers, and the main screen went black for several moments before reasserting itself.

‘Piri! Status report!’

‘All systems operational,’ came the verbalized reply.

‘What just happened? Everything went crazy for a second.’

‘All systems operational,’ came the Piri’s reply again. ‘Levels of data being drawn into my stacks are sufficient to cause resource allocation problems. This is forcing periodic outages.’

Sweat prickled Corso’s skin. The Piri’s primary systems were like nothing they had back on Redstone; its inherent skills of machine deduction and analysis were light years ahead of anything Corso had ever worked with before. It was possible the Piri was having problems with the sheer quantity of data available to it, but somehow he found it all too easy to believe Dakota’s invisible intruder was trying to subvert the Piri.

‘Piri! Use the interpretation protocols to grab anything else deemed relevant, download it now, and abort the rest!’

Better safe than sorry, he had decided, and, besides, time was running out before the alien would regain control of the Hyperion and then realize that the termination point for the current flood of data lay in the cargo bay.

‘Cease interface in a maximum of fifteen seconds, no traces. Got that?’

‘Understood,’ came the reply.

Now he just had to wait for Dakota to make it back aboard.

He cast his eye over the fresh data drawn from the derelict and, as he read it, almost forgot how to breathe.

Dakota made to exit the bridge, and found Udo Mansell approaching down the corridor towards her. A long scar cut across his forehead, now pink and smooth from an autodoc’s booster treatments. Patches of skin on his face looked new and shiny.

She gasped in astonishment, taking a step back as he moved in on her.

‘When did you-’

He punched her hard, and she stumbled back in surprise, sprawling across the metal grilles that comprised the deck of the Hyperion’s bridge.

She rolled on all fours and put a hand to her nose in shock. At least, she thought, it wasn’t bleeding.

Udo looked unfocused, clearly still fighting off the side-effects of his medication. She guessed that he’d climbed out of his medbox only in the last few minutes. How stupid, exactly, do you think I am?’ he roared, bunching his fists again. ‘How often do you think you can pull off shit like this and get away with it?’

‘I haven’t-’

Udo stepped forward, then swung his leg back and delivered a tremendous kick to Dakota’s ribs. She bounced off a bulkhead, too little air left in her shocked lungs to scream.

‘Oh, I’m up to date on everything that’s going on around here, and you can thank my dear brother for that. He came and visited me in the medical bay and we talked. How we talked. He told me of all your deceptions, even your murder of one of your own. Now he’s in the medical bay himself and barely able to stand. So, tell me,’ Udo screamed, ‘where is Corso? Where-the fuck-is-he?’

‘I don’t know, Udo,’ she pleaded. ‘For God’s sake, did Kieran tell you to-’

‘I don’t need my brother to tell me anything, you implant-ridden whore. Where is Corso?’ Udo bellowed, fists clenched at his sides. ‘He doesn’t appear on the monitoring systems, so where the fuck is he?’

Corso stepped back from the console, feeling stiff and sore after spending long minutes rigid with shock.

He rubbed at his eyes, thinking it strange how the woman who owned this ship had started out as his enemy, yet he now felt closer to her-felt more in common with her-than any other human being he’d ever met.

That was when he noticed the figurine for the first time.

Dakota was far from being tidy-natured. Anyone moving through the cramped interior of her ship was continually banging into things: small decorative items pinned to the walls, or bizarrely floating on strands of fine filigree. Other mementoes and objects that might be tiny pieces of artwork had been epoxied, apparently at random, to every surface. Others floated free, waiting to smack the unwary in the head when least expected.

He instantly recognized the figurine as of Uchidan origin, and suddenly recalled Dakota telling him how she had received it on her first encounter with the Shoal-member on Bourdain’s Rock. It was clearly modelled on the famous statue of Belle Trevois.

Belle Trevois herself had been a thirteen-year-old girl born to a family on Leverrier II during the Diaspora Conflict, more than a century before. Her parents, previously devout members of Moscba Org, lost everything they possessed during the siege on the Hubbard Spaceport, and then converted to the Uchidan faith, which required accepting the Light Of Truth implants central to the Uchidan belief system.

That could hardly have been an easy decision, considering several other Uchidan converts had already been murdered on Leverrier. It was the height of the war, and Uchidans in general were widely suspected of being spies. Yet their conversion could easily have been an entirely pragmatic decision, since the Uchidans had no involvement in the Org’s conflict, and therefore could obtain free passage into orbit.