As he turned his attention back to Dakota, his fingers clenched into a fist. Dakota appeared to be awake, but no longer aware of her surroundings. Her blank gaze, surveying the bridge and Corso, was clearly seeing nothing.

Corso ran forward and tried to pull the girl away from Udo. The other man slammed him to the ground with ease, but in the process he’d let go of her.

As Corso pulled himself up, he saw Dakota looking straight towards him with that same calm, unfocused expression. Whatever she was seeing now, it was somewhere a long way from the bridge of the Hyperion. It was the same look she’d given him that time near the airlocks.

‘We don’t need her at all,’ Udo slurred. ‘She’s better off dead.’

Dakota suddenly came to life. Moving with inhuman fluidity and speed, she leapt up and spun around to face towards Udo, who barely had time to open his mouth in dazed surprise. Yet her face remained blank, empty of emotion.

Udo’s knife appeared in his hand as if from nowhere and he swung it towards her, but Dakota slithered out of reach so fast he might as well have been a motionless statue.

Corso stared, appalled, as she leapt on Udo’s back, gripping his neck between her thighs and wrapping her arms tightly around his head. She twisted around on his shoulders with brutal efficiency in that same moment, and Corso heard a sickening snap.

Udo hadn’t even had time to reach up towards her. Even in the lower-than-normal artificial gravity of the bridge, the skill and speed with which she had moved was startling.

Udo jerked violently and his knife fell to the floor. Dakota landed with delicate grace behind him as he collapsed to the deck, his head lolling at a strange angle as his body slumped lifelessly.

She focused on Corso with bright cold eyes, giving him the unpleasant realization that whatever was now looking at him through her eyes had decided to kill him next.

Suddenly her attention snapped away from Corso, to a point immediately behind him. She darted forward and he stumbled out of her path, turning just in time to see Gardner appear at the entrance to the bridge. Dakota slammed into the man and they both went down in a mess of tangled limbs.

Corso looked around desperately for anything he could use as a weapon. He spotted a box of stack components left lying next to a partially disembowelled control console, and headed unsteadily towards it. The components within appeared to be individually encased in solid steel, and felt good and hefty in his hands when he lifted one of them out.

Gardner was desperately fighting to push Dakota away from him, filling the air with his terrified screeching. When Corso went over and grabbed the edge of her jerkin, she suddenly peeled away from Gardner and leapt towards him instead. There was absolutely no sign that she recognized him at all.

Corso landed hard, felled by a punch he hadn’t even seen coming. Her long fingers-those same fingers that had recently slid along the curve of his back in a lover’s embrace-reached down to grab him hard by the testicles.

Corso choked and then screamed, lashing out with the reinforced component. By luck as much as by intention, it connected heavily with the side of her head. A clicking noise emerged from deep within Dakota’s throat, and she floated free.

But she appeared to recover almost immediately, heading straight towards him again, her breath hissing harshly between bared teeth.

Corso waited until the last second, then decided any attempts at a gentle approach would probably end up getting him killed. He flung the stack component and it connected with her head a second time. She was knocked entirely unconscious and crumpled on the deck.

‘Oh God.’ Gardner was literally shaking with fear as he stood up. ‘I thought… I thought she was going to kill me.’

‘She was certainly aiming to,’ Corso snapped. ‘I need to…’

Need to do what, he wondered: take her to the med bay? No, Arbenz would surely have come up on the shuttle, bringing enforcements of some kind with him -assuming others weren’t already on their way from the Agartha.

The Piri Reis was still the best bet he had. But even if he did manage to haul her back to her ship without being intercepted, what would happen when she finally woke? Would he be dealing with Dakota again, or something far more malevolent?

‘Where are you going?’ Gardner demanded, as Corso began dragging her out of the bridge.

‘If Kieran Mansell or any of the rest of them get their hands on her, Mr Gardner, you can kiss your transluminal drive goodbye.’

‘Stop, damn you. Stop!’ Gardner’s face was like thunder. ‘Stop or I’ll-’

Despite the pain lancing through him, Corso laughed as he watched Gardner’s fists twisting at his sides in impotent rage. But Corso had long pegged him for a physical coward.

‘There’s nowhere for you to go,’ Gardner almost pleaded, his voice breaking up. ‘There are worse things than death, Mr Corso. They’re your own people-you should already know that.’

‘The two of us were already dead the moment either of us set foot on the Hyperion,’ Corso replied. ‘And you know it, so shut the hell up.’ He finally managed to wrestle Dakota out into the corridor adjacent to the bridge. ‘And you’re just as expendable to them, Mr Gardner. Perhaps you should know that too.’

Twenty-one

Redstone Colony

Consortium Standard Date: 03.06.2538

Port Gabriel Incident + twenty-five minutes

From the middle of the highway, Dakota stared at the line of approaching vehicles, one hand shading her eyes from the bright sun overhead.

For the first time she noticed the statue mounted on a shoulder-high plinth over to one side of the road. The statue itself was no more than perhaps two feet in height, as if a tiny figure had climbed on top of the granite plinth and raised its bronze hands to the skies in either triumph or despair.

Although she had never set eyes on the statue before, she identified it immediately.

What was curious about that sudden recognition was the knowledge that, until a few minutes ago, she could not possibly have known the significance of the statue or even who it represented. That, of course, was before the Uchidans had filled her with their Holy Purpose.

The statue, she now knew, was of Belle Trevois, the martyr. The figure was stylized, its face smooth and blank, the body angular. Iron flames rose up behind to frame her, like the rays of the sun.

The statue had been badly vandalized. Freeholder graffiti had been scrawled across it, words like mind-fucked bitch and burn in hell. The stylized metal flames had been bashed and bent out of shape, and the tools obviously used to do the damage still lay in the grass nearby: rusted engine tools and nondescript chunks of stone.