She focused fully on him now. ‘That thing raped me, Lucas. I don’t know how he knew I’d get here, but he had planned everything from Bourdain’s Rock on at the very least.’
Her lips twisted in a snarl. ‘And now I’m going to destroy him.’
Twenty-three
A few minutes passed.
‘We’re going out on to the hull,’ Dakota suddenly informed him, grabbing his pressure suit from the corner it had drifted into and pushing it towards him. ‘Outside, now.’
He gaped at her blankly.
‘Look, I’ll explain on the way, all right?’
She’d barely got herself dressed, but she began to pull her clothes off once more. She noticed his lips tighten as the filmsuit spread across her skin, but he clearly wasn’t in the mood right now for asking too many questions. She was glad of that, because she wasn’t in the mood for explanations. She’d already guessed he might have seen the Bandati technology in operation while he was bringing her back to the cargo bay.
‘I wanted to talk to you about this,’ she said casually.
Corso glanced around to observe the small object gripped in Dakota’s hand, and froze when he saw it was one of the remote failsafes. He reached down automatically, and realized he didn’t have his own any more.
‘I found this earlier among your clothes, right after we got naked.’ Her tone remained casual. ‘This thing was meant to break the link between me and the interface chairs, wasn’t it?’
Corso nodded dumbly.
Dakota smiled like a cat. ‘I suppose this is as good a time as any to tell you it wouldn’t have worked.’
Corso swallowed. ‘Your Ghost?’
‘Nothing gets past it.’ She regarded him coolly. ‘After what you told me on the derelict, I figured there was a chance you might be carrying something like this.’
He looked away from her and pulled his suit on. Then she guided him back out of the Piri Reis and into the cargo bay and towards the airlock built into the main bay’s external doors.
Outside, the surface of Theona looked so close she imagined she could reach out and touch its icy surface with one hand. The dull grey and orange stripes of the gas-giant Dymas hovered in the darkness beyond. Dakota was able to converse normally with Corso via a tiny, Ghost-linked transponder carried in the back of her throat.
Beyond the curve of the ship’s hull, three new stars were visible shining unevenly but brightly: the approaching, unknown fleet. Their engines were pointed towards the inner system as they decelerated.
She could see Corso’s face clearly through the visor of his suit. He looked absolutely terrified, his arms and legs waving frantically as only the intelligent lanyards built into the waist of his pressure suit kept him attached to the ship’s hull. Delicate-looking but incredibly strong silver wires shot out from his waist, embedding and re-embedding themselves in the hull as Corso shifted up behind her. Dakota had slaved his belt to her own suit’s lanyards, so that Corso was forced to follow her as she made her way across and around the hull towards some half-remembered destination.
‘Wouldn’t it be better’-his breathing was uneven, panicky-‘easier even, if I just pulled myself after you with the handholds?’
‘Not a chance. You don’t have the experience of zero gravity or outside work for me to risk the chance of you drifting off, and I don’t have the time to baby-sit you either. Those lanyards are pretty much fail-proof, all right?’
‘Fine,’ he gasped, his laboured breath making his words hard to decipher. ‘So tell me, why the hell are we out here anyway?’
‘Take a guess.’
‘Well… at a guess, then, you’re worried the Piri Reis has been infected by the same thing that infected your Ghost. But can the Piri hear us out here?’
‘Not as long as we stay on this frequency.’
‘You know, the Piri did say your implants were now clean of invasives.’
‘Maybe it’s lying.’ She paused for a moment, snatches of memory coming back. She looked around, thinking hard. That way, she decided, rapidly continuing on her way around the hull’s circumference.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘if the Piri’s infected, we’re dead anyway. Your ship’s the only possible escape route we might have, right? We talked this over, and I’d prefer to believe it’s not infected. Besides, the Piri Reis is a paranoid’s wet dream. From what I saw and heard back there, it’s like your counter-surveillance doesn’t even trust itself.’
‘That’s because it doesn’t. It has to deal with some very sophisticated probing techniques. Besides, you know what they say: paranoids live longer.’
A mental image of a service hatch, and its number, flashed into Dakota’s mind from a pocket deep within her Ghost’s memory stacks that had, until very recently, been locked off from her consciousness. She paused for a moment, trying to think which way to go next. It came to her suddenly, and she set off once more.
Corso’s response was panic. ‘Hey, where are you going?’
She explained as she went. ‘The Shoaler alien I met on Bourdain’s Rock was called Trader. Everything that’s happened since it gave me that damned gift has been set up so I take the blame. It was the alien destroyed Bourdain’s Rock, and then made me look responsible because I was the one carrying a GiantKiller on board my ship. Then it got inside my head and made me murder Josef Marados after he tried to save my skin. It was the same with Chris Severn. You’re right, Lucas.’
The words spat out of her mind in bitter anger. ‘I did kill him.’
‘So I guess the memories are coming back now?’
Dakota gritted her teeth. ‘Yeah, you could say that.’
They were meanwhile passing an observation blister. Even though it was incredibly unlikely Arbenz or anyone else would be inside the blister looking out, Dakota nonetheless felt a stab of fear on passing it.
She glanced over her shoulder to see Corso not too far behind her, still dragged along by his lanyards. At least he appeared to have stopped struggling.
‘The point is, everywhere I go, something bad happens. The alien covers its tracks by using me as a puppet to do what it wants me to, and that way there’s no reason for anyone to investigate any deeper.’
She finally stopped and waited for him to catch up. As she led him along this curving path, Theona had partially slid out of sight behind the Hyperion’s hull. The gravity wheel still spun around the ship’s axis a hundred metres ahead to the fore. She heard Corso’s breathing become more laboured, and guessed that was because he had just glanced the same way. To him it must feel as if he were being dragged, by wires that couldn’t possibly hold his weight, up the side of a kilometre-high tower with a rotating wheel waiting near its apex.