She decided to keep him talking to keep his mind off things.

‘Here’s a question. The entire reason Ghost tech was developed is down to the lack of anything like credible artificial intelligence, even after half a millennium of computer technology. Ghost tech was a way of sidestepping the problem, right?’

‘Yeah,’ Corso croaked. ‘An artificial unconsciousness that processes data and only bothers you with the really important stuff, right?’

‘Right. So given that fact, data stacks on board the Hyperion or anywhere else, couldn’t possibly contain something as sophisticated as the intelligence that communicated with me. So maybe then it’s reasonable to assume there’s something external to the stacks.’

She spotted an access hatch and felt another flash of dйjа vu. She pushed herself towards the hatch, lanyards whipping back and forth as she went.

She kept glancing back at Corso to make sure he was making way all right. He’d now let his limbs hang loose, allowing his lanyards to carry him after her. She smiled: he looked like some impossibly skinny sea creature picking its way over a seabed, with a human-shaped prize mounted on its minuscule head. But they were starting to make good time.

‘And is that another reason why we’re out here now?’ he asked.

‘Yeah. Hang on.’

The service hatch had a simple locking mechanism. It contained nothing vital and was easy to open. She pulled back the lid and gazed down at something that looked not unlike a neuron cell, but blown up to the size of a human head and silver-grey in colour, its body apparently composed of crystalline, semi-transparent fibres. It extended dozens upon dozens of strands deep into a control panel inside the hatch.

‘Shit,’ Corso whispered as he came abreast of her. ‘What is that thing?’

Dakota, too, stared down at it, struggling with a sense of deep loathing that filled her mind. It was hard for her to believe she’d been responsible for placing it there herself.

‘That’s Trader, Lucas. Or rather a copy of its mind, linked in through this panel and into the Hyperion’s subsystems. We need to destroy it.’

She was beginning to remember how she’d murdered Josef.

She’d slipped away from the Black Rock docks, literally minutes before she’d been due to depart for the Hyperion aboard a shuttle. Josef’s own hacks had made it simple for her to find her way back to his office undetected. The door had slid quietly open and he’d looked up, with barely enough time to register surprise, before she was on him, her face hidden by the smooth black oil of her filmsuit.

She’d torn the ceremonial Challenge blade from where it sat in a niche on his wall, and used it to slash at his throat before he’d even had time to stand up. He’d staggered away from her, trying to keep the desk between them before he eventually collapsed, bleeding heavily. She’d dropped the blade and picked up a heavy-looking ornament that sat by the window, which looked out over Mesa Verde, and used it to bash his skull in, her compromised Ghost all the while altering the Hyperion’s live security feeds to make it appear she was in fact already on board the shuttle.

After that, she’d made her way back down to the Black Rock departure bay and on to the shuttle, with barely seconds to spare.

She had later killed Chris Severn while he lay in a medbox in Ascension, cutting out his heart and pushing the still-warm organ into his insensate mouth, as an attempt to disguise his death as a ritual killing carried out by one of Ascension’s many criminal organizations.

Even so, Trader’s total mind-rape hadn’t taken into account the possibility of chance physical encounters either with Corso or anyone else. The more she thought about it, the more the alien’s strategies stank of hasty preparation, of seat-of-the-pants planning rather than careful deliberation.

The machine-organ before Dakota twitched, and she wondered if Trader had any idea what she was intending to do next. She hoped it did.

She pulled off her knapsack and rummaged inside, finally producing a tool similar to a crowbar. She leaned in towards the hatch, prising and wrenching at the Trader-object, trying to pull it loose. It struggled, entwining soft silver limb tendrils around the shaft of the tool in a vain attempt to wrest it from her grip.

After a few moments of this battle of wills, Corso reached in and helped her tug at the object. It struggled all the harder, wriggling frantically, but finally it came loose and floated free of the Hyperion, its limbs rippling in a futile attempt to gain purchase out in the void. Dakota swatted at it hard, sending it rapidly drifting away towards Theona.

‘And is that it?’ Corso asked in a tone of clear revulsion. There was something so fundamentally disturbing about the thing they had just destroyed.

‘I’m pretty sure that’s all there is, yes.’

‘And you put it there yourself?’

‘Under Trader’s control, yes.’ Dakota nodded. ‘I sat up one day while I was back on Mesa Verde and I had a vault number and an address in my head. I went to the address and collected a package. That thing was inside.’ She shrugged. ‘Then, I guess, it was just a matter of finding an opportune moment.’

She saw that Corso was no longer paying attention, and followed the direction of his gaze.

It seemed they had company.

Three figures in armoured pressure suits were moving towards them, carried forward by their own lanyard belts. All three were clearly armed.

Dakota twisted around so that her own lanyards held her upright, relative to the hull, her feet planted next to the open hatch, and watched as they approached.

She wondered if her filmsuit would absorb the kinetic energy of the bullets, given that their weapons looked like the projectile variety.

Yeah, she thought. And maybe I can magically fly home as well. If she didn’t go back inside the ship at some point soon, the filmsuit would run out of power and she’d be left exposed, naked to the vacuum. The only way for her to stay alive was getting back through the airlock, and just sneaking around clearly wasn’t an option any longer.

At least her mind was her own again. She had Corso to thank for that. She couldn’t decide if what she now felt towards him was love, or merely a kind of ecstatic gratitude born out of the knowledge that he’d helped rip a parasite clean out of her head.

Perhaps time would tell… but then again it wasn’t likely either of them had more than a few hours to live.