When he’d gone, I let my head fall back against the couch. I was fairly certain that I was doing the right thing for Preston by letting him stay, but it would probably turn out to be a mistake for me in the long run. The last thing I wanted was to fly with an unqualified medic. And yet, there was no way I could have turned the kid away. His plight reminded me too acutely of my own sorrows. However, by allowing him to stay, I knew I had given Alva Clay ammunition against me, should her resentment ever boil over into actual hostility. On the other hand we had Laura Petrushka on board, and I was fairly confident she could handle any medical emergencies that arose. As far as I was concerned, I wasn’t putting the crew in danger; but she wasn’t an official medical practitioner, and that distinction might be enough to end my career.

I stretched my fingers and toes, trying to dissipate my fatigue. Then I hooked open the neck of my t-shirt and sniffed. I had been sleeping in these clothes for two days, and badly needed a shower. With a groan, I got to my feet and climbed up into the main corridor.

When I reached my cabin, I found Laura waiting by the door.

“Have you come to beg for clemency?” I rubbed my jaw, where Childe’s fingers had bruised the skin.

To my surprise, she shook her head. “I have some information you need to hear.” Her voice dripped with painkiller-induced weariness. I could even see it in the set of her shoulders. Slumped in the wheelchair, she looked ten years older.

I leant against the corridor wall. “What kind of information?”

“I’ve been looking at the Geest van Amsterdam’s distress signal,” she said, “and there’s something weird about it.”

“Weird?” I uncrossed my arms. My own tiredness gave way to professional interest. If there was anything that might negatively affect the success of our rescue attempt, I needed to hear about it.

Petrushka flicked lint from the blanket covering her knees. “A ship that size doesn’t have one comms array,” she said, “it has half a dozen, spread out across its hull.”

I knew this. “So?”

“So, in order to silence the ship, you’d need to knock out all six arrays simultaneously. But no torpedo’s that accurate, and the ship has its defence cannons. The odds are at least one of those arrays should have survived and been functional after the first attack.”

“The ship shut itself down, like the Hobo.”

“The Hobo?”

“It was a scout ship that ditched in the sea on a world twelve light years past the Yellow Sky Relay. The data we pulled from its black box suggested its mind had deliberately turned itself off.”

Petrushka leant forward in her chair. “When was this?”

“It crashed a week ago, on Thursday.”