“Four days before the attack on the liner?”

“We were trying to rescue the crew when we heard about the Geest van Amsterdam.” I pushed away from the wall. “Why? Do you think there’s a connection?”

She let out a long breath. “Two Outward vessels downed within days of each other, having both apparently turned themselves off?” She shook her head as if unable to calculate the odds of such a coincidence. “What’s the flight time from Yellow Sky to the Gallery, as the crow flies?”

“Six days.”

“But a warship like this, at maximum burn?”

“You could maybe shave a third off.”

“So, theoretically, the same ship could have targeted both vessels?”

“I guess.” It would have been possible. We were completing the same trip in a similar time, including stopovers at Camrose and Cichol. “But how could one ship convince two others to voluntarily commit suicide?”

Laura Petrushka sat back and drummed her fingers on the wheelchair’s armrest. “There is a way.” For a moment, she was silent, seemingly debating with herself. “At least,” she continued in a low voice, “I’ve heard rumours of something that can do it. Some sort of alien weapon that can infiltrate and confuse a neural matrix.”

I flicked a hand. “That’s just talk.” If you hung around spaceports long enough, you’d hear all sorts of fantastical and paranoid tales—magical relics, hypervoid monsters, lost cities of gold…

Petrushka shook her head. “The person I heard it from is reliable, even if he is a Conglomeration agent.”

I raised an eyebrow. “How can you be so sure?”

Her eyes fixed on mine, evaluating, challenging, imploring. “Because he says they have one.”

All the breath seemed to evaporate from my lungs. “The Conglomeration has a weapon that can remotely disable a ship’s brain?”

Petrushka maintained eye contact. “That’s correct. And I’m only admitting to knowing that now because, as captain, you need to know what we might be up against.”

Thirty-Seven: Ona Sudak

THIRTY-SEVEN

ONA SUDAK

We tried to move as silently as possible, desperate to stay ahead of our pursuers. For the moment, we were hidden by several curves of the spiral staircase. Their voices and footfalls came to us as echoes. However tired we were, we could not afford to pause. To do so would be to squander our head start and risk capture, or worse. All we could do was keep lowering ourselves from one oversized step to the next as we slowly corkscrewed our way into the heart of the Brain.