I had been recruited as a rookie cop with potential, but twice failed to make the grade as a field operative. Because I was their informant, they let me spearhead the operation to root out corruption on my old precinct. But it was only after I’d managed to piss off my supervisors that I was given my first proper assignment. I was sent to Cichol not as a true field agent, but more as a kind of glorified warehouse manager, taking in shipments of arms and ammunition, and then arranging for them to be delivered by plane to the rebels in the hills. I might as well have been distributing tins of beans for all the difference it made. I carried myself like a full agent of Conglomeration Intelligence, but the truth was I spent more time grappling with inventory spreadsheets and flight schedules than doing anything that might be considered spy work. I had been trained in hand-to-hand combat, field medicine and the use of small arms, but everything else was bullshit. I saw that now. I had the objective clarity of a condemned man. I had never been cut out for fieldwork, and the strain of faking it almost broke me.

I cringed at the memory of my hand squeezing Konstanz’s face, and the shameful feeling of power it had given me. I had let macho posturing take over, when, deep down, I was still that kid sitting outside the head teacher’s office, struggling to come to terms with the way fear and anger made him lash out at those around him.

If I ran now, I would be running from myself. I would have to leave everything I’d worked to be, every ambition I’d ever nursed. Everything that made me who I was in the eyes of the universe, everything that described me as an adult, would have to be jettisoned. And I had no idea how or if it could be replaced.

That was, until Captain Konstanz came to see me.

* * *

The captain’s hair was damp from the shower. She was wearing a fresh green jumpsuit at least two sizes too large. The suit’s zip was open to her stomach, revealing a faded but clean-looking t-shirt, and she had squashed a frayed baseball cap onto her head.

“Okay,” she said, crouching beside me. “We need to talk.”

I blinked up at her from the abyssal depths of my despair. “You’ve got me welded to the floor. I’m not going anywhere. What’s left to discuss?”

Absently, she reached out and gave the carbon-fibre struts supporting my forearm an experimental prod.

“I’ve been talking to your friend, Laura.”

“And?”

“And she told me the Conglomeration has a weapon that can remotely hack a ship’s brain.”

“Oh.”

“Is it true?”

If I hadn’t been held in place, I would have shrugged. “I don’t know.”