She had slipped her jacket off as he spoke, revealing bare shoulders poking above an armless vest. ‘Because I don’t want to think about that right now,’ she answered.

Corso fell silent, watching as she pulled the vest up over her head before dropping it to the floor. His mouth become instantly dry as he studied her smooth belly and small firm breasts.

‘I ought to warn you I’m not in the best of shape right now,’ he said.

‘Just tell me if it hurts,’ she answered, quickly unzipping her boots and throwing them to one side. Her trousers and underwear followed a moment later.

Corso stared at her in the dark, feeling his body respond instinctively despite his injuries and the medication, and he was suddenly reluctant to recall just how long it was since he’d last been with a woman. There’d been no time for anything but work over the past few years.

She pulled the blanket to one side and slid on top of him, straddling his hips. Without thinking, Corso slid his hands up the taut surface of her belly. She quickly manoeuvred him inside her, and then reached down with both hands to grip his sides, taking care to avoid touching him where the caterpillar-like creature knitted his flesh together. Before long she was rocking her hips back and forth in a steady rolling motion that shot spikes of pleasure up his spine.

He started to thrust, raising his hips from the mattress, but she shook her head. ‘No. Stay still.’

He watched her for the next several minutes, with no small pleasure, as her breath started to emerge in short sharp gasps, her head tipping back as she came closer and closer to climax. He reached up, sliding his hands further up and gently cupping her small breasts again. Her flesh felt so supple and smooth, and entirely human, that he found it impossible to believe her story. She still felt completely real.

The look of intense concentration on her face made him remember other times, first on board Hyperion and later in a Bandati tower on a distant world long since wiped out. He wondered again about her story: if she really had been recreated somehow, reborn from the flesh of one of those alien starships . . .

That killed it for him.

He felt his ardour rapidly drain away, but a few seconds later Dakota gripped him painfully hard, before letting her forehead drop against his chest.

After a minute she looked up and gave him a questioning look.

‘I think it’s the meds,’ he muttered, embarrassed.

She gave him a look of careful appraisal, as if she wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not, then wordlessly lifted herself up and off him, before dropping down beside him, and pressing up close. The heat of her skin felt like a furnace against his own.