‘If you had that performance planned, I hope you warned the staff to give us some privacy,’ he muttered.

‘I don’t think we’re likely to be disturbed.’ She reached up to stroke a finger along his jaw line. ‘That man Breisch, who is he?’

‘He taught me how to fight.’

She raised herself on one elbow and gazed down at him. ‘What happened to you, Lucas? I saw the whole thing, and you killed that guy in cold blood. It was . . . brutal. I thought you stood against that kind of thing.’

Corso shrugged. ‘Seems it’s the only way to get anyone here to listen to me. A lot of people want me dead, and the rest won’t take me seriously unless I play them at their own game.’

‘But that doesn’t mean you had to—’

‘It does,’ he retorted. ‘Things got a lot harder once you were gone, Dakota. The Fleet’s lost most of its power, we’re a spent force – and the Freehold isn’t the only one desperate to undermine us at every opportunity.’

‘But you had it in your power to place sanctions against uncooperative worlds.’

‘Yes, but not the moral authority, and their governments knew it. The only people who were getting hurt by the sanctions were refugees dumped on worlds without the resources to deal with them. Too many people were dying, Dakota. We had to give in, especially once some of the navigators broke ranks.’

She bristled. ‘But we were only taking on navigators if we were sure we could trust them.’

‘There’s only so many old-school machine-heads available, so of course we had to take in navigator candidates whose backgrounds we couldn’t always check and loyalties we could never be sure of. Most of the first batch of navigators, like Lamoureaux, were on our side, but two thirds have burned out for some reason we don’t understand. As it is, we’re barely maintaining the lines of physical communication that hold the Consortium together.’

‘It’s that bad?’

‘After you left, I split my time between Ocean’s Deep and Redstone, trying to stop things falling apart here after the coup. At first I got treated like a returning hero, but it wasn’t long before I realized I’d made a lot of enemies without really trying. They were practically lining up to call me out with challenges. I learned to fight because I couldn’t see any way out of that, not if I was to have any hope of retaining some influence. I wanted to show them I could meet them on their own terms and still beat them. But instead things just went from bad to worse.’