Griffith and Velardo were already there, using secure data-net connections to organize more extractions. Olivarri and Willis arrived with the morning, along with some late arrivals who had their own stories of close escapes from the Senate’s police.

At first the public news networks told of chaos in the streets surrounding the Senate, but when the networks went offline Corso knew his worst suspicions had come true, and a counter-coup was under way. He kept himself awake throughout the next few nights with a steady diet of coffee and amphetamines, throwing himself into finalizing the details of a plan to take control of the Mjollnir before it could be removed from Redstone’s orbital space.

Kenley went off and returned a few hours later with Dan Perez in tow; both men departed once again, this time accompanied by Ray Willis, on a mission to retrieve the Mjollnir’s commander. They reappeared with Martinez some hours later, looking dirty and exhausted, Willis’s face streaked with blood that was clearly not his own.

By then Whitecloud had been tracked down to a secure government building, but by the time someone went out to try and extract him, the residency building had been bombed and Whitecloud had vanished.

His subsequent reappearance in a Unity police station, kilometres away from the residency, raised questions that Corso did not have the time to try and answer. Sympathetic contacts within the Senate’s own security services arranged for Whitecloud to be transferred to a less secure facility, where falsified documentation was all that was needed to extract him and bring him to the safe-house, to join with the rest of them.

But of far greater concern to Corso was Dakota’s failure to show, even as the time to launch for the Mjollnir approached. He felt her absence like an ulcer throbbing in his guts, because without her everything he had planned was for nothing. He found his mood swinging between fury and despondency, and yet there was no way to contact her, not even through Lamoureaux after he also arrived at the safe-house.

At one point, looking up from where he had fallen asleep in front of a screen, Corso realized that more than seventy-two hours had passed since his narrowly escaping arrest. He looked around at the people sitting before other screens, or talking quietly on secure links, or sleeping on mats on the floor.

During the next twenty-four hours most of them would scatter, through Kenley’s underground network, to other safe-houses, while a very few, himself included, would board a couple of shuttles in place of the team of engineers detailed to check final repairs to the Mjollnir.

That, at least, was the plan. But if Dakota didn’t show, that could still undo everything they had worked towards.