‘Just that if you had, you’d know they’d rather blow the frigate out of the sky than let her escape. The consequences don’t matter. To them it’s all about honour.’

She glanced at Corso, who affected a weary shrug. ‘He’s right, Dakota.’

She shook her head in irritation. ‘Then they’re a bunch of fucking idiots. All right, we could hang around here and take all those missiles out with the drones, but we’d just be wasting valuable time.’ She headed over to the interface chair. ‘I’m going to jump us out of here now.’

‘The drive batteries are low,’ warned Corso. ‘It’s not enough to even get us out of this system.’

‘We’re not going to jump out of this system,’ she replied, pulling herself back into the chair’s embrace. ‘Remember I said I wanted to make a premature jump? Well, we’re going to take a hop and a skip, just a couple of million kilometres here or there. It doesn’t really matter where we come out, as long as it puts some distance between us and Redstone.’

Corso had followed her back over, and Perez watched them carefully as Corso stepped up on to the dais and gripped the side of the chair.

‘How sure are you that you know what you’re doing?’ he demanded, keeping his voice low. ‘You disappeared for a hell of a long time, and I can’t tell you how difficult that made things for me. And what the hell’s going on with your own ship?’

‘I am frequently very far indeed from knowing just what I’m doing, Lucas. I just take each minute as it comes. And as for my ship,’ she added, ‘just wait and see.’

She closed her eyes, shutting out the bridge and dipping back into the data-space. The new batch of missiles – built for hard acceleration and tipped with antimatter warheads – wouldn’t get in range of the frigate for at least another thousand seconds.

She looked up at the overhead projection and saw that the drones were now spiralling back in towards the Magi ship. Clearly some of its minds had finally realized what she intended, and it had already begun to accelerate away from Redstone – but still not fast enough.

Some of the drones began to burn with a furious incandescence, focusing this energy into highly destructive beams that played across the hull of the Magi ship. Corso watched with slack-jawed horror as it began to disintegrate under the intensive fire.

Corso grabbed Dakota by the shoulder, almost pulling her out of the interface chair. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘Fixing a problem,’ she replied, before closing her eyes and ignoring him.