‘I think their first priority would probably be to destroy the cache at Tierra.’

She watched Corso try to assimilate this. ‘What?’

‘Remember their original mission, apart from tracking down the Maker, was to destroy caches wherever they could find them. They don’t make exceptions.’

‘But the Magi ships don’t have weapons,’ he pointed out. ‘How could they . . . ?’

She smiled as Corso reached the obvious conclusion on his own, his eyes widening in horror. ‘By destroying whichever star the cache is orbiting, of course,’ she said, finally pushing herself off the examination table.

‘We have to warn them,’ he said, in a half-croak.

‘Sure, you could,’ she replied, stepping over to the screen to study the details of her diagnostics, noticing the dark patches inside her skull where her implants were located. ‘But think about it, Lucas. I heard the news about Consortium forces moving in and taking over the Tierra cache by force. They’re not going to listen to anything you have to say. But, if it came to the worst and we did lose the Tierra system altogether, there are other caches out there, and we still have other ships we can use to find them.’

She watched him think this over. He’d try to warn them anyway, she had no doubt, because that was the kind of man he was: endlessly drawn to hopeless causes.

‘So you destroyed your ship . . . ?’

‘Because I couldn’t trust it any more.’

Corso gaped at her, dumbfounded.

There was another chime, and the diagnostics display flashed a couple of times.

‘What does it say?’ she asked.

‘That there are lesions in your brain,’ Corso told her. ‘The med-bay thinks you’ve suffered a grand mal seizure.’ He reached out and touched the screen, and more information appeared. ‘It’s the same thing as Ted,’ he observed.

‘I feel okay. And whatever changes the Magi made to my brain or Ted’s, your med-bay isn’t programmed to factor them in.’

‘Well, one way or another, there are changes.’

‘Will Ted be okay?’

Corso shrugged. ‘We won’t know until the medbox is finished with him. How are you feeling?’ he asked, looking at her with a curious expression.

‘About what?’

‘I know you were . . .’he struggled to find the right word ‘. . . attached to your ship; to the experience of being joined with it.’

‘I’ll deal with it,’ she said abruptly. ‘I’m not going to crack up like I did before.’ She nodded towards the med-bay entrance. ‘You said we should take a look at what we’ve gone to all this effort for. How about now?’

Ty Whitecloud looked up at the sound of the lab’s airlock cycling, and realized he still had no idea if the Senator’s plan to hijack the frigate had been successful. He sat at the lab’s primary console, sudden tension knotting the muscles of his back.