Dakota left the bridge and made her way to a nearby meeting room, where the others were waiting. She smelled food as she entered, unfamiliar spices and odours that made her stomach growl. An image of Epsilon Tauri, the surrounding cluster spread out around it like a sprinkle of multicoloured diamonds, floated above a low table in the centre of the room. The room itself was oval-shaped, with low couches set against curving bulkheads and facing inwards towards the table. The only faces not present were Martinez and Lamoureaux, but Corso had told her they could expect to be decanted sometime in the next twenty-four hours.

Corso himself looked dog-tired and haggard. While Dakota had been busy prepping the Mjollnir for its jump, he and Schiller had got busy moving the bodies of the dead to the ship’s morgue. Then they had a go at scrubbing the bloodstains off the deck.

Corso looked at her with raised eyebrows as she lowered herself on to a couch opposite him.

‘I just put us about halfway across Consortium territory,’ she told him, leaning back, her shoulders cramping with fatigue. ‘We can jump again in another day or so, which should take us a long way outside the Consortium.’

Corso handed her a bulb containing some dark liquid. ‘Here, Redstone coffee – guaranteed to wake you up.’

She took it and sniffed at it warily, then noticed Perez and Schiller were watching her carefully. She sucked at the straw for a moment, then her eyes widened and her face turned pale.

She dropped the bulb and succumbed to a coughing fit. Someone laughed. When her eyes had stopped watering, she could see that Corso was grinning at her.

‘What,’ she asked, ‘the fuck is that?’

‘There’s this weed, see, grows in water-pipes and plumbing back home,’ said Nancy Schiller. ‘They’ve been brewing it up since the days of the first settlers. They made me drink a gallon of the stuff in one go when I first joined up.’ She shook her head sadly and gazed at Corso. ‘This girl wouldn’t last an hour in any regular crew.’

Dakota started coughing again, and Corso passed her a glass of water. She swallowed it all in one go, to clear a little of the sour, gritty taste from her throat. When she looked up, Corso wore a conciliatory grin.

‘So,’ began Perez, looking around them, ‘down to business. First question: do we get to fly a pirate flag on the ship? And second question: who wants to make it?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Schiller. ‘I say we paint FUCK YOU on the side and just fly the damn thing into the sun of the first heavily populated Emissary system we find. Besides . . .’ she added, pausing to take a long suck at a bulb, ‘I can’t sew. Can you?’