He had actually meant to cut things short; that being the easiest way to deal with such things. He had opened his mouth intending to say one thing, but something else entirely had emerged.

He summoned one of the spiders and started to rummage inside its toolbox, feverishly thinking all the time. What, he wondered, could Corso actually do to him by way of punishment? Very little, he suspected.

Ty called up his suit’s menu and put in a call to Nancy, and she replied almost immediately.

‘Tonight,’ he said. ‘Ship time. Come down to the labs.’

‘You . . . need help with something?’

‘Yeah,’ he replied with a grin. ‘Something like that.’

Chapter Twenty-two

‘This is where we are just now,’ indicated Lamoureaux.

Dakota leaned back in her seat on the bridge and stared up at the overhead simulation: a view of the Milky Way as it might be seen from roughly twenty thousand light-years above its ecliptic plane. A small point of light representing the Mjollnir blinked constantly from deep within the Orion Arm.

From the perspective Lamoureaux had chosen, it was clear the Orion Arm was not so much a true spiral arm in its own right, but more a broad streak of stars caught midway between the Sagittarius and Perseus arms.

‘And this,’ Lamoureaux continued, from the interface chair, ‘is our first stop. After that we’re in for the really long haul.’

A line reached out from the icon representing the Mjollnir, and came to an end at a star fifteen hundred light-years from their current position. A second line grew from there, stretching across a relatively starless gulf before terminating at a point deep within the Perseus Arm.

Dakota studied Lamoureaux, who had tipped the interface chair all the way back to a forty-five-degree angle, until he was looking almost straight up at the simulation. He still seemed frail, and when he glanced at her she could sense the pain and loss he was feeling. Sometime soon, she was going to have to explain to him just why she had destroyed her ship.

Corso sat close behind Dakota, while Nancy, Ray and Nathan were still outside working on the drive-spines. Martinez was not expected out of the med-bay for another couple of days, Olivarri was asleep in his quarters, and Perez was somewhere halfway across the ship, checking over the plasma conduit systems and prepping the onboard fabricators to produce replacement drive-spines.

‘Ted, can you put up that information I gave you about our first target system?’ asked Dakota.

‘No,’ said Corso from behind, his tone hostile. He had barely spoken to her since she had told him about Trader. ‘That can wait a minute. Ted, you said you had secured some updates on the war.’

Ted flashed Dakota an apologetic glance before he nodded assent to Corso. Moments later dozens of bright red points appeared in clusters along one edge of the Orion Arm, with a few scattered deeper within it.