He paused for a moment, then turned to face Dakota, with visible reluctance. ‘How many jumps do we need to reach our first destination?’

Martinez frowned, looking back and forth between them. ‘First destination?’

Of course, Dakota realized, he didn’t know about Trader yet.

‘We’re taking a detour,’ Dakota explained, ‘so we can salvage weapons systems left behind by an extinct alien race. It means stopping off at another star system on the way.’

Martinez regarded her warily before turning back to Corso. ‘And you concur with this?’

‘We’re just one ship, so we’re going to need every advantage we can get. A couple of days’ detour shouldn’t make any difference in the long run.’

Martinez nodded wearily and looked back at Dakota. ‘Lucas asked you how many jumps to get there.’

‘At least three,’ Dakota replied. ‘Possibly more, given the issue with the drive-spines.’ She stood up and nodded to Lamoureaux. ‘Ted, if you don’t mind, maybe I’d better run the next part myself.’

‘Sure.’ Lamoureaux stepped down from the interface chair, moving with elaborate care. Dakota felt his implant-mediated senses brush against hers.

‘Okay.’ She climbed into the chair and locked on to the ship’s data-space. A moment later the great swirl of the galaxy faded, to be replaced by a model of a single star system.

‘This is where we’re headed next,’ she explained. ‘You’re looking at a star towards the cooler end of the main sequence. It has eleven planets altogether, but our main point of interest is coming up in a moment.’

The system expanded rapidly until they had a view of a lifeless world no more than a few thousand kilometres in diameter, its surface dotted with ancient impact craters. A broad, artificially flat plain, at odds with the surrounding landscape, surrounded what seemed at first to be just another crater.

‘That’s the cache entrance you can see there,’ Dakota continued. A cutaway view of the planetoid now appeared next to its photorealistic image. ‘Same layout as the Tierra cache, in fact and, like the Tierra cache – and every other cache in existence, from what I gather – it’s located on a dwarf planet too small to be geologically active.’

The cutaway showed that the cache primarily consisted of a borehole extending more than thirty kilometres beneath the surface, with hundreds of passageways of varying length extending out from this central shaft and into the remaining body of the planetoid.

‘How the hell could you know all this?’ asked Martinez, switching his gaze between her and Corso.

‘This all comes from a renegade Shoal-member—’

‘A renegade what?’ said Martinez, looking like he was about to throw his walking stick at her.

‘Eduard,’ intervened Corso, ‘as soon as we’re done here. I swear.’ He nodded to Dakota for her to continue.

Martinez looked far from happy, but held his silence.