Martinez folded his arms and looked from one to the other. ‘But still no sign of Olivarri?’

‘Nope.’ Dakota shook her head. ‘The spiders are still out searching through the whole ship, but there’s just too much space to cover. It could take us weeks to investigate every nook and cranny.’

‘All right, what about Trader?’ asked Corso.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘disregarding just for the moment the fact neither of us trusts him in the least, I just don’t see any way he could have pulled this off

‘But it’s not like there isn’t precedent,’ Corso insisted. ‘We know he’s lied in the past, and we both know how machine-heads like yourself are vulnerable to—’

Dakota sat up and glared at him. ‘Listen, I’m getting really sick of being treated like I’m some kind of bomb about to go off. Why don’t you—’

Something beeped loudly, cutting her off mid-sentence.

‘That’s Dan on the emergency frequency,’ said Willis, stepping over to an adjacent console. ‘I’ll put him through the overhead.’

Dan Perez’s face appeared on a screen next to the couch. Nancy Schiller was visible just behind him, floating in a stretch of red-lit passageway.

‘It’s Olivarri.’ Perez sounded out of breath. ‘We just found him, down near one of the fusion-maintenance bays. He’s dead.’

Chapter Twenty-five

By the time Corso and Martinez reached the maintenance bay, Perez had found some opaque plastic sheeting to cover Olivarri’s body. Schiller had meanwhile headed back to the bridge.

Corso winced when Perez pulled the sheet back from Olivarri’s head and upper torso, because the back of his head had been caved in. Dried blood had crusted around his mouth, and his nose was crushed flat against his skull.

He was barely recognizable, Corso thought.

Martinez leaned in close to the body and looked up at Perez. ‘Where exactly did you find him?’

‘Over there.’ Perez nodded towards where a large steel panel had swung away from the wall. ‘Whoever did this wedged him behind that maintenance panel, but it then set off an alert on one of the control boards. I got the shock of my fucking life when I pulled the door open to check it out.’

‘Question is,’ said Corso, ‘why hide him here? Why not just drag him to an airlock and push his body outside the ship? That way we’d never have known what happened to him.’

Martinez shook his head. ‘Too much chance of getting picked up by the hull’s sensor arrays. They run on their own power and control systems, so whoever did this presumably knew they’d be spotted if they tried to do so. To be honest, we’re lucky we found him at all. This ship is big enough that, apart from an alert being triggered, it might have taken a long time before we eventually found him.’