Perez looked up from Olivarri’s pulped features. ‘Look, this is pure speculation, but is it possible all this – the sabotage, the systems failures – was intended just to cover this up?’

The three men exchanged looks. ‘The same thought did cross my mind,’ said Corso. ‘We’ve already got most of the primary systems back online. At first we thought we were looking at a catastrophic system failure, but in the end it proved to be not much more than an inconvenience.’

‘A distraction, in other words?’ said Martinez.

Corso stared down again at the dead man and felt a flash of resentment, as if this new crisis were somehow the victim’s fault. It was hard to connect this crumpled ruin with the living, breathing human being Olivarri had been.

Martinez sighed and turned to Perez. ‘Any sign of the weapon?’

‘Not that I could find,’ Perez replied. ‘But I’d say it was a wrench or something similar. There are diagnostic programs we can run to figure out how it was done, within a fairly narrow margin of error. Same thing goes for any DNA or other chemical traces left behind – assuming we find them.’

‘We’re going to have to search everyone’s quarters,’ decided Martinez. ‘These labs, the bridge, and anywhere any of us have spent much time.’

‘Surely whoever did this wouldn’t have been stupid enough to leave a murder weapon lying around their own quarters?’ Corso protested.

‘We don’t know, do we?’ said Martinez. ‘Any idea who was the last of us to see him before he was killed?’

‘He was outside doing hull repairs with Nancy and Nathan,’ said Perez. ‘But that was several hours before the outage.’

Corso recalled that Olivarri had spent a lot of time visiting remote parts of the ship, checking up on various life-support and maintenance systems in areas where the surveillance coverage was often less than adequate. There might have been any number of opportunities for someone to track him down and kill him.

Martinez glanced over at Perez. ‘Dan, would you mind giving me and Lucas a minute alone?’

Perez looked warily at the two of them, then walked out into a passageway adjoining the bay. Martinez turned to Corso, his expression grim.