At the end of the shift, Dakota made her way back to the airlock and surveyed the hull, noting the gaps where drive-spines had been removed but not yet replaced. Nancy had made a point of cycling back through the airlock before either of them.

Tell me what I have to do to get her off my back, Dakota asked him, as they made their own way back inside the frigate.

Lamoureaux activated the airlock access panel and a light blinked green. <Maybe she’s not so bad as you think,> he sent back.

You can’t possibly be serious.

He glanced towards her while they waited for the hatch to slide open. <Most women’s lives in the Freehold are pretty circumscribed, Dakota. Their career choices come down to mother, teacher and whore. She must have had a hell of a fight to get to be head of security on a ship like the Mjollnir. Then she lost that job when Martinez fell out of favour. No wonder she’s pissed off – wouldn’t you be?>

Dakota tried to think of a reply, but could not manage one.

Chapter Twenty-eight

Less than an hour later, Dakota reached the bridge just in time for Olivarri’s funeral service.

The rest of the crew was already there – even Driscoll, who had been hiding in the labs ever since leaving Redstone. The overhead display was filled by an external image of the Mjollnir, as seen through the lens of a surveillance-drone trailing the frigate at a distance of a couple of kilometres. Floating a few metres away from the drone, and in full view of its sensors, was a single spider-mech holding a jar delicately in its multiple arms.

Martinez was in full dress uniform, as were Nancy Schiller and Dan Perez. Corso wore a formal suit, his shirt a swirl of various shades of grey. Dakota, by contrast, felt distinctly underdressed in her usual casual uniform of T-shirt and work trousers, but dealing with formal occasions like this was very far from being one of her strong points.

She watched Corso mount the dais, resting one hand on the arm of the vacant interface chair as he waited until the conversation died down. Dakota tried to listen to his brief eulogy, and then that of Willis, but waves of fatigue kept washing over her, and her attention kept slipping. All she could see when she briefly closed her eyes were the grey and black plates of the Mjollnir’s armoured hull.

Her mind drifted further, speculating on what the next generation of human-built superluminal ships might be like, assuming they ever survived the onslaught of the Emissaries. She decided their best option would still be to find some way to power up the Ascension coreship, or one of the other coreships abandoned in the vicinity of the Long War . . .