But now the Shoal themselves were gone, and the cache had been quickly rediscovered, and subsequently placed under the control of the Peacekeeper Authority. Corso had been locked in a political battle with the Consortium Legislate ever since, desperate for the resources and personnel needed to exploit the cache, but forced to make more and more concessions in order to get them.

‘All the latest research is right here on this data ring,’ Lamoureaux explained. ‘It can take up to a couple of weeks to produce a single superluminal drive, and as soon as one is finished half a dozen different colonial governments, with their own agendas, start threatening embargoes and worse if we don’t give it to them. At the moment most of the drives are meant to go into ships intended for relief operations throughout the Consortium, but we’ve got no guarantees that’s what they’ll get used for. That and about a hundred other reasons are why there are so many delays, and why Eugenia doesn’t have its drive yet. And that’s before we even get to considering the increasing rate of neural burnout in our machine-head pilots. We’ve had to retire nearly a third of our longest-serving navigators in the past six months.’

‘“Neural burnout”? Is that what they’re calling it now?’

‘That and the bends, but the neurologists prefer not to call it that. It’s primarily affecting the ones who’ve been piloting Magi ships the longest.’

‘Like yourself.’

‘So far I’ve been fine, but it might only be a matter of time.’

‘And we still don’t know what’s causing this?’

‘Nope.’

Corso leaned back and stared up at the ceiling, suddenly feeling wearier despite the pills. ‘In other words, we’re even more fucked than we already were.’

Lamoureaux spread his hands. ‘Look . . . I don’t want to be the one to have to say this, but if things keep on the way they are, we’re going to wind up losing navigators faster than we can replace them. We might then be forced to give the Legislate at least some of what it wants.’

‘Specifically?’

‘Relaxing the rules governing the recruitment of new navigators. Allow the Legislate, and the governments it represents, to share the responsibility for finding and training them.’

‘Which would leave the Peacekeeper Authority without any purpose. Or authority.’

Lamoureaux’s expression was carefully non-committal.

‘Yugo,’ Corso asked, ‘your thoughts?’

‘If I can speak candidly?’

Corso nodded.

‘I think Ted’s right. If we don’t make major concessions now, the Legislate might claim we’re being unreasonable and merely blocking them. That might be just enough of an excuse for them to try and make a grab for the Tierra cache. The Allocation Treaty means a certain proportion of finished drives go to them, so if they then decided to carry out a military action against us, they’d have the means and resources to do it.’