Dakota glanced towards the live video feed and realized with a start that they were already moving. The hold’s open doors were receding into the distance, the yacht’s inertialess systems dampening the effects of its acceleration.

Another projection now appeared in the air in front of Trader, taking the form of a flat black rectangle. A yawning, glass-walled abyss appeared inside this rectangle, falling away into darkness. It looked like images Dakota had seen of the Tierra cache. As the viewpoint rushed headlong into the mouth of the cache and into sudden darkness, she felt a strong urge to look away.

Some kind of filter kicked in, so that the cache’s walls became visible. There were oval openings ranged on all sides, blurring together initially as the viewpoint descended at speed. But then the viewpoint suddenly slowed and veered aside into one of the doorways, moving rapidly along a smooth-walled tunnel until it arrived in a long, narrow chamber filled with the blackened ruins of some kind of machinery.

The projection then faded to black. Dakota glanced to one side and saw the Mjollnir receding into the distance with increasing speed.

‘And it’s the same throughout the cache?’ asked Dakota.

‘As far as can be determined,’ Trader replied. ‘Contact with some of my probes was lost after a certain depth, but that may be down to the sometimes unusual gravitational conditions to be found inside caches. The Meridian defence systems, however, are located near the mouth of the cache.’

‘I still want to see inside the cache at the first opportunity,’ insisted Dakota.

‘But of course,’ Trader replied, his manipulators wriggling like hungry worms.

The idea that Trader might actually provide better company than another human being would never before have occurred to Dakota, and so she found herself tremendously irritated when Trader left her alone with Nancy in the egg-shaped chamber. All she could do was crouch in the inertialess zero gee, and try to ignore Nancy’s embittered gaze. But before very long the sheer tension, enhanced by boredom, drove her to at least make an attempt at conversation.

When that failed, Dakota finally lost her temper.

‘Just what is your fucking problem?’ she seethed. ‘I used to own a cargo ship that was easier to talk to.’

Nancy’s eyes darted away from hers. ‘There’s things you don’t know about me. That make it hard for me to talk to you.’

‘What? What things?’

Nancy swivelled her gaze back around, her shoulders rising and falling as she took a deep breath. ‘I lost family in Port Gabriel,’ she replied.

Dakota felt her face go red. ‘I’m sorry, I—’