Nancy burst out laughing. ‘No, no . . . I mean that’s just the kind of bullshit you want to hear, right? I didn’t lose anyone. I just . . .’ the other woman shrugged and shook her head. ‘I just really fucking hate machine-heads. You and the Uchidans, you’re all the fucking same to me, you know that? Even that hole in the ground we’re headed for isn’t deep enough for you all.’

Dakota stared at her, speechless.

‘Look,’ Nancy went on, ‘if Commander Martinez wants you on board with us, that’s up to him, not me, but I don’t have to pretend I like you, or that I trust you, or that I’m not sure you had something to do with Olivarri’s murder. Are we clear on that?’ ‘As daylight,’ Dakota replied through gritted teeth.

After that, Dakota kept her mouth shut and her eyes fixed on the projections all around. Nancy crouched in a similar pose, her helmet resting nearby. They had a spectacular view of their approach to the cache-world: the curving limb of the planet rose towards them at a terrific speed and, as they drew nearer, Dakota studied with interest the great rifts and valleys and ancient impact craters that spoke of a violent past. The mouth of the cache became visible as a perfectly round circle of black punched through the tiny world’s outer crust.

Dakota felt the tug of something familiar from the surface below.

‘There’s more drones here,’ she muttered out loud.

Nancy shot a glance at her. ‘What?’

‘More Meridian drones. Trader! Where the hell are you, Trader! There’s—’

<I am here.> Trader replied to her directly through her implants. <Are you certain? >

Very certain. I’m picking them up right now.

<An unexpected surprise, then. Do you have a location?>

Close to the mouth of the cache, about where the field-defences are. They’ve buried themselves deep in the ground.

‘Who are you talking to?’ Schiller demanded.

‘I’m talking,’ Dakota replied testily, ‘to Trader.’

‘Did you know your mouth moves when you talk in your head like that?’

‘It does?’

Schiller nodded slowly. ‘Makes you look like an idiot.’

Chapter Twenty-nine

They made landfall not long afterwards, the yacht settling on to a cushion of shaped fields just a few kilometres from the mouth of the cache. Dakota pulled off the standard-issue jumpsuit she had been wearing, and folded it into a wad before dropping down from the yacht’s open hatch, relying once more simply on her filmsuit for protection.

Her black-slicked toes kicked up a cloud of dust as she hit the ground, before she took a few bounding steps in the low gravity. She glanced behind her in time to see Nancy hit the ground only to be immediately swallowed in another billowing dust cloud that coated her pressure-suit in grey.