Corso glanced towards Perez and Martinez, but they had stepped over to a console on the far side of the bridge, and were deep in a discussion over astrogational data.

‘I think we’re going to have to let Dakota see it,’ he replied. ‘If we’re right about Whitecloud, she should be the first to know.’

‘You realize that means telling her who he really is?’

‘Yes . . . yes, I suppose I do,’ Corso replied. ‘Not that I’m looking forward to it.’

‘Rather you than me,’ Lamoureaux said softly. ‘Rather you than me, any day of any year.’

Chapter Thirty-one

Whitecloud sat staring at a screen and nursing a bulb of coffee as Corso entered the lab a short time later.

‘Found anything new?’ Corso asked him, shooting a glance at the Mos Hadroch still wedged inside the enormous machine and surrounded by probes.

Whitecloud went on staring at the screen like he wasn’t even aware of the man standing next to him.

‘Ty?’ Corso asked again, this time in a substantially lower voice.

Whitecloud finally turned to face him. Nobody home, thought Corso, chilled by the empty expression on the other man’s face.

Whitecloud seemed to come back to life a moment later, and jerked backwards, clearly surprised to find Corso standing in front of him. The bulb of coffee went spinning out of his hand, but Corso reached out and caught it, then handed it back. His lingering doubts about Whitecloud being under some form of control had now vanished completely.

‘I was wondering if you had anything new to report,’ Corso started again, keeping his voice level even while his heart hammered inside his chest. It was important not to let Whitecloud suspect anything was amiss. ‘You were supposed to file an update this morning, but I didn’t receive anything from you.’

In truth, Whitecloud’s reports rarely made for good reading. Rather than containing actual information or providing any insights, they tended more to be a list of tests, or variations of tests, that had been run on the artefact, all producing the same dismal results. The only time the derelict had shown any sign of being anything other than a dumb inanimate object had been that first time Corso had laid eyes on it.

Whitecloud blinked and pulled himself out of his chair, grabbing a rung in the low ceiling for support. ‘New?’ He scratched his head, staring around him as if he had been asleep for a long time. ‘Yes. Yes there is, actually. Take a look at this.’

Whitecloud pushed past Corso and headed for a tabletop imager. He activated it first by passing his hand over its plate, then quickly sped through a series of holographic menus until he found what he was looking for.

A few moments later Corso found himself looking at the image of a translucent upright cylinder hovering above the plate, with thousands of hair-thin passageways extending outwards from it horizontally.