‘It means there’s at least the outside chance that Atn protocols might work on the artefact, but the fact is we’re almost out of time. We’re almost certainly going to need Trader to activate the thing, whether we like it or not.’

‘It’s strange to hear you saying that, Lucas.’

‘Yeah, well, I’m still not too keen on the way you sprung him on us.’

‘But I’m not the only one who’s been hiding things. How long have you known Leo Olivarri was working undercover for the Legislate?’

Corso stared at her. ‘Where did you hear this?’

‘Trader told me,’ she replied. ‘And, no, don’t ask me where he heard it. He wouldn’t tell.’

‘I haven’t known about Olivarri that long,’ Corso replied. ‘There were suspicions, but we had to send a covert signal back home to get any kind of confirmation. It still doesn’t tell us why he was murdered.’

‘If he was spying on us, maybe he knew something we didn’t. I could have worked on finding out more, if you’d only told me. Or do you still not trust me?’

Corso leaned forward and buried his face in his hands for a moment, before looking back up at her. The transport station lay silent and empty through the curved glass behind him. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I know who killed Olivarri. Or at least I have a pretty damn good idea. I think it was Driscoll.’

‘What makes you think it was him?’

‘Whoever sabotaged the ship’s stacks didn’t do a thorough enough job. It turns out there are memory overflow buffers that can hold partial back-ups in case of a major failure. We managed to retrieve some of the missing hours from the surveillance feeds, and it turns out Driscoll was the last person to see Olivarri alive. We even have partial video of them arguing not long before Olivarri was killed.’

‘What were they arguing about?’

He shrugged. ‘No idea. We haven’t managed to recover the sound yet.’

‘That’s not necessarily incriminating in itself, is it? I mean, people do argue.’

‘There’s more. Before we left Redstone, Nathan completely disappeared for several hours. We have no idea what happened to him during that time.’

‘Surely you asked him?’

‘Yes, but his answer never rang true.’

Dakota leaned back and studied Corso for a moment. ‘You’re still holding something back, I can tell.’

Corso smiled weakly. ‘All right, when the med-bay was vandalized, it made it almost too easy to pin the blame on you or Ted.’

‘I think it was deliberate misdirection: a way to take the focus off someone else by making the obvious suspects look like the only suspects.’