‘You should have told me,’ she protested in sudden fury.

‘And if I had, would you have been happy about him coming along?’

‘No, I wouldn’t,’ she spat back at him. ‘He’s a mass murderer, don’t you understand? You weren’t there, Lucas. You have no conception of what it was like losing your mind like that.’

‘And yet we have Trader sitting in his yacht there in the hold, and we all know what he’s capable of. I seem to recall he did exactly the same thing to you. So how do you square that with your conscience?’

Dakota’s face paled and she fell silent, her eyes round and luminous in the light cast by the reactor simulation.

Corso shook his head in irritation, embarrassed at his own sudden sense of discomfort. A silence stretched between them, but when he ducked to continue through the hatch, she followed after only a moment’s hesitation.

The area beneath the reactor control room was barely big enough to enable them to crouch together inside it, and the only light came from a single red panel in one corner. Corso pulled out a small flashlight and shone it on to what looked to Dakota at first like a jumble of machinery. He gripped the flashlight in his teeth and used both hands to pull himself closer to it.

As Dakota followed, she saw that a plastic chair had been pushed into one corner, and was covered with matt foil that she recognized as a kind of force-feedback material. A bird’s-nest tangle of wiring and circuitry surrounded it, while yet more circuitry and wiring was wrapped around the arms of the chair.

‘What is it?’ asked Dakota, puzzled.

‘See that superconductor cable running through the back? That’s so it can tap directly into the reactor power feed without showing up on the logs.’

Suddenly Dakota saw the order in the chaos, and realized she was looking at a home-brew version of the interface chair up on the bridge.

She moved abreast of Corso and brushed the fingertips of one hand along the wiring. ‘So why build it at all?’ she asked.

‘To trigger the shutdown,’ Corso explained, ‘and to hide the identity of Olivarri’s killer. Some of its components were manufactured from the lab’s dedicated fabricator. That would nail Whitecloud pretty conclusively.’

‘I don’t see how,’ Dakota muttered. ‘Can Uchidan implants even work with an interface chair?’

‘Apparently his can. I did a little research into his escape from custody. His implants are a custom job – far from surprising, when you think about it. All the members of his R&D unit were regularly tinkering with their own neural hardware to see what results they got.’

‘There has to be a reason you’re telling me all this now rather than previously.’