‘You have to hold a service,’ Ty rasped. ‘There was one for Olivarri.’

‘That was different,’ Corso snapped. ‘He was murdered. Nancy’s death is a direct result of our mission. We’ll mark her passing properly, but not until this is over.’

‘And is that what the others think, too?’

‘I’m not here to debate the issue with you. I’m just telling you how it is.’

‘Good of you to let me know,’ Ty replied sarcastically.

‘She had no idea who you really were, did she?’

‘It wasn’t the kind of thing that came up in conversation,’ he replied, unable to keep the acid out of his voice.

‘Ty, didn’t it ever occur to you what you were actually doing by deceiving her like that? Did you really think I instructed you to stay away from the crew just to punish you? I’ve been deceiving people who would give their life for me, and for this mission, by not telling them who you really are. I wanted you to stay away because I didn’t want to make that lie any bigger than it already is.’

‘I thought of telling her,’ Ty confessed, ‘but I couldn’t face the idea of her hatred.’

Corso chuckled. ‘Keep saying things like that, and I might end up mistaking you for a human being one of these days.’

Once he was back inside, Ty slept for a solid ten hours before waking with aching muscles and skin that had become infuriatingly itchy from pressure sores. He dragged himself into the lab’s minimal toilet facilities, turned on a tap and watched a ball of water form at the end of the nozzle. Once it was about the size of his fist, he pulled it free and pushed his face into it, gasping at its icy coldness against his skin. He felt like he hadn’t slept at all.

It was time to take a look at what the cameras he’d positioned around the lab had recorded. But first he was going to fix himself a drink.

Ty could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he had ever touched alcohol, but some compulsion born of fatigue and grief, as well as the fear of what he might find when he reviewed the video feeds, made it easier to break what had until now been a habit of lifelong abstinence. Before long he was heading for an echoing, empty mess hall not too far away, where he breakfasted on freeze-dried crackers and reconstituted yoghurt. Once he had finished eating, he wandered through the kitchen area until he found the liquor cabinet he had spotted previously and randomly picked out a few squeeze-bottles of wine of indeterminate vintage and quality.