Ty moved over quickly to forward the video feed another hour. Nothing changed: the monster was still crouching next to the stack-unit, staring directly into the lens. Its slack-muscled features betrayed all the warmth and compassion of a reanimated corpse. He – no, it – must have been standing there during all that time, just staring into the lens.

Ty knew he was being sent a message here. No wonder he felt like he hadn’t been getting any sleep; because he hadn’t.

He slammed the console with his open palm so hard that it stung. The video feed blanked, but he could still see his own traitorous face reflected back at him in the smooth black glass.

He snatched his gaze away, suddenly sober again, and now filled with a terrible, skin-crawling chill. He hunted about for the hidden cameras and soon discovered most, but not all, were missing. He repositioned the undamaged ones in places where he hoped they might be harder to find, then he took a seat, opened another squeeze-bottle and began drinking with grim determination.

At first, the others didn’t notice his condition when Ty arrived in the airlock bay for his next shift on the hull.

That was fine by him, since he felt wrung out after spending the night vomiting into a vacuum hose, and tiny gold-plated hammers still pounded with an unwavering rhythm against the inside of his skull. Conversation was certainly not something he was looking forward to, but it looked like he would once again be working with Corso and Lamoureaux, who usually spent most of the time just talking between themselves.

The two men were standing almost head-to-head, already deep in discussion. Ty paused by the entrance, where they couldn’t yet see him, and listened quietly.

‘So you think we can still recover more data?’ Corso was asking.

‘The Mjollnir has a lot of inbuilt redundancy,’ Lamoureaux replied, keeping his voice low – but sounds tended to carry easily inside the frigate. ‘There’s a chance we can recover the rest of the lost data from the surveillance systems.’

‘You mean the overflow buffers?’

‘No,’ Lamoureaux shook his head, ‘we’ve got everything we can from them. But some of the core stack arrays can act as virtual buffers in an emergency. So it’s possible there’s still . . .’

Lamoureaux glanced to one side, spotted Ty and fell immediately silent. Corso turned and scowled when he saw him.

But Ty didn’t care, and he headed for one of the suit racks, his mind suddenly racing with possibilities.

Over the next several hours, he had plenty of opportunity to mull over the brief snatch of conversation he had overheard.

Memory overflow buffers. He guessed they were talking about the data lost during the catastrophic systems failure around the time of Olivarri’s murder. Clearly there was a way of recovering at least some of that data. And what else might be hidden in those buffers?