‘I swear, I only just found out myself.’ She glanced at Corso. ‘You know, maybe you should have told all of us a long time before now.’

‘Maybe I should,’ Corso agreed, but she knew he was dissembling.

She couldn’t stop staring down at Willis’s face; he wore an expression of mild surprise that seemed utterly at odds with the violence that had been done to him. The gashes in his body were horrible, and yet she couldn’t look away.

‘I guess it’s pretty conclusive now that Whitecloud killed Olivarri,’ she said.

‘I’m still not making any assumptions until we find him,’ replied Martinez.

‘What about Willis here? Who found him?’

‘We were getting unexplained major power surges from the labs,’ Corso explained. ‘Driscoll . . . Whitecloud,’ he corrected himself, ‘didn’t answer our calls, so Ray came down here to check things out. That was the last we heard from him.’

Dakota dipped back into the data-space and checked on Trader’s yacht.

‘Trader’s where he should be,’ she announced. ‘His yacht hasn’t budged, and he hasn’t tried to link up to any of the airlocks.’

Lamoureaux leaned in through the doorway and caught her eye. ‘You think Whitecloud might be on his way to the hold?’

‘How the hell does Trader come into this?’ Martinez demanded.

‘How much did Lucas tell you about Whitecloud?’ Dakota asked him.

‘Enough to make me a very unhappy man, Miss Merrick.’

‘Well . . . he has a customized Uchidan implant, and it’s possible Trader’s using it to exert some kind of control over him. It’s also possible he doesn’t even know what’s happening to him.’

‘That might be the case,’ Martinez growled, ‘but if I happen to accidentally blow the bastard’s head off, I won’t cry about it.’ He nodded towards the corridor outside. ‘There’s an arms locker near here. We get armed and we go looking for him.’

‘No. No firearms,’ said Corso firmly. ‘We can’t take a chance that the artefact might get damaged.’

Martinez pulled himself upright, took hold of a metal shelf bolted to the bulkhead behind him, and used it for leverage as he planted one booted foot on Corso’s shoulder and pushed hard. Corso was sent skidding across the floor until he hit the bulkhead opposite.

‘I should kill you now,’ the Commander rasped. ‘You’ve lied to me too many times, Lucas, and it’s getting people killed. This is still my command, my ship, my crew. Therefore we carry arms.’

He glanced around them all with an expression of disgust. ‘Nothing would make me happier than to shove the whole fucking lot of you out the nearest airlock and watch you wriggle, but right now you’re going to get yourselves armed and start looking for Whitecloud. I don’t care how big the fucking ship is, this time I want him found.’