By the time Dakota made it back to the bridge some hours later, Lamoureaux had just completed the latest in a series of jumps that had shifted the frigate deep inside the Perseus Arm. They were now only twelve hundred light-years from the target system.

She lowered herself on to a couch near Martinez and Perez, and saw they were all present for once – excepting Trader and Whitecloud, of course. Lamoureaux sat in the interface chair and looked so tired that she wondered if he might pass out. Corso perched on the edge of the dais, by Ted’s feet, facing towards the rest of them. They all looked just as exhausted as she felt.

Corso nodded to her. ‘Think you can stay awake a few minutes more?’

‘Sure,’ Dakota muttered hoarsely. A numbness, like thick black cotton pressing against the inside of her skull, kept threatening to swallow her thoughts. She had enjoyed maybe a couple of hours’ sleep at most out of the last seventy-two. Her implants could modulate her hormone and adrenalin levels to give her the occasional boost, but there was only so much abuse her body could endure.

Lamoureaux climbed down from the interface chair and sat beside her. Corso now stood up and faced them all.

‘First,’ he said, ‘there’s still no sign of Whitecloud. It’s the same problem as before: this ship’s just too big. We’ve set the fabs to manufacturing a couple of dozen stripped-down spider-mechs to take over the search, but they won’t be much more than a camera mounted on a navigational platform. They’ll search the ship systematically, and at speed, starting at the bow and finishing at the stern.’

‘Who’s going to be running them?’ asked Dan Perez.

‘No one,’ Martinez replied. ‘We can’t afford the spare hands, not with only five of us to do all the work. The spiders will maintain their own network, cross-check everything they see, and flag anything even slightly out of the ordinary.’

‘But that’s still going to take too much time,’ Lamoureaux protested.

‘I agree,’ Corso nodded. ‘What we really need to be doing is using our heads to try and figure out another way to track Whitecloud and the artefact down. While he was rooting around in the lab computers, Dan found something you really need to see. Over to you, Ted?’

Lamoureaux nodded, and a moment later an image of the Mos Hadroch appeared overhead, still suspended inside the imager array in the lab.

Dakota leaned forward. There seemed to be something wrong with the artefact, as if the air around it had become distorted.