‘By putting two and two together. I don’t have a shred of doubt anymore that he’s under Trader’s control. But here’s the thing. We didn’t let Trader come on board because we didn’t want him getting anywhere near the Mos Hadroch, right? At least, not in person.’

‘So he used Whitecloud to get to it?’ said Lamoureaux, his eyes widening.

‘And used him as well to run his own experiments on the artefact,’ Dakota continued. ‘He transferred copies of the command structure into the lab, where he could test it out and see if it worked. But, somehow, Whitecloud stumbled across the command structure and figured out what was going on.’

‘But why take the Mos Hadroch now? Why not before?’

‘I don’t know,’ Dakota admitted. ‘But once Trader discovered Whitecloud had distributed copies of the command structure throughout the ship, he’d have realized we wouldn’t need him any more.’

Martinez stood up, his expression grim. ‘Which means right now Whitecloud is on his way to Trader’s yacht – if he isn’t there already.’

He stepped over to a console and a moment later a wire-frame of the frigate appeared above them. ‘We’ll resume the search, but this time we’ll focus exclusively on the aft airlocks, and on every access route leading to the main hold and Trader.’

‘But he could be there already,’ said Perez. ‘He probably went straight there after killing Ray.’

‘Not necessarily,’ said Corso. ‘As soon as we found Ray, I programmed the surveillance feeds to send me an alert the moment Whitecloud showed up on a camera.’

‘Except that the cameras don’t cover the whole ship,’ Martinez pointed out. ‘Just the main passageways and bays.’

‘But including every access point leading directly to the hold,’ said Corso, nodding in agreement. ‘Except we haven’t caught him on camera yet, which means he – meaning Trader – is staying away from the parts of the ship under surveillance.’

‘Then he must still be hiding somewhere on board the ship,’ said Dakota.

‘Listen,’ said Perez, ‘there’s something else you have to keep in mind before we go running off looking for him. Right now we’re down to less than fifty per cent jump capacity. There are also hull defects that need serious attention. We’d be at a huge disadvantage if we tried to jump into the target system right now.’

‘Dan’s right,’ Dakota said to Martinez, ‘and I understand you want to let the spider-mechs hunt for Whitecloud on their own and free the rest of us up for essential work, but we’ve still got a much better chance of catching him if you let me or Ted run the spiders. No amount of repair work is going to make a damn bit of difference if we don’t have the Mos Hadroch when we reach that cache.’