Beyond the vaulting walls of the tower chamber, thousands of lenses showed to Trader the waters around the Commander’s vessel beginning to boil. ‘We have no fleets to spare, certainly not on the scale you’ve requested. If I were to provide them to you, it would lead to certain questions being asked – questions I would not care to answer. And if such a scandal were to be exposed at a time such as this, it would shatter the Hegemony so thoroughly that no weapon, no matter how legendary or powerful, could possibly save us.’

‘If you refuse to help me, you condemn us all to death!’ The Commander paused in the act of turning to leave. ‘I am offering you the slim chance of returning a victorious hero, rather than as a fugitive. Which is more than some might think you deserve. Find your own fleet, if you can, Trader. Then return triumphant, or do not return at all.’

Chapter Eight

A holographic simulation of the Milky Way filled the shallow dome of the debriefing room as Corso entered, angled so that the wispy trail of a spiral arm hovered just a few metres above the floor. The air inside the room felt pleasantly chilly, the atmosphere in the rest of the Bandati orbital station being too warm and humid for his comfort. He had only just arrived back at Ocean’s Deep aboard a transport called the Kilminster, along with more than a hundred newly recruited technical specialists who would continue on to the research base at Tierra.

Lamoureaux stepped towards him from out of the gloom. ‘Senator.’

Corso nodded and dropped into one of twenty chairs arranged around the circumference of the room and facing towards its centre. ‘I literally just came down the spoke. I got your report about White-cloud. Where is he now?’

‘Still up at the hub, on board a ship. Ray and Leo both felt it was safer keeping him there.’

Corso nodded tiredly and glanced towards the glistening star-simulation. ‘Fair enough. How about we get started?’

Lamoureaux nodded and stepped back towards the centre of the room. ‘This is where we are,’ he said, turning slightly to regard the simulation.

A minuscule ball of light representing the Consortium blinked into life deep inside the Orion spiral arm. It was easy to miss amongst the surrounding starscape.

‘I can never get over how tiny it looks,’ Corso muttered.

‘It is tiny,’ Lamoureaux agreed, ‘on the galactic scale of things. Now, remember some of what I’ll be showing you consists of best guesses and conjecture.’

‘That’s fine.’

Half a dozen yellow pinpricks, their brightness oscillating rapidly to make them stand out from the surrounding starscape, appeared at various points scattered through the Orion Arm and beyond. Lines representing trajectories connected each pinprick to the ball of light representing the Consortium.

‘The yellow dots represent the furthest points reached by our experimental probes,’ Lamoureaux explained.