‘I’m just telling you what I see here,’ Nancy insisted, and he could tell he’d sounded too harsh. ‘A dead Atn, that’s it.’

Ty stood up and looked around. All he could see were smooth, unblemished rock walls, entirely devoid of glyphs, amid swirling dust. ‘All the evidence points right here,’ Ty reaffirmed, thinking out loud.

‘All right, and maybe it’s a deliberate red herring set up to misdirect anyone coming looking for the Mos Hadroch, and we fell for it.’

The same thought had already occurred to Ty, but he didn’t care to admit to it.

Commander Martinez’s icon blinked back into life at the bottom of Ty’s visor. ‘We just picked up a mass of gravity-traces located no more than three or four AUs from here,’ he informed them. ‘Whatever you think you have, grab it and get out, or you risk being left behind.’

Ty could feel the blood pounding in his head, and he felt suddenly sick with anxiety. He leaned forward, again shining sharp-edged light on the dead alien’s carapace markings, while he studied it for long seconds.

Think, he told himself. All they had so far was a name . . . they had no idea what the Mos Hadroch might look like, how big it was, or how small . . .

A sudden sense of excitement gripped him and he pinged Nancy with a request for a secure one-on-one link, at the same moment he severed his comms link with the Mjollnir ’s bridge.

Nancy accepted the link, and her voice came through a moment later. ‘What the hell, Ty?’ she asked. ‘Why did you just cut off the ship? Martinez’ll throw a fit.’

‘We can’t go back yet.’

Her shoulders slumped, her expression more puzzled than angry.

‘Look around you,’ he demanded. ‘What do you see?’

‘An empty passageway – and a dead alien.’

The Atn were a cyborg species, and only part organic, of course; that much was well known. Not that anyone had ever managed to prove it, but the general consensus was that their long-term memories and any other data stored in their brains could be passed from one individual to the next. That way you got creatures whose individual identities constantly shifted and changed, as they each accumulated the experiences of their brethren. What if he wondered, the Mos Hadroch was nothing more than some form of information, carefully hidden inside some dormant circuitry located somewhere inside what passed for this creature’s brain?

Ty shook his head, thinking hard and fast. No, that couldn’t be it. If that had been the case, they’d have done as well to hide the actual stack-discs here, too, rather than destroy them in their storage chamber.

He let out a snarl of exasperation and squatted on his haunches. ‘X marks the spot,’ he muttered.

‘What?’