She turned to see a figure looming out of the darkness, and knew immediately this was the man she was looking for. The figure resolved into an impossibly tall black man in his late twenties, with the ubiquitous shaved skull of a machine-head.

‘Miss Merrick,’ he repeated, now taking her hand with a smile. ‘Leroy Rivers. It’s wonderful to meet you at last.’

‘I should be thanking you,’ she replied. ‘I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find my way around this place without help.’

‘Nobody else knows you’re here?’ There was a precision in the way he spoke, each word and syllable meticulously phrased.

She shook her head. ‘You’re the only one I’ve told.’

Rivers bent down towards her a little, and dropped his voice. ‘We should not delay. It’s not safe to stay around here one second longer than we need to. I have transport nearby, and I managed to acquire one of the items you asked for at very short notice.’

She nodded, and he led her towards a small open car with tractor wheels, parked close to a pillar. ‘You’re part of the relief operation?’ she asked.

He laughed. ‘That is the idea, but it’s like using a teaspoon to bail out a sinking ship. All we’ve managed to bring here so far are a few emergency fabricators, and yet there are people dying of diseases that are supposed to be extinct.’

‘I see.’

‘There is not enough room for all the refugees,’ he continued, climbing into the driver’s seat. ‘We really need to expand into newer tunnels, but that means further negotiations with the Skelites, which is proving difficult, I’m afraid. There’s been a lot of clashes between the original settlers and the refugees, but the Skelites refuse to open up more space.’

‘Why not?’

‘They want star-drives seeded from the Tierra cache,’ he explained. ‘That’s their basic condition before they’ll enter into any kind of negotiation.’

Dakota nodded. ‘Right. I understand. They lost the coreship network along with us and the Bandati, so of course they don’t want to have to rely on the Fleet or anyone else.’

She climbed into the passenger’s seat, beside Rivers. He turned to look at her with an earnest expression. ‘I will be straight with you, Miss Merrick. When you told me you wanted to come here, helping you find someone I’ve never heard of was not my first priority. But your influence at Ocean’s Deep is enormous, and if the Skelites here were to think they might get their star drive, it could take a lot of the pressure off. At present it doesn’t take much to start a riot here, and before you know it there’s another dozen dead bodies. People generally need to know things are going to get better.’