It took an effort of will for Dakota to meet Rivers’s hopeful gaze. Things, she wanted to tell him, were just as bad everywhere. There were a thousand Leroy Rivers scattered over an area of space so vast it was difficult even to contemplate, all of them desperate to ward off a coming catastrophe.

She smiled in what she hoped was a convincing manner. ‘I can’t make any promises, Mr Rivers, because things are bad all over. But I’ll see what I can do when I get back to Ocean’s Deep.’

Rivers nodded and exhaled noisily, like a man who had just been unburdened of a heavy load. He turned to her again and smiled gently. ‘Thank you for telling me that.’ He reached down and activated a switch, and the car’s treads ground noisily.

She studied him. ‘You didn’t believe a word of what I just said, did you?’

‘No,’ he said, with a broad grin. ‘Not a word. But I still had to ask.’

Dakota looked away, biting her lip in shame.

‘Something for you,’ he said, pulling a plastic bag, filled with something that clanked noisily, out from under the dashboard.

He passed it over one-handed. Inside she found two short metallic tubes and something that looked like the grip of a gun.

‘The weapon is modular,’ Rivers explained. ‘All you need to do is snap the components together. The locals call these things “ratcatchers”. A small, high-capacity fusion battery housed in the grip powers the plasma bolts. Like I said, it’s the best I could get hold of at short notice. But you’re going to have to be careful about how you use it. They have a nasty habit of going wrong if they get overheated.’

She gave him a doubtful look. ‘Wrong, how?’

‘The battery is a fabricator hack job that bypasses the programmed safety limits. If it gets too hot, it blows up.’

She stared at him. ‘And this is seriously the best you could get?’

‘Weapons of any kind are in very short supply here. The second-stage Skelites themselves aren’t exactly lacking in armaments, but they’re less than keen on supplying them to us intruders.’

‘So they’re all home-made efforts like this?’ she asked, emptying the bag’s contents on the seat between her knees.

‘Yes. I think that particular one came from a fabricator originally designed for making customized kitchen components.’