‘I said,’ she hissed, through gritted teeth, ‘that I thought I was working for SC.’ She looked to one side and sighed heavily, then turned back to him. ‘Maybe I am, maybe I was, maybe there’s different bits of SC, maybe something else entirely, I just don’t know, don’t you understand?’

‘So who sent you?’ he asked, crossing his arms. The ownskin jacket slid round his torso; the module’s bio unit was cleaning his shirt. The suit still looked pretty good, he thought. The girl hadn’t changed out of her jewelled space suit (though she had used the module’s toilet, rather than whatever built-in units the suit had). She looked less and less like Dajeil Gelian every hour, he thought, her face becoming younger and finer and more beautiful all the time. It was a fascinating transformation to watch and if the circumstances had been different he’d have been aching at least to test the waters with her to see if there was any sort of mutuality of attraction here . . . but the circumstances were as they were, and right now the last thing he wanted to do was give her any impression he was ogling her.

‘I told you who sent me,’ she said, her voice cold. ‘A Mind. With the help . . . well, it looks more like collusion now, actually,’ she said with an insincere smile, ‘of my home world’s Mind.’ She took a deep breath, then set her lips in as tight a line as their fullness would permit. ‘I had my own warship for grief’s sake,’ she said bitterly, addressing the stars on the screen ahead of them. ‘Is it any wonder I thought it was all SC-arranged?’

She glanced back at the silent drone, then looked at him again.

‘Now we’re told our ship’s fucked off and we’ve to keep quiet about where we are. And the sort of trouble we had getting you off Tier . . .’ She shook her head. ‘Looked like SC to me . . . not that I know that much, but the machine thinks so too,’ she said, jerking her head to indicate the drone again. She looked him down and up. ‘Wish we’d left you there now.’

‘Well, so do I,’ he said, trying to sound reasonable.