When his rapid promotion attracted Thijss enmity, he had sought to learn as much about the chief of security as possible. And, in the course of his investigations, he discovered what the Demarchy had in store for their Speaker-Elect. Moreover, he discovered that the Magi ship at Dios known as the Ship of the Covenant had crash-landed only after being very nearly destroyed by the woman of whom Gabrielle was a clone.

The mind of that woman, whose name had been Dakota Merrick, had somehow come to be encoded within the memory banks of the Magi ship. Following its crash-landing, the ship itself had by some means recreated Merrick in body as well as mind, apparently in the hope that she would be willing to negotiate with the Demarchy in order to ensure the ships survival until that time, centuries hence, when it could complete its repairs and depart from Redstone.

Gabrielle had listened to all this while his hand caressed her hair as they lay together in her bedchamber, and her skin grew increasingly chill as awful detail followed upon awful detail.

At first, the Demarchy had been intent on dismantling the alien craft with the aim of penetrating its secrets. Extraordinarily powerful though it was, it had suffered incredible damage, for its drive-spines and much of its outer shell had been burned away during re-entry. But then this woman this Dakota Merrick had suddenly emerged, disoriented but physically intact, from the Magi ship. The Demarchys investigators had interrogated her for days, running tests that confirmed her physiology to be entirely human.

And yet there was evidence that she was not the original Dakota Merrick. She was clearly a clone of some kind, one whose last memory, prior to emerging from the ship, was of dying halfway across the galaxy, some centuries before.

This clone proved to be entirely unwilling to fulfil the task for which the Magi ship had apparently brought it back to life; nor was it willing to cooperate with the Demarchys interrogators. They had resorted to torture in the hopes of gleaning from Merrick any information relating to the Magi ship that might be turned to the Demarchys military or political advantage.

Their attempt proved wildly successful, for Merricks clone proved to be in some way able to tap into the wealth of knowledge contained within the Magi ships memory banks, and it imparted some of this knowledge under duress. But then the clone died while fleeing its guards, and before they had a chance to extract any more.

That might have been that, but the scientific and technological data the Demarchy of Uchida had thereby gained was valuable enough to barter in return for financial and military aid from the Accord. With such support, the neighbouring River Concord States were beaten into submission, while the Freehold once the dominant military force on Redstone was eventually reduced to a few violent extremists living in mountain caves.