‘How many of you were there, down there?’

‘I’m not entirely sure—’

‘How many?’

‘Seventeen . . . fourteen now.’

‘Their location?’

Freyda eventually volunteered a grid reference deep in the forests.

‘There is something there,’ Jack informed Aphran. ‘It’s shielded, but not sufficiently so.’

‘Now,’ said Aphran, ‘what brought you here?’ She gritted her non-existent teeth through the ensuing political diatribe, and kept asking the same questions until Freyda provided the true answer.

‘High level ECS agents to kill—that’s always attractive.’

‘How did you know they would be here?’

While she waited for the answer, Aphran listened in on coms traffic both within the ship and way below, as the shuttle down on the surface, containing Thorn, Scar and fifty dracomen, launched on a heading to the coordinates just revealed.

‘I was told.’ Freyda abruptly stood and eyed Aphran up and down. ‘Is that how you appear now, the princess, the lady in white . . . one of the good guys?’

‘It is how I like to appear.’

‘Perhaps you’ve forgotten Coloron, then. Thellant N’komo still runs things there, and it’s him you need to talk to. Where he got his information from I don’t know, but it was him that sent us here.’

Aphran allowed her image to fade totally, then, as an afterthought, sent the signal that paralysed Freyda. The Separatist woman dropped like a pole. Aphran observed as the door now opened and the telefactor entered, carrying the aug they would use to record Freyda’s mind and check the veracity of her story.

‘Do we ship her back to Earth?’

‘No,’ Jack replied.

‘Kill her?’

‘No.’

‘What then?’

‘Sentence was passed on Freyda long ago, should she ever be caught. Death or erasure to be carried out as soon as feasible after her capture. After I have taken a recording of her mind, checked her story, and gleaned from it all knowledge that might be useful to ECS, I will wipe the recording and then wipe her mind. We will put her body into coldsleep, as there are still plenty of minds in the Soulbank who would be grateful for the physical vessel.’

And that being how the Polity dealt with its criminals, Aphran felt die then any hope she harboured for a future.