I cleaned myself up as best I could, then cleaned up what I could of the blood and the puke in the galley. I left the bodies where they were for now, then went to the control room. The first thing I paid heed to was the ship’s clock, which told me I’d been in Garval’s hideaway for a day and a half – about half what it felt like. The second thing I noticed was the sickly pulsing glow of the sweeper. The instrument was still running on some minimal power. Captain Jastrabarsk’s ship was still showing up at maximum range, but unless I was reading the sweeper wrong, there was no one close to us.

Except there wasn’t any ‘us’ now.

Just me.

I went to the squawk console. Its dials and readouts were still aglow, but faintly. I’d watched Rackamore and the others when they used it, and although there were aspects I hadn’t got straight in my head, the basics weren’t too knotty. There were switches to receive and to talk, and various channel and power selectors. The console was still set as it had been in when Bosa Sennen made her demands to board.

I snapped the switches, worked the selector toggles, watched as the dials flickered almost to darkness before regaining their glow. My hand trembled on the ‘talk’ switch. I had seen Rackamore use it so many times, and the urge to scream for help was almost more than I could bear.

Almost.

I moved my hand from the switch, then found the main control that put the console to sleep. It snapped with a hard, definite clunk. The dials and readouts faded to darkness. I hoped they’d come back on again when next I tried.

I went to the sweeper and was about to do the same thing when a cold dread passed through me. I’d almost given myself away to Bosa. If the sweeper was active now, she would be aware of it – and she would know if someone was around to switch it off suddenly.

So I let the sweeper remain.

The cold was beginning to get to me, so I worked back through the ship to find some extra clothes, blanking the corpses in the galley as I passed through. The ship was cooler than it had been before the attack, her metal surfaces turning icy under my fingertips. My breath was showing up in the lungstuff.