‘You’re really confident of that?’

‘Confdence is not the issue, but speed of image processing, assignment of risk levels and reaction times are. The only chance of someone actually firing a weapon in my direction is if twenty-eight people were to attempt it simultaneously within the same four-second time frame.’ He glanced at her. ‘You yourself installed the hardware in my head, you know what I can do.’

Hannah shrugged. ‘On an intellectual level, yes.’ She nodded towards the airlock. ‘Here’s Messina.’

Still watching her, Saul grinned. ‘Did you think I needed telling?’

He turned to the airlock from which Messina had just emerged, with four large and heavily augmented bodyguards gathered round him. The Chairman wore a vacuum combat suit, doubtless state-of-the-art, but perhaps still wanted to put some flesh between himself and potential bullets. However, rather than go and lose himself in the growing crowd gathered at the dock edge, he walked directly towards Saul, and came to a halt only five metres away, his bodyguards lining up behind him.

‘Your decision,’ said Saul quietly.

Hannah assumed he had addressed the Chairman, but when Messina showed no reaction she realized the words had been for her ears only. She was tired and now wanted to just be somewhere safe, so she could sleep, but the implication of those two words had her chest tightening and her heartbeat thundering in her ears. Panic attack – she’d been here before. Perhaps this meant that somewhere inside she was feeling safe, sufficiently out of danger for her false friend to return. She tried to breathe calmly, to get it all under control: in through her nose and out through her mouth. Saul turned to look at her and waited. Messina was speaking, she could see. Saul probably listened to his words and discounted them. Messina’s control of his own destiny had ceased some while ago.

‘My decision,’ she managed, the thundering in her ears retreating but the tightness in her chest increasing. ‘I am going to defer my decision.’

‘That you cannot do.’

‘Yes, I can.’ She shrugged, trying to get angry enough to drive away the feeling of losing control. ‘It is my decision that, until I come to some final decision, all of these people will be confined to Arcoplex One.’

Saul nodded, with a hint of a smile. ‘Yes, appropriate.’ He then turned back to Messina, snapping, ‘Shut up.’ Hannah heard Messina’s last words tailing off, as Saul now included her and probably everyone else in the communication. ‘Here’s what is going to happen.’ He glanced from those already huddled at the edge of this dock to those still fling across from other docking faces. ‘You will all head towards the back of this pillar, and proceed through to the endcap of Arcoplex One, where you’ll enter through the airlock there. I see there are one hundred and ninety-three of you, so I leave it to yourselves to organize who enters first and who enters last, on the basis of air supply, since each cycling of the lock will take a minimum of two minutes and it will only hold four of you at a time.’