“There’s a lot of data on this ship, if you know where to find it and you know how to read it. I know where to go and how to get around. I’m sure you’ve realized that this lab, Lab 17, is heavily trapped against intruders. Well, I know where those traps are, and how to disarm them.”

Carson’s military mask did not perfectly conceal his pleasure at the idea that there was someone here to make his impossible job achievable. Tamara, if anything, looked warier than before.

“May I?” I asked, and Carson nodded at the soldier holding me captive, and the gun was lowered from my temple. “Thanks,” I said, and walked over to the trapped door.

The door itself was locked and sealed, creating the impression that the only obstruction to passing through it was the door itself. If you opened it, though, it would complete a five-thousand-year-old circuit, faithfully maintained by the AI, that would trigger a small and precise detonation. “The data I read said there’s a little bomb hidden in the wall, right about here,” I told Carson, patting the wall above where the nanomachines had told me there was a bomb.

He shouted someone over, who appeared carrying some sort of scanning device, which he waved over the surface of the wall where I’d indicated. At first he seemed to find nothing, then he frowned deeply and knelt beside the wall, tapping at the old metal while examining the readings on his device. Tamara stood in the back, shifting her weight from foot to foot, her glance darting between the wall and me.

“There’s a nugget back there,” the technician reported at last. “Solid, superficially resembles the Ministerial ball bombs. Maybe a very early version of that design.”

“Is it live?” Carson asked.

The technician nodded.

Carson looked at me. “Then we have you to thank, Mr. Wren,” he said, and called for someone to come disarm the bomb blocking the door. I stepped aside to let them through and, very discreetly, turned my palm to the wall. The skin of one of the cuts split, bright needle-pain, and a nanomachine drifted lazily and invisibly out to vanish into the wall and short the circuit, just in case.

The entire group split their focus, some guarding the rear exits from the room, others focused on disarming and unsealing the door. I could’ve told the soldiers guarding the rear exits that there was no point in watching those; there was nothing that way but dust. The only threat to them in Lab 17 lay ahead of them, on the other side of that sealed door—a threat I didn’t intend to let them face, and a bloodshed I wouldn’t allow to happen.

The others’ distraction gave Tamara Gupta the chance to corner me she’d been waiting for. She came up to me while I stood apart from the others, in a relatively private corner of the room. Her hair was tidied back into a braided bun and her expression was dark.