“I don’t think Lolola is the critic. I think the actual critic got diverted somehow—maybe killed, maybe just kidnapped—and Lolola has their credentials. It’s a good scam, and if she’s going to use it again—which I would—it’ll be the former, rather than the latter, and she will have fully taken on their identity. Smart. Who questions something like a famous critic arriving to evaluate a place?”

“So while we were inadvertently being taken to Scourse, the ship just happened to have accidentally caught a real criminal, and one that was targeting it,” Dabry said.

“Which means she had ten times the reason to avoid getting there that we did.”

“Do you think that means the Orb she gave us isn’t real?” he said wistfully.

Niko gave him a look, shaking her head.

“She must have realized you were onto her,” he said. “And taking over the ship was the most efficient move, since we outnumber her. She doesn’t move like a fighter.”

“She’s wearing a very expensive body. Not many people can afford that sort of outlay. She might know some fighting, but that’s not her main purpose. She’s an infiltrator. Maybe a saboteur.”

“You think she would have tried to kill us en route?”

“I think it’s a possibility. After all, if we were dead, we couldn’t contradict anything she said.”

“The ship could.”

“It’s a ship. They’d look at its records and that’s it. And a ship like this doesn’t record what happens aboard it. Takraven will have disabled any mechanism like that. The rich like their privacy, and they like their lives undocumented.”

The ship refrained from commenting on the fact that it did, in fact, record things since Takraven had never specifically forbidden it, although he might have been led to believe that he had. It was aware it did things on occasion that Takraven would not have approved of; it was still deciding what Niko’s stance might be on such moments.

“I’m being disappointed,” Skidoo said regretfully. “That’s being a high-grade body Lolola’s wearing.”

“You’ll live. You might not have if you’d decided to test that body out,” Gio signed.

“All right, so now we see it all,” Niko said. “She was meant to steal this ship. Smart. They planted advance rumors, sent her in as a critic. TwiceFar’s far enough from the hub that there wouldn’t be any contradictions until long after the fact. And no one knows what form a Nikkelin critic will show up in.”

“Which they took even more advantage of by making sure that it was a form that would attract Arpat Takraven,” Dabry said.