Piri?

She tried switching to a different comms channel but still couldn’t get an answer.

‘Fucking asshole Quill!’ she shouted into the darkness, her fear rapidly transmuting into anger. At least her Ghost circuits were still functioning: she let them flood her brain with empathogens and phenylethylamine, brightening her mood and keeping outright terror at bay.

Dakota started to breathe more easily. It was only a minor emergency, an easily fixable systems fault. She soon found the first of several manual override switches and punched it a lot harder than necessary. Emergency lights flickered on, and a single klaxon alert began to sound from the direction of the command module. The life support, however, remained resolutely inactive.

One thing she was certain of. Whatever the source of her present troubles, it was surely within the cargo bay.

‘I can’t take that kind of chance,’ Dakota had warned Quill several days earlier.

The asteroid Sant’Arcangelo’s central commercial complex was visible through the panoramic window filling one wall of the shipping agent’s office. Vehicles slid constantly along cables slung across between the two sides of a mountainous crack cutting deep into the crust of the Shoal-boosted asteroid. Birds flew in dizzy flocks through air so thick and honeyed you could almost drink it, while trees sprouted from slopes as broken and jagged as they’d been on the day of creation. On either side, both slopes were festooned with buildings and shopping complexes that literally hung suspended from tens of thousands of unbreakable cables criss-crossing the enormous void.

Just a few hundred metres above this city of Roke’s Folly, the narrow wrapping of atmosphere ceased abruptly at the perimeter of the containment field wrapped around Sant’Arcangelo. Beyond that lay the cold wastes of the asteroid belt.

‘Dakota.’ When he spoke, Quill combined all the verbal qualities of a stern teacher and a favourite uncle. ‘There is no risk involved. What could be simpler? My client loads an unspecified cargo into your ship. You fly your ship to Bourdain’s Rock, where you then allow my client to retrieve his cargo and go on his way. Where’s the risk in that?’

Quill shook his head, apparently incredulous. ‘Look. If it weren’t for the fact I’m not a pilot with a reputation as good as yours used to be, I’d do the job myself.’ He moved over from where he’d been standing next to the window, and sat down opposite Dakota. ‘So tell me how it’s taking a chance.’

She stared at Quill and laughed. ‘For a start, you can stop pretending I don’t know that we’re talking about Alexander Bourdain himself. I know things about Bourdain that would make the hair stand up and creep off your head. I’ve dealt with him a couple of times before, and I’d rather take my chances stark naked in a cage full of hungry wolves. And, on top of that, I won’t even know what it is I’ll be delivering to him?’ Dakota shook her head. ‘Gangsters like Bourdain-’

‘Wrong,’ Quill interrupted. ‘He’s not a gangster.’ He glanced back towards the window, momentarily hiding his face from her. ‘All those charges were dropped, remember?’

She wanted to take Quill by the throat and ram his head against the window behind him. It took an extreme effort of will not to start shouting at him. ‘Well, I heard how one witness died mysteriously in an accident, and by remarkable coincidence all the others changed their testimony within a couple of days of that. Excuse me if I don’t feel totally convinced.’

Quill returned his gaze to her briefly. Then he walked over to the door of his office and opened it. ‘You, I think, need to get some trust into your life.’ He gestured her out of the door with his head. ‘Or are you telling me you don’t need this job so badly anymore?’

‘Shut the door. I haven’t changed my mind.’

Quill closed the door and went to stand over her, arms folded. Just then Dakota felt like she’d never hated anyone more in her whole life. ‘But it’s… it’s too much of a risk shipping something when I don’t even know what it is I’m delivering. That’s just asking for trouble!’

Quill pursed his lips. ‘You’ve still got some time to think about it: another eight hours before they need a definite answer. Though I should add, he’s … my client is in a hurry to finalize arrangements. Maybe I’d be better off getting someone else to-’

Dakota shook her head, suddenly weary. She was just making a fool of herself pretending to Quill she might have any choice. If she didn’t do this job for Quill, she’d forfeit her ship the Piri Reis to him. He’d been responsible for acquiring much of the highly illegal counter-surveillance and black ops devices now installed on the vessel, and Dakota still owed him for that equipment.

‘No. I’ll do it.’

‘Maybe I’ll-’

‘No.’

‘All right, then.’ Quill nodded and sat down again behind the low marble desk where he did much of his business. ‘We won’t need to worry too much about official channels, since I’ll be providing a manifest detailing something entirely innocuous-’

‘Don’t,’ she said sharply, cutting Quill off. ‘Just leave it. Load the cargo, tell the Consortium whatever you like, and just let me do the job. I don’t want to know anything more than I absolutely have to. I don’t even want to be having this conversation.’

Quill gazed at her blankly for a moment, then a small smile twitched at one corner of his mouth.

‘You know, you wouldn’t be stuck like this if you hadn’t messed up that job out at Corkscrew. Way I heard it, you were lucky the Bandati didn’t dump you in a hive and feed you to their grubs. They like doing that kind of thing, I hear.’

‘I delivered-but the people I was delivering to tried to kill me rather than pay me.’ Dakota’s voice rose in pitch. ‘I’m a machine-head, yes, but I’m not a fucking psychic. I didn’t know what they were going to try.’

‘Shame Bourdain’s now got you running jobs like this as penance, I guess.’ Quill smiled, watching Dakota rage in impotent silence, then gave her the details.

‘Okay, you’re going to have to rendezvous with another ship at these coordinates…’

A few minutes after the Piri Reis’s systems had ceased functioning, Dakota stepped into space and secured herself using intelligent lanyards. These snaked out of a belt she wore around her waist, and embedded themselves in the hull, constantly retracting and shooting out again to attach to a new point as she pushed herself on around the hull in the direction of the cargo bay.

She was still getting used to the filmsuit she’d stolen from the Bandati during her visit to Corkscrew. It coated her naked flesh just like a thick layer of dark chocolate, protecting her from the vacuum and radiation just millimetres from her skin. It smoothed out her features, making her appear, to any potential observer, like an animated doll. Her lungs were stilled, their function temporarily taken over by microscopic battery units she’d had implanted in her spinal column. She was, in effect, a one-woman spaceship, though there was a clear limit to just how long the suit would keep functioning before the batteries needed recharging.