But if by some miracle this trip to the Rock worked out, it would have been worth the deception-and worth her botching the Corkscrew delivery.

The vibrations had faded by the time Dakota exited the ship. But when her Ghost suddenly fired a pulse of nervous attentiveness into the middle of her thoughts, she braced automatically, and a moment later the ship had jerked hard enough to propel her away from the hull. She drifted a couple of metres away before the lanyards roughly yanked her back.

That’s it, she thought. Screw Quill, and screw Bourdain. I’m going in to look.

She found her way to the cargo bay’s external airlock. The crew of the ship she’d rendezvoused with for the pickup had spent a busy hour installing security devices inside the cargo bay, while she herself waited inside the command module.

Dakota reached up and pulled the manual override key, which she wasn’t supposed to possess, off the narrow wire she’d loosely strung around her neck. Bourdain’s installed security was good-the best money could buy-but it was off-the-shelf, and could be circumvented.

She adjusted her position, tightening the lanyard until her feet were firmly planted on the hull, and with one hand took hold of one of the hand-grips extending from the airlock door, still clutching the key in her other hand. She held this position for a minute, recalling her conversation with Quill, thinking about the risk she was about to put herself at.

If I do this and Bourdain finds out, losing the money and the Piri’ll be the least of my problems. Maybe it’s not worth it.

She reached out with the override key, and paused again.

But then again, I have no idea what it is I’m transporting. What if those vibrations get worse? What if it’s something that could destroy the Piri itself?

She tried to imagine a new life without the Piri Reis, her only home for several years now, and found she couldn’t.

Once more she reached out with the key. Once more she paused.

On the other hand, with the life-support apparently irretrievably down, she couldn’t even hide in the Piri’s medbox until she made it to the Rock, nor would her filmsuit last long enough to keep her alive in the meantime. Her only other option was the tiny one-man lifeboat she always kept on board, but it also had limited air and battery power.

Fuck that, she thought, and started to insert the key, just as she felt a familiar tingling at the top of her spine.

‹Dakota?›

Piri?!

She froze, the key still poised in one hand. For a moment she thought she’d only imagined the ship’s voice inside her mind. A wave of exhausted relief flooded through her.

Piri, what happened to you? You were out of contact for, for-

‹Approximately twenty minutes, Dakota. Life-support systems have been reactivated. I have no records relating to the downtime.›

Dakota let go of the key. Then her eyes closed for several moments behind their slippery film, and she sent out a fervent prayer to no one in particular. It was over.

Aboard the Piri, she lowered the lights and crawled exhausted into her sleeping space. She’d have to clean up before disembarking on the Rock. That meant goodbye to now familiar body odour: regular hygiene was easy to forget in the long, lonely weeks between departure and arrival. She barely noticed the random detritus of her hermetical existence that now floated in freefall throughout the living space, even drawing a kind of comfort from it.

As so often these days, loneliness and depression swept over Dakota, lying alone in the dark. The ship’s soft fur felt warm under her skin, yet something was missing.

It didn’t take long for the Piri to respond to her unspoken need.

She was facing the wrong way to see a familiar shape detach itself from one wall, but she could imagine it easily. A tall, warm-bodied effigy of a man, its face as smooth and bland as its artificial flesh, its machine eyes imbued with fake emotion.

In the dim red light seeping through from the command module, she saw the silhouette of its smooth curved buttocks as it kneeled over her, soft moist lips kissing her gently on her naked belly.

‘Dakota?’

Her ship spoke to her through the lips of the effigy. It had soft brown hair, almost indistinguishable from the real thing. Cables like umbilicals ran from its spine and into the wall-slot where it spent most of its existence-her ship made flesh.

She was so used to it now, it was beginning to feel natural.

‘Dakota, your nervous system is again flooded with high-grade Samadhi neural boosters. Perhaps you are over-indulging-’

‘Don’t lecture me, Piri.’ Dakota smiled, both her thoughts and body warm and fuzzy.

‘Yes, Dakota. However, it does concern me that-’

That I’m not dealing properly with my past. Dakota felt a surge of anger, but it was soon gone under a flood of neurochem that washed the bad feelings away. If you were really intelligent and not just doing a remarkable imitation of sentience, I’d-

Dakota wasn’t sure what she would do, but it would be mean. Mean and nasty. She smiled as she felt the effigy press down on her, smooth and soft and almost indistinguishable from the real thing in the warm dark.

Bourdain’s Rock measured fifteen kilometres along its widest axis, eight along its narrowest. Before Concorrant Industries had drilled out the asteroid’s core and plugged a planet engine into its empty centre, it had drifted for the better part of a billion years on a looping elliptical orbit, taking it close to the edge of the heliosphere before circling back in past Jupiter and Saturn. Several years before, Concorrant-built fusion jets had manoeuvred the asteroid into a permanent, stable orbit out beyond the most remote of Jupiter’s native moons.

Dakota had seen pictures of the asteroid before Alexander Bourdain had paid the Shoal to work their magic on it. The images had then reminded her of a fossilized turd she had once seen on display in a museum. To some extent it still looked like a fossilized turd, but one that had been sculpted with explosive nuclear chisels until its shape approximated that of a rough-edged flattened sphere. Its surface was still cratered with deep cracks running along one side, but had now been transformed into a chiaroscuro of blues and greens, like a child’s drawing of a tiny world with exaggerated people and buildings towering over its minuscule surface area.

The planet engine created a field of gravity by some arcane trick of physics that still baffled those human scientists who took it upon themselves to try and figure out the Shoal super-science behind it. The engine also generated a series of shaped fields that surrounded the asteroid, containing a pressurized atmosphere that extended no more than a few hundred metres beyond the asteroid’s surface while also filtering out radiation and retaining heat. It was a grand, baroque gesture on the part of a man who had inherited a fortune reaped from the helium-three mining operations at the heart of Jovian industry. More, it was a demonstration of the power the outer-system civilizations now wielded.