The Bandati made another gesture and the bead changed colour, now glowing a bright, fiery orange. A moment later the torturer's mouth-parts began to rattle and click once more. Simultaneously, words – recognizably human words – emerged from a point midway between Dakota and her interrogator, generated by the bead. The accent was harsh, machine-like, making it hard to distinguish one word from another.

'-silence. To speak not speak when questioned. Questioning/enquiring/interrogative point of origin? Response.'

The creature's mouth parts stopped clicking and the simultaneous translation ceased. The words had been garbled nonsense.

'Questioned/Responding?' The Bandati asked again, its own rapid clicks providing a percussive backdrop to the bead's machine voice. 'Answer? Again.'

'I…' Dakota licked her lips, and shook her head. 'I don't understand.'

Dakota's interrogator regarded her silently. A fresh torrent of clicks poured out from the bead, and she guessed they were her own words translated into the Bandati's language.

To Dakota's surprise, as the clicks poured forth, a rich variety of scents briefly filled the air between them, making Dakota think of dying flowers and oiled copper. She now vaguely recalled that the Bandati employed scent glands in some parts of their communication.

The interrogator reached out to the levitating bead and it changed in hue once more. The creature clicked more rapidly and, she imagined, more angrily.

'Understanding now?'

Dakota nodded. 'Maybe. Yes.'

'Dakota Merrick. Your theft. From us, of thing stolen-was-ours. Skin of darkness.'

It was getting hard to think, now her initial rush of adrenalin was beginning to fade. The drugs they'd fed her with were once again tugging her thoughts towards oblivion.

Then she realized it was talking about the filmsuit.

All she had to do was close her eyes, and the filmsuit would Fresh pain burned every nerve-ending in her body.

'Do not do that, Dakota Merrick.'

She twisted within her restraints once more, catching sight of the matt black of her activated filmsuit slithering across her bare skin, retreating back into her navel and sliding back between her thighs from where it had briefly emerged like night-stained mercury. She tasted its kiss as it slithered past her lips and back down her throat.

Back in her cell, when her filmsuit had failed to activate on her mental command, she'd wondered if the skeletal implants responsible for generating it had somehow been removed from her body without her knowledge.

It's still there, she realized, even through the pain. But why hadn't it worked that previous time? For a moment salvation had seemed so very close at hand, but her Bandati interrogator had somehow reversed the filmsuit's progress.

'Fuck you,' she mumbled, a deep core of bitter anger rising past the terror and pain. 'Fuck you and your questions. I came here on board a ship. Where is it? Where is it?' she yelled.

'We wish to know everything about the starship. It is not human. It is not Bandati. It is not Shoal, yet it travels between the stars.'

She spat straight into the creature's face. Probably the creature had no idea of the significance of the gesture, but for a very brief moment the action made her feel better.

When it lowered the pain-inductor to her forehead once more, she guessed it probably had a pretty good idea what her gesture had meant after all. The next time she opened her eyes, she was back in her cell.

Fat raindrops pitter-pattered on the protruding lip beyond the door-opening as a fresh migraine assaulted her like something trying to tear its way out through her skull. She clutched at her depilated scalp, her fear made all the worse for not knowing what was happening to her until, following long hours of agony, the pain began to subside. After a while, merciful sleep stole her away again.

She woke to notice a pipe sticking out of the inner wall. She rubbed the viscous liquid between her fingers and touched it to her lips. An overwhelming hunger made her…

She gripped the pipe in her trembling hands and felt a deep, instinctive terror.

Ambrosia.

Where had that word come from?

Dakota pushed herself back over to the far side of the cell and crouched on her haunches next to the door-opening, staring hungrily at the pipe, knowing it was her one and only source of sustenance.

If there was any one thing she could remember from her past life, it was the value of trusting her instincts. Time passed with excruciating slowness and select memories began to return to her; and with them came snatches of what had happened to her at the bottom of a deep, sunlit shaft.

Her hunger and thirst became worse. Yet she couldn't rid herself of the terror that if she drank from the pipe, she would once again find herself back in that sunlit shaft. So she spent all her time hunkered down on the hard metal floor next to the door-opening, staring outside as the sun moved across the sky.

Her thoughts became clearer.

After some indeterminate amount of time had passed, she turned her back on the city and carefully lowered herself over one side of the lip that extended beyond the only entrance. She pushed her bare toes into the deep grooves of the tower's wall, breathing hard, gripping handholds tightly.

Her breasts chafed against the edge of the metal lip, but she managed to cling on for a minute or two before pulling herself back in to safety, gasping and trembling from the effort. She'd become weak for lack of exercise, and the lack of food or water wasn't helping any either. More headaches assailed her, each worse than the last. She whined like a kicked dog, curling herself up against the frame of the door as the evening drew on until a fitful sleep mercifully stole her away. She dreamed she was lost in some vast, depopulated metropolis, whose echoing streets felt so recently abandoned she could still hear the lingering voices of those who had once dwelled there.

She opened her eyes to warm rain drizzling down between the multiple towers. She crawled back out onto the lip, heedless of the sheer drop beyond, and caught the rainwater in her cupped hands, drinking it until her thirst was slaked. When she had swallowed enough, she caught more and used it to wash the grease from her skin, rubbing at her flesh with wet hands until it grew red from the friction.

Her dream of a city had not, in fact, been a dream, she now realized.

She recognized it as a tenuous contact with the derelict starship; the city streets she'd explored had been taken from its memory stacks. They were nothing more than the long-dead dreams of fallen empires, and yet she felt a powerful nostalgia for them, as if the experience of interacting with the starship's virtual worlds were more real than the here and now. More days passed, and even as her strength failed, so Dakota's ability to communicate with the derelict starship grew. Her mind was carried far from the terrible racking agonies of her body whenever she slept.

The derelict meanwhile tapped into databases located throughout the tower within which she was trapped, and began to feed her details concerning her whereabouts. She discovered she was in a Bandati-controlled system called Night's End. The particular world she found herself on was Ironbloom, and the towers that surrounded her formed the city of Darkwater.

She felt the derelict – so immensely more powerful than she'd previously realized – slowly extend its influence throughout the planet's interconnected communications systems, like a virus subverting a living body to its own dark purpose. She discovered that the derelict was being held in an orbital facility, under conditions of the utmost secrecy, in another part of the Night's End system. She saw great swirls of cloud through the derelict's senses, the surface of a gas giant seen from close up: clearly the facility orbited one of its moons. She witnessed Bandati engineers attempting to penetrate the derelict's outer hull, with limited success.