Her two guards had then moved to either side of her, weapons drawn. They weren't taking any chances.

Trader appeared once more, entering the Royal Chamber and taking up a position slightly to one side of Dakota and midway between her and the Queen. Days of Wine and Roses had been the last to arrive, positioning himself at the far end of the chamber, presumably so he could keep an eye on both Dakota and Trader simultaneously.

Dakota watched as a fragile-looking tower, constructed on a wheeled base, was pushed up close to the Queen. An attendant then pulled himself up onto the platform at the tower's summit and placed an interpreter bead in the air immediately before the Queen's wide slit of a mouth. The attendant then hopped back down onto the deck, wings flaring momentarily, before scurrying away in some haste.

I'd be scared, too, standing next to that thing, Dakota reflected.

And then the Queen began to speak in words Dakota could understand, the programmed tones so outlandishly fragrant and sensual that Dakota could scarcely associate them with the monster before her.

'So this is the one who not only colluded in an attempt to steal from us the filmsuit technology we worked so hard to acquire, but a starship as well?' said the Queen. 'I must admit, Miss Merrick, to some indecision over whether to applaud or condemn you.'

'It wasn't like that,' Dakota grated. 'I didn't "steal" anything, particularly not your filmsuit. Let's just be clear on that.'

'There is substantial evidence,' the Queen replied, 'to the contrary. You would be facing serious charges of espionage, if the matter of the derelict starship wasn't considerably more urgent.'

'I said it wasn't like that. Okay?'

'Then perhaps,' the Queen replied, 'you would care to enlighten us before we move on to other matters.'

And Dakota began to tell her story. It had all started with a betrayal, only a few months before the destruction of Bourdain's Rock.

Quill's instructions for Dakota, which awaited her in the form of a lightly encrypted and therefore highly insecure transmission upon her arrival at one of Fullstop's lesser-known orbital ports, had been a triumph of nebulous wording and deliberate obfuscation, even when compared with her previous assignments. She was to meet a man called Lin Liao in a bar called The Wayward Dragon, in a district whose outer hull was still dotted with nacelles that had once housed nuclear missiles – a testament to less peaceful times.

The port itself had been constructed during one of the periods of political tension between Fullstop and its sister world Corkscrew.

It was well known that every 287 days, the two worlds came spectacularly close to crashing into each other; then Fullstop slid around the larger planet and went on its way. Although this was traditionally a cause for celebration, every now and then trade embargoes, political rivalries, clashes over available resources and ideological differences between these two worlds would result in one or the other starting a shooting war at the point of closest approach. The celebrations held at such times were inclined to have a decidedly fatalistic edge.

Only Fullstop, however, enjoyed the attention brought to it by the dreamwind spores that drew those in search of ecstatic revelation to its capital city.

'You understand, "Fullstop" and "Corkscrew" are not their true names, not their original names,' Lin Liao had explained to her, peering over the long-stemmed pipe he fiddled with constantly.

Lin Liao wore traditional Chinese garb, fine cloth with gold and silver threads woven into intricate patterns. His eyes had been bio-engineered so that Dakota found herself peering into twin green slits like the eyes of a particularly hungry lizard-demon. Clearly extremely ill-at-ease, he studied her through the cloud of smoke that emerged from the pipe. His nervousness did nothing for her own state of mind.

'That's interesting,' Dakota replied in a voice that conveyed her complete lack of interest, but Liao either didn't notice or care about her reaction.

'Corkscrew is known as Nuwi in the Chinese language,' he explained, sounding like he was desperate to distract himself from whatever was really occupying his mind. 'And Fullstop is Fuxi. The names are those of a brother and sister from ancient myth, and most often they are pictured as intertwined, crossing the heavens together.' Liao smiled. 'You can see the significance.'

I can see that you're worried about something, she had thought. 'The shipment?' she asked, desperate to get it all over with.

Liao halted in mid-flow and looked over at her. 'Yi has been delayed,' he replied, a touch gruffly.

'Bit public here, don't you think?' she said, nodding her head to either side to indicate the crowded and busy bar around them.

He shrugged. 'Most of these people are Tong,' he said, as if that explained everything.

Dakota glanced around again. 'Most of them aren't of Asian descent,' she observed.

'Yeah, well. The Tongs are equal-opportunity secret societies these days,' Liao replied with a small note of irritation. 'So nobody's going to hassle us, all right?' His lizard-eyes glanced nervously towards the rear of the bar behind her, and she resisted the urge to turn and look.

Lin's gaze dropped back to the table between them and Dakota kept her mouth shut, determined not to be sidetracked into small talk. She studied her own drink, the liquid sloshing up slightly on one side due to the port ring's coriolis effect.

Half a minute passed in an uncomfortable silence, then Lin looked up suddenly, his head cocked slightly to one side and his gaze focused on some indeterminate point between them. She guessed he was receiving a message, almost certainly from Yi. He nodded to the air and stood abruptly.

Dakota gazed up at him. 'Lin, I don't know what you're playing at, but I'll be straight with you. Someone's been trying to screw around with my ship since I disembarked, and we both know that can't be good for the health of either us. The faster I'm gone from here the better, so I really don't have the time for stupid-'

'Okay,' he said, as if completely oblivious to everything she'd just said. 'There's a room in the back where we can all talk. Come on.'

I don't want to- Dakota started to say, but Lin was already barging his way through to the rear of the bar.

She stood and followed him, despite an increasingly stony weight in the centre of her gut. She had to move fast to keep up as Lin jogged through a busy kitchen area, and then pushed open a door leading into a refrigeration room. Dakota followed him inside to find a large, ragged piece of carpet had been tacked over part of the bulkhead that formed the room's rear wall. Lin twitched the carpet aside and Dakota saw a crude door had been burned through the bulkhead, the edges looking rough and half-melted.

She followed Lin through this bolthole and found herself in a cramped space furnished with reed mats, low tables and large embroidered cushions in rich shades of gold and red. Wreaths of smoke rose up from ornate incense-burners, tickling the insides of her nostrils.

Several wall hangings covered in Chinese characters disguised the bare metal walls all around her, yet it was clear that this room had not been designed with domestic occupation in mind, for a large, bare girder crossed the width of the low ceiling, and a series of pressure pipes ran up one wall, gurgling sporadically.

Yi lay sprawled across one of the cushions, watching with a brooding, nervous expression as they entered. Where Lin was tall and willowy with a narrow face, Yi – his sister – was smaller and more compact, with the lithe strength and grace of a dancer, which had in fact been her chosen career prior to the most recent outbreak of hostilities between the Two Planets. Since then she had gained a reputation as a merciless warrior with a strong nationalistic streak and a string of recorded kills to her name. Her rise within the criminal societies of Fullstop had been even more spectacular following the resumption of an uneasy peace.