In fact, she and her brother were two of Dakota's least favourite people in the known universe.

Lin now paced nervously around the room, near his sister. 'We want to make a proposal,' he said, glancing towards Dakota.

'A deal,' Yi corrected. She gave her brother a sharp glance before regarding Dakota with hazel eyes that were as pretty as their owner was callous. 'A deal concerning what it is you're here to pick up.'

Dakota briefly considered her options. Immediately turning around and walking back the way she came was the favoured one; but that meant returning to Quill empty-handed, which was something she couldn't afford to do.

'Yi, play "Dragon Lady of the Spaceways" all you like, but I'm here on business. It doesn't involve impromptu "deals". You offload my shipment, and replace it with the agreed quantity of dreamwind spores. I stay away in the meantime, and, as far as anyone else is concerned, I'm here on legitimate business. When you're done, I fly away again. I never heard of you, and you never heard of me. And yet,' she glanced deliberately around the room, 'I have to put up with all this clandestine bullshit and get myself seen in public with your brother. Why is that?'

'There has been a change in circumstances,' Yi replied.

'Really?' Dakota stared at the other woman in a stunned silence for a few moments. 'All right, then, there's a protocol for exactly this kind of situation. I'm going to go back out through that bar. I'm going to go shopping and pretend I was never here talking to you, while you, as far as I know, get busy loading up the spores. If you can't do that, some very nasty people are probably going to come here and ask you why.' Dakota stabbed one thumb towards the room's half-melted entrance. 'So I'll be leaving right now, okay?'

Yi's expression was faintly amused. 'Remind me what it is we got our hands on?' she asked Lin.

'Some kind of fancy alien personal shield tech,' Lin replied. Thick, orange-green smoke squirted from his nostrils as he took another hit from his pipe, and Dakota smelled the distinctive aroma of burning dreamwind spores. 'Acquired from Atn traders, who acquired it themselves from God knows where. They might have been carrying it at sub-light speeds for centuries, for all we know. You know what the Atn are like; they don't care how long it takes as long as they get wherever the hell it is they're going.'

Dakota shook her head. 'I have no idea what you're talking about.'

'Restricted technology,' Yi replied. 'Stuff the Shoal doesn't want us to have. We… acquired it, and now we need your help.'

Dakota stepped backwards towards the exit. 'Right, fuck you, in that case. We're finished doing business. I-'

She turned, and yelled in surprise when her shoulder touched a shaped-field barrier that had suddenly appeared across the half-melted exit. It sparkled where she had collided with it, and her shoulder smarted.

Lin cackled, and instantly started to cough. Dakota turned back towards the brother and sister in time to see Yi reach behind her cushion to retrieve and activate a dock-worker's torchgun that had been hidden out of sight.

Torchguns were handheld plasma-arc cutters designed for small repair jobs and quick fixes, and a device Dakota was far from unfamiliar with. Yi pointed it at Dakota, holding it steady with the other hand under her wrist. The tip of the nozzle was already incandescent with heat. Strictly speaking it wasn't a weapon, and had a range of barely more than half a metre; close up, however, it could do serious damage, and Dakota was currently close enough…

'Didn't you ever hear that line about not shooting the messenger?' Dakota asked, carefully keeping her hands by her sides where the other woman could see them.

Lin wiped at his eyes with one hand, still sniggering. 'Sorry, it was the look on her face. She…' he snickered again, then belched smoke and began to cough loudly.

Yi spared her brother a brief and deeply hateful glance. 'We meant it about a deal,' she repeated, returning her gaze to Dakota, her anger evident. 'We just aren't interested in giving you a choice in this matter.'

'But a "deal" sort of implies I get something out of it, Yi.'

'Well, yeah. We're going to need your ship – and in return, you get to stay alive.'

'What do you mean "need my ship"? I need my ship.'

Lin sniffed and wiped a hand over his face. 'We had a problem, you see. We-'

Yi's face grew red with anger. In one smooth motion, she turned towards her brother, still standing to one side of her, and now pointed the torchgun at him.

A moment later there was a searing flash of light that left Dakota momentarily blinded. She stood frozen with shock, her ears full of Lin's screams. She covered her eyes, waiting for vision to return. When she could see again, Lin was lying on his side and panting like a sick dog, both hands gripping his thigh. The smell of burning flesh now drowned out the more delicate scent of incense. Dakota saw part of one trouser leg had burned away, revealing charred meat and the sickening sight of exposed bone. With his slit green eyes, the injured Lin looked far more like an injured animal than anything human. Dakota looked away.

Yi was standing now, her face a mask of apocalyptic rage. Dakota stayed where she was without moving.

'Fuck! I told you to let me do the talking, didn't I?' Yi screeched. 'But you had to start smoking those fucking spores, you miserable, useless piece of shit! This is all your fault!'

She turned back to Dakota, talking rapidly. 'Shithead here had the bright idea of investing in a hijack operation that grabbed a shipment being smuggled to some Bandati Hive. The hijackers got a hell of a lot more than they bargained for, though, including prohibited tech which wound up here when they realized the Bandati wanted it back very, very badly.' She paused momentarily for breath. 'Except my dear brother here has such a hard time keeping his mouth shut that word got out – and now the Bandati are looking for both of us.'

'So I happened to turn up just when you needed to get out of town?' Dakota replied stonily.

'Tough shit. You're in as deep as we are now, so you've got even more reason to help me get out of here.' She waved towards one of the wall hangings. 'There's another door behind there. Go open it.'

Dakota stepped towards the hanging and pulled it back to reveal a pressure door. Lin went on whimpering and cursing from where he lay on the floor, his skin pale and slick with sweat. Yi stepped forward and ripped the hanging away from the wall. Dakota then spun the wheel on the door, all too aware of the steady hiss of the torchgun's nozzle only millimetres from her spine.

The door hissed open and Yi gestured for her to step through. Dakota found herself on a wide metal platform running along one side of an open docking bay. Overhead was a curving metal roof equipped with gantries on which escape pods had once been mounted during the port's military days. Beyond that and below the platform was only hard vacuum.

The dusty yellow-green surface of Fullstop, several thousand kilometres distant, wheeled out of sight as the port rotated on its axis. The bay was separated from the vacuum by shaped fields and, even though she'd been in many such bays, Dakota's stomach always did a small flip when she was confronted with such a sight.

Some of the gantries were occupied, she saw, by a variety of ground-to-orbit shuttles. Further along the platform they now stood on were several other doors identical to the one they'd just stepped through. She wondered at the chances that some or any of them might be unlocked, and whether Yi would be expecting her to make a break for it.

She turned, and looked at the door they'd just emerged from. A sign on it read: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY: EMERGENCY LIFE-SUPPORT amp; MAINTENANCE SYSTEMS ACCESS.