He was led on towards a mobile platform set into the floor of the bay that started to sink as soon as all four of them had fully stepped onto it, dropping them down into another chamber almost as big as the one immediately above it.

This one, however, was filled with a deep gloom, through which occasional flashes of light sparked and flickered eerily. A bulky, dark shape occupied the far end of the otherwise empty chamber and, as Corso peered at it through the gloom, he felt his jaw actually drop when he realized what he was now looking at.

It was Dakota's own ship, the Piri Reis – battered, dented and scarred, but nonetheless utterly familiar. The Piri floated just above a maintenance cradle built over a set of horizontal bay doors in the deck beneath it, and was held in place by shaped-field generators built into the cradle itself.

Corso then realized this chamber was simply a very large airlock where ships and heavy cargo could be loaded, before being raised to the pressurized upper chamber. He could see clearly where part of the ship had been damaged by missiles back in Nova Arctis.

'This is the craft used to bring the starship out of the Nova Arctis system,' Honeydew enquired, 'is it not?'

Corso nodded absent-mindedly, but realized after a moment that he still hadn't given an answer. 'It is, yes.'

Something was different, however.

He'd now just about been able to make out odd shapes through the gloom, scattered more or less at random across the floor of the chamber, between where they stood on the platform and the cradle holding the Piri. The light flickered once more and Corso noticed scorch marks on the walls, ceiling and floor around Dakota's ship. Those shapes now resolved into the singed remains of Bandati, their bodies contorted in their death-agonies.

He realized, with a start, that they were standing on the edge of a battlefield.

Most of the lighting units in the walls and ceiling had either been destroyed or were functioning only sporadically, hence the flickering gloom. Clearly a vicious fire-fight had taken place here. He could make out weapons scattered near the bodies of the dead Bandati, while various chunks of dented and blasted machinery looked like they'd started out as robotic exploratory devices. There was also a suspiciously Piri-sized dent in the bay doors situated directly beneath the cradle.

'What the hell happened here?' Corso asked, once he remembered how to breathe.

'The Magi protocols you developed are stored inside this vessel's stacks,' Honey dew replied bluntly.

'Yeah, that's what I said before.'

'This vessel was also in communication with the starship that brought you to Night's End.'

'I know she was making it difficult for you to get inside the Piri Reis.' Understatement of the century, Corso thought to himself. 'Based on what I've seen and heard, I guess she was using the derelict as some kind of relay between herself and the Piri.'

Wide black eyes surveyed him intently while Corso desperately tried to glean some notion of what was going on in the Bandati's mind. 'You do not clearly understand. This craft also communicates with the starship,' Honeydew repeated.

'Look, I – oh.' Exasperation gave way to enlightenment. 'The Piri Reis is communicating with the derelict – directly? You mean, under its own volition, without Dakota being involved?'

'The evidence strongly suggests it.'

This was a revelation. 'How do you know?' Corso asked.

'Remote sensors previously showed a link between increased systems activity on board the Piri Reis, and increased gravitic and neutrino activity within the region of the Magi derelict. The correlation is clear: the ships were – and still remain – in communication with each other.'

Corso stared out across the scene of ruin. He had a pretty good idea just what the Piri Reis was capable of when it came to defending itself, but it had no onboard weapons capable of causing this level of devastation.

'You agreed to cooperate,' Honeydew reminded him. 'Now board the Piri Reis and retrieve the protocols.'

'But… what about this?' Corso asked, waving a hand towards the field of carnage. 'What did this?'

'That is something we would also like to know.'

Corso turned to face the alien directly. 'The Piri Reis doesn't have any kind of offensive capabilities, and that's a fact. You've been monitoring the ship, haven't you? So this must be obvious to you?'

'Yes, but our monitoring systems have been… unresponsive. All we can say for certain is that there have been sporadic surges of power to the field generators built into the supporting cradle.'

'Okay' Corso thought for a minute. 'I'm assuming you did try turning the power supply to the cradle off?'

The alien stared at him silently.

For pity's sake. 'What, you can't actually turn it off?'

It didn't take much for him to sense Dakota's hand somewhere in all of this.

'You made it clear that Merrick granted you override privileges that allow you to board her ship.' The alien cast his gaze across the silent, darkened bay. 'Our own attempts to do so have not met with success.'

Corso gazed over the swathe of destruction before them and felt sweat prickle his brow. 'Yes, but she's not here. I tried boarding the ship without her direct permission once before, and it came very close to killing me. Maybe if you brought her here-'

'That isn't currently possible,' came the bland synthesized reply. 'You, however, are a noted expert in pre-Shoal electronic linguistics. You will board the Piri Reis, find the information we need, and thereby prove your worth to us.'

'Everybody wants something from me,' Corso sighed, half under his breath.

'I don't understand.'

'Nothing,' Corso snapped, feeling irritable. Would the Piri Reis still recognize him? Or would it find some way to kill him before he could even get near it?

'In that case, time is of the essence, Mr Corso. Don't wait too long before returning – or think about hiding inside the ship. If you do, we will not hesitate to destroy the Piri Reis, with you inside it if necessary'

Corso stared into the alien's implacable black eyes.

Just get this over with. He stepped off the platform and walked slowly forward, eyes firmly fixed on the Piri Reis. After a dozen or so steps he stopped and turned to look back at the platform, and saw the three Bandati still standing there like giant-eyed statues, unmoving and implacable beyond the occasional involuntary twitch of their wings.

He turned back to face the Piri, and started moving again, unable to keep himself from crouching slightly, as if to make a smaller target.

Reaching the first group of corpses, he saw that their wings had been almost entirely burned away.

The Piri sat only about fifteen or twenty metres ahead, drifting very slightly inside its field restraints. The constantly flickering light was too much like some cheap effect out of a haunted-house 'viro for Corso's comfort. He tried to remember what he'd seen of the Piri 's internal systems layout, in case there was some clue there as to how it had managed to kill those heavily armed warriors.

He stopped dead as a new thought occurred to him.

Honeydew had mentioned unexplained power surges in the cradle's field generators. That had to be it.

Shaped-field generators could have short-range defensive uses. Normally, you needed 'receiver' devices that 'contained' the field, since otherwise it would dissipate almost as soon as it was created.

But it was possible to create a small bubble without a receiver -a bubble that might be only a few centimetres across – and then shrink it rapidly in the fraction of a moment before it burst. If air molecules were trapped inside the field, they could be compressed hard and fast enough to form a white-hot plasma with explosive energy. And as soon as the tiny field-bubble containing that plasma dissolved…