Corso gazed down at a blackened lump by his feet. It took a moment for him to realize he was looking at the blown-off head of a Bandati warrior. He felt a chill, thinking about what just one person could do with that much power – and that much reach, in being able to subvert computer systems at will from across an entire solar system.

'Dakota?' he whispered, feeling ridiculous at calling out the name of someone who, as far as he knew, was still sitting alone in a tower back on Ironbloom. But in that flickering half-light, surrounded by devastation and death, it was almost as if he could sense her presence all around him. He'd seen enough over the past few months not to make the mistake of taking anything for granted, any more.

He received no reply, of course.

He ventured another step forward, fresh sweat prickling his brow. He thought about picking up one of the abandoned weapons lying nearby, but then thought better of it. He was most of the way towards the Piri now, and had already noticed a faint hum emanating from the craft.

Corso took a step closer, and heard the hum change in pitch. He froze in place, one foot half-raised, and waited to see what would happen. He could see the half-incinerated form of a dead Bandati just out of the corner of one eye.

Now he noticed a faint hissing.

He glanced downwards to see a thin line of black running precisely between the two bay doors situated directly under the Piri Reis. The Piri Reis had apparently crashed into the docking bay doors hard enough to compromise their integrity, and as a result air was slowly but perceptibly seeping out of the chamber.

But how to get inside? Corso wondered. In through the main airlock, or around the side and then in through that hole in the hull?

He stood there thinking about the various half-truths he'd told Honeydew.

Strictly speaking, the Bandati didn't need him at all. Oh, it was true he'd developed the protocols they – and everyone else -wanted so badly, and it was just as true that he was an expert in the extremely rarefied field of antediluvian Shoal programming languages. Yet the fact remained that it had been just plain dumb luck that Senator Arbenz's researchers had stumbled across a veritable Rosetta Stone while making the first tentative explorations of a derelict starship. Once you had that, it wasn't really much of a jump to figure out how to create the necessary protocols – at least, as long as you had a handy supply of experts to hand, like himself.

That much, fortunately, Corso had kept from his captors. This way, at least, they needed him; this way they had a reason to let him live – until they had acquired what they wanted, at any rate. But he still had to give them something in the meantime: something that was only to be found inside the Piri Reis.

He came right up to the hull of Dakota's ship and slowly walked around one side, despite an overwhelming urge to turn tail and run. He did his best to ignore two part-exploded bodies that lay nearby.

'Congratulations, Mr Corso.'

Corso nearly shrieked when he heard Honeydew's voice seemingly right behind his shoulder. He turned and saw the glowing bead of an interpreter hovering, unaccompanied, just a metre away. He hadn't known they could do that.

'You've done very well,' said the Bandati's disembodied voice. 'Please continue.'

'Don't try that again,' Corso muttered, his voice cracking. The bead hovered there without replying.

'I mean it,' he said a little louder. 'If you follow me on board with that thing, I've got no idea how the Piri's going to react. So get rid of it.'

He waited a tense moment until the interpreter began to move back across the bay towards the figures waiting on the platform. Corso breathed a sigh of relief.

He moved quickly along the side of the craft until he came to its primary airlock. There was a hiss, and the door slid open. Corso pulled himself up and inside, and listened carefully.

He could hear something creaking, through the inner door of the airlock, like metal straining against metal.

'Piri?' Corso called out, feeling more confident now. If Dakota's ship had meant him any harm, he'd surely know it by now.

He activated the airlock's inner door and stepped through that, too. 'Piri, it's me, Lucas Corso. Can you hear me? I'm coming on board.'

Nothing.

'I still have Dakota's authorization for command override, Piri,' he said, a little louder this time.

The inner airlock door swung shut behind him, in the best tradition of haunted-house 'viros. He peered into the gloom, and enjoyed a brief fantasy of taking control of the Piri, and using it to smash through the airlock doors and out to freedom.

And how long before they tracked you down and shot you out of the sky? It had to remain a fantasy, nothing more.

Even to Corso, his senses inured to the odour of his own unwashed skin after so many weeks of captivity, the interior of the Piri Reis stank to high heaven. There was garbage everywhere -bits of Dakota's clothing, as well as food cartons with blackened remains still clinging to their insides. Patches of the fur that lined every wall and surface now looked shiny and greasy in the low-power emergency lighting.

He moved carefully, all too aware that the ship's interior was a paranoid's wet dream. There were countermeasures secreted in every nook and cranny, all controlled by a central faux-intelligence that had been designed, from the ground up, to be overwhelmingly neurotic.

He headed for a console and brought up its main interface, tapping at the screen while thinking hard. Okay, get the protocols. Then what?

There they were, boldly displayed on the screen before him. Now just hand them over to the Bandati and wait for them to realize they didn't require his services any more?

Hardly.

Corso gazed at the screen and frowned, trying to work out what it was that didn't look right.

He brought up base routines, studying what should have been hardwired algorithms meant to control how the spacecraft functioned, and all the while the lines on his face furrowed deeper. Wholesale alterations had been made to the Piri's integral systems, and all within the past few weeks.

The only person who could have done so was Dakota.

He called up log-files and reviewed some of the changes, most of which turned out to involve the main AI functions. At first glance, it looked more like vandalism than anything else, for great chunks of the ship's programming had been entirely rewritten.

Except nothing he saw there made any sense to his skilled eyes.

He thought of the Bandati waiting for him in the chamber outside, and wondered how much more time he had.

Honeydew had claimed the derelict and the Piri Reis were somehow in direct communication with each other. That Dakota would have used the derelict as a secure relay in order to talk to the Piri made sense – and, based on what the Bandati had already told him, only Dakota could have been behind the slaughter of the Bandati lying outside its hull.

But if the derelict itself was somehow responsible for these changes to the Piri, the question remained – why?

He flipped back to the Piri's altered base routines. It was a devilish piece of work, but a closer look revealed a certain order amongst the chaos. Every piece of spare circuitry on board the Piri had been put to the task of carrying some part of the ship's mind, regardless of whether or not it had been designed for that purpose. Entire chunks of what remained had been reallocated all across the vessel's data stacks.

There was a recursive quality to what remained that made Corso wonder if he wasn't looking at things in the wrong way. On a whim, he processed a few of the data chunks as graphics. What he got back was much more than he might reasonably have expected – swirling, organic patterns; constantly renewing Fibonacci-like visuals that filled the screen.