'I should be thanking you,' she replied. 'I wasn't sure I'd be able to find my way around this place without help.'
'Nobody else knows you're here?' There was a precision in the way he spoke, each word and syllable meticulously phrased.
She shook her head. 'You're the only one I've told.'
Rivers bent down towards her a little, and dropped his voice. 'We should not delay. It's not safe to stay around here one second longer than we need to. I have transport nearby, and I managed to acquire one of the items you asked for at very short notice.'
She nodded, and he led her towards a small open car with tractor wheels, parked close to a pillar. 'You're part of the relief operation?' she asked.
He laughed. 'That is the idea, but it's like using a teaspoon to bail out a sinking ship. All we've managed to bring here so far are a few emergency fabricators, and yet there are people dying of diseases that are supposed to be extinct.'
'I see.'
'There is not enough room for all the refugees,' he continued, climbing into the driver's seat. 'We really need to expand into newer tunnels, but that means further negotiations with the Skelites, which is proving difficult, I'm afraid. There's been a lot of clashes between the original settlers and the refugees, but the Skelites refuse to open up more space.'
'Why not?'
'They want star-drives seeded from the Tierra cache,' he explained. 'That's their basic condition before they'll enter into any kind of negotiation.'
Dakota nodded. 'Right. I understand. They lost the coreship network along with us and the Bandati, so of course they don't want to have to rely on the Fleet or anyone else.'
She climbed into the passenger's seat, beside Rivers. He turned to look at her with an earnest expression. 'I will be straight with you, Miss Merrick. When you told me you wanted to come here, helping you find someone I've never heard of was not my first priority. But your influence at Ocean's Deep is enormous, and if the Skelites here were to think they might get their star drive, it could take a lot of the pressure off. At present it doesn't take much to start a riot here, and before you know it there's another dozen dead bodies. People generally need to know things are going to get better.'
It took an effort of will for Dakota to meet Rivers's hopeful gaze. Things, she wanted to tell him, were just as bad everywhere. There were a thousand Leroy Rivers scattered over an area of space so vast it was difficult even to contemplate, all of them desperate to ward off a coming catastrophe.
She smiled in what she hoped was a convincing manner. 'I can't make any promises, Mr Rivers, because things are bad all over. But I'll see what I can do when I get back to Ocean's Deep.'
Rivers nodded and exhaled noisily, like a man who had just been unburdened of a heavy load. He turned to her again and smiled gently. 'Thank you for telling me that.' He reached down and activated a switch, and the car's treads ground noisily.
She studied him. 'You didn't believe a word of what I just said, did you?'
'No,' he said, with a broad grin. 'Not a word. But I still had to ask.'
Dakota looked away, biting her lip in shame.
'Something for you,' he said, pulling a plastic bag, filled with something that clanked noisily, out from under the dashboard.
He passed it over one-handed. Inside she found two short metallic tubes and something that looked like the grip of a gun.
'The weapon is modular,' Rivers explained. 'All you need to do is snap the components together. The locals call these things "ratcatchers". A small, high-capacity fusion battery housed in the grip powers the plasma bolts. Like I said, it's the best I could get hold of at short notice. But you're going to have to be careful about how you use it. They have a nasty habit of going wrong if they get overheated.'
She gave him a doubtful look. 'Wrong, how?'
'The battery is a fabricator hack job that bypasses the programmed safety limits. If it gets too hot, it blows up.'
She stared at him. 'And this is seriously the best you could get?'
'Weapons of any kind are in very short supply here. The second-stage Skelites themselves aren't exactly lacking in armaments, but they're less than keen on supplying them to us intruders.'
'So they're all home-made efforts like this?' she asked, emptying the bag's contents on the seat between her knees.
'Yes. I think that particular one came from a fabricator originally designed for making customized kitchen components.'
Rivers put the car into reverse, and the tractor treads crunched across the stone floor as he guided it carefully between the close-packed hovels and sleeping bodies, veering close enough to outstretched limbs at times to send Dakota's heart leaping towards her mouth. She studied the weapon's components and then carefully slotted them together, the grip sliding in last. When she held it in her upturned palm it felt light, insubstantial, more like a toy than a real weapon. Hugh Moss would have access to far greater firepower than this.
'I don't mean to pry,' said Rivers, 'but you said at one point you thought you might have trouble finding your way around on your own…?'
'I can't manipulate data the way I used to, Mr Rivers. I'm not much more than a passenger on the Magi ships these days.'
Rivers nodded, looking embarrassed. 'I'm sorry for asking. It seems so many of us are suffering from the bends.'
She frowned. 'The what?'
'That's what some of the other navigators are calling it now,' Rivers explained. 'The bends, or neural burnout – a sickness from diving too deep into the world of data contained inside every Magi ship.'
'Really.'
'I've not been affected myself,' Rivers continued. 'But I suspect it may only be a matter of time.'
'How long have you been a Magi-class navigator?'
'Six months,' he replied. 'Most navigators start suffering the ill effects after seven or eight months.' His smile faded a little. 'We should be going now. I found you a place to stay on a lower level.' Before long they were trundling through a series of endlessly winding passageways. Steps were carved into the stone on either side, every thirty metres or so, leading up to open galleries cut into the side of the passageways, just below the ceiling. Terran flora was everywhere, although much of it had clearly been engineered specially for an underground existence. Vines dropped down from the ceiling to brush against their heads as they drove on, while dwarf trees – oak, ash and a few unidentifiable hybrids – lined every district they passed through. These trees barely came up to shoulder height, and made Dakota feel like she and Rivers were a pair of giants going out for a Sunday drive.
Business districts merged into residential areas, the ceiling sometimes dipping so low that Dakota would have had to stoop if she disembarked, while at other times it soared to cathedral proportions, with tiers of recessed homes and businesses rising up and up, all interconnected by carved stone staircases. They moved through a cornucopia of odours, those of food cooked on open griddles in busy market places, the fragrance of pale-leaved flowers and the rankness of thousands of human bodies living for years at a time in this deep subterranean darkness. And as they moved from one district via a downwards-spiralling ramp to a lower district, the air became ever hotter, denser and damper.
'Tell me everything you know about Moss,' Dakota asked at one point.
'He turned up here slightly less than five weeks ago and established himself extremely rapidly. It's my understanding that he trains what are intended to be either bodyguards or assassins, depending on your source of information. Killers, certainly,' Rivers added, as they hurtled on.
'Assassins? But to assassinate who?'