'I don't know what we're going to face out there,' – she waved one gloved hand towards the stars, – 'and… when I think about it, I don't want to be alone.'
Something made him reach out and touch one gloved hand to the arm of her suit. He stared at his spread fingers, contemplating this unexpected betrayal by one of his own limbs.
'You won't be,' he said finally.
'I'm glad, Nathan.' She then moved away, sounding more subdued now. 'I… you know where I am. Just drop by sometime.'
'I'll do that,' he heard himself reply.
Ty watched her go, suddenly back to her brisk efficient self.
He had actually meant to cut things short; that being the easiest way to deal with such things. He had opened his mouth intending to say one thing, but something else entirely had emerged.
He summoned one of the spiders and started to rummage inside its toolbox, feverishly thinking all the time. What, he wondered, could Corso actually do to him by way of punishment? Very little, he suspected.
Ty called up his suit's menu and put in a call to Nancy, and she replied almost immediately.
'Tonight,' he said. 'Ship time. Come down to the labs.'
'You… need help with something?'
'Yeah,' he replied with a grin. 'Something like that.'
Chapter Twenty-two
'This is where we are just now,' indicated Lamoureaux.
Dakota leaned back in her seat on the bridge and stared up at the overhead simulation: a view of the Milky Way as it might be seen from roughly twenty thousand light-years above its ecliptic plane. A small point of light representing the Mjollnir blinked constantly from deep within the Orion Arm.
From the perspective Lamoureaux had chosen, it was clear the Orion Arm was not so much a true spiral arm in its own right, but more a broad streak of stars caught midway between the Sagittarius and Perseus arms.
'And this,' Lamoureaux continued, from the interface chair, 'is our first stop. After that we're in for the really long haul.'
A line reached out from the icon representing the Mjollnir, and came to an end at a star fifteen hundred light-years from their current position. A second line grew from there, stretching across a relatively starless gulf before terminating at a point deep within the Perseus Arm.
Dakota studied Lamoureaux, who had tipped the interface chair all the way back to a forty-five-degree angle, until he was looking almost straight up at the simulation. He still seemed frail, and when he glanced at her she could sense the pain and loss he was feeling. Sometime soon, she was going to have to explain to him just why she had destroyed her ship.
Corso sat close behind Dakota, while Nancy, Ray and Nathan were still outside working on the drive-spines. Martinez was not expected out of the med-bay for another couple of days, Olivarri was asleep in his quarters, and Perez was somewhere halfway across the ship, checking over the plasma conduit systems and prepping the onboard fabricators to produce replacement drive-spines.
'Ted, can you put up that information I gave you about our first target system?' asked Dakota.
'No,' said Corso from behind, his tone hostile. He had barely spoken to her since she had told him about Trader. 'That can wait a minute. Ted, you said you had secured some updates on the war.'
Ted flashed Dakota an apologetic glance before he nodded assent to Corso. Moments later dozens of bright red points appeared in clusters along one edge of the Orion Arm, with a few scattered deeper within it.
'These are the current confirmed sightings of Emissary forces,' Lamoureaux explained. A few dozen more points now appeared, coloured yellow. 'And these,' he continued, 'are stars that have gone nova since the war escalated. You can see they're mostly centred on the region of the Long War, but there's been more detonations deeper inside our arm, and getting closer to Consortium territory.'
'Any word from Ocean's Deep?' asked Corso.
'They're in total disarray, Senator. The Legislate's taken up a large military presence in the orbital station and rounded up a lot of the key Authority staff for questioning. Most of this news comes through Bandati contacts, rather than from our own people. It's the same at Tierra – no news coming in or out.'
'I think,' declared Corso, 'it's time everyone stopped calling me "Senator". From now on "Lucas" will do just fine, don't you think?'
'Then I guess you'd all better start calling me "Eduard".'
They all turned to see Martinez standing at the entrance to the bridge. Corso started to rise, but Martinez gestured him to sit back down.
'I'm fine. Leave me be,' Martinez insisted, shuffling forward. He was walking with a stick, Dakota noticed. He stopped when he spotted her, staring at her like she was a ghost.
'Sir, are you absolutely certain you're ready to be out of treatment?'
'Why, yes I am, Lucas,' Martinez replied, still without taking his eyes off her. 'I just have to go easy. Maybe spend another night in the medbox to speed up the healing.'
He moved closer to her. 'So you're Dakota Merrick. When the hell did you get on board? And where the hell were you when we were getting ready to…'
'Commander,' Corso interrupted. He had come to Martinez's side and put a hand on his shoulder. 'As soon as we're finished here, we'll go to your quarters and I'll explain everything.' He gestured towards a couch. 'Please.'
Martinez looked like he was struggling to control his temper. 'Then you'd better make your reasons good,' he replied tautly, and headed for the seat.
A priority comms icon appeared, floating just to one side of the galaxy simulation. Corso reached up to his ear and spoke quietly into the air for a few moments.
'Nancy just reported in,' he explained, once he had finished. 'If we're going to make a significant jump any time during the next couple of days, we're going to have to leave up to a quarter of the drive-spines offline.'
'That's not good,' said Martinez.
Corso shrugged. 'Not much we can do about it. The engineers hadn't finished work on the hull when we boarded. Dan's ready to start running out replacement drive-spines as soon as he's got the fabricators back online.'
He paused for a moment, then turned to face Dakota, with visible reluctance. 'How many jumps do we need to reach our first destination?'
Martinez frowned, looking back and forth between them. 'First destination?'
Of course, Dakota realized, he didn't know about Trader yet.
'We're taking a detour,' Dakota explained, 'so we can salvage weapons systems left behind by an extinct alien race. It means stopping off at another star system on the way.'
Martinez regarded her warily before turning back to Corso. 'And you concur with this?'
'We're just one ship, so we're going to need every advantage we can get. A couple of days' detour shouldn't make any difference in the long run.'
Martinez nodded wearily and looked back at Dakota. 'Lucas asked you how many jumps to get there.'
'At least three,' Dakota replied. 'Possibly more, given the issue with the drive-spines.' She stood up and nodded to Lamoureaux. 'Ted, if you don't mind, maybe I'd better run the next part myself.'
'Sure.' Lamoureaux stepped down from the interface chair, moving with elaborate care. Dakota felt his implant-mediated senses brush against hers.
'Okay.' She climbed into the chair and locked on to the ship's data-space. A moment later the great swirl of the galaxy faded, to be replaced by a model of a single star system.
'This is where we're headed next,' she explained. 'You're looking at a star towards the cooler end of the main sequence. It has eleven planets altogether, but our main point of interest is coming up in a moment.'