'So… you're, what? A spy?'
'I work for the Consortium Security Services. I was meant to bring you into custody along with the Mos Hadroch. Then the Senator decided to take the frigate by force and, by the time I learned about it, it was too late to come up with an alternative plan.'
Ty shook his head. 'Just what is it you want from me?'
'Nothing just yet,' Olivarri replied. 'Right now I'm just establishing contact. We wanted the artefact where we could run our own tests but, by the looks of it, Merrick and Corso have access to information we don't. For the moment, we're going to let them run things the way they want to.'
Ty stared back at him. 'Then what the hell do you need me for?'
'We're concerned about what happens to the artefact after it's been implemented. It's a powerful weapon that could conceivably be used to shut down the Tierra cache once the Mjollnir returns to the Consortium – or any other cache, for that matter. That makes it too valuable to allow it to remain in anyone else's hands.'
So that's it. 'But why didn't you tell me any of this before – when you first contacted me? And what about this ring?' he asked, bringing his hand up and displaying it to Olivarri. 'What the hell is it for?'
'What?' Olivarri glared at him. 'Ty, what the hell are you talking about?'
'What am I talking about?' Ty laughed. 'You're the ones who contacted me.'
'Ty, no one else in the security services has been in contact with you, apart from myself, believe me.'
'But…' The explosion, the taxi, the meeting with the avatar.
'Wait,' continued Ty. 'This doesn't make sense. There was that Consortium agent back in Unity. Who was he?'
Someone who merely claimed they worked for the Consortium, Ty reflected. He stared at the ring on his finger as if seeing it for the first time. He had a sudden, overwhelming sense that there was something he needed to remember.
'Ty, I swear, nobody from my side has approached you before now. I can guarantee that.'
Then who the hell…?
Ty suddenly felt a deep terror grip hold of him. He pushed roughly past Olivarri, the sudden motion sending the other man sprawling.
Ty collided with the door, and clumsily pulled himself through, and kept going, caroming from side to side as he made his way down a passageway leading towards the nearest transport station. Only once he had reached it, and climbed inside a car, did he finally come to a halt, lungs aching breathlessly.
He glanced frequently out through the car's open door towards the hub entrance, but there was no sign yet that Olivarri had followed him.
Ty was seized by a crippling pain in his head and he doubled over, gripping his skull and crying out at the unexpectedness of it. As he squeezed his eyes tight shut, he saw a tiny but intense flash of light in his peripheral vision, and…
The next thing he knew, he was still inside the transport car, but his hands were grimy and his body stank of sweat like he had never once taken a shower.
There was something he had to remember… something important.
But, however hard he tried, it wouldn't come back to him.
Chapter Twenty-four
The Mjollnir jumped again only seven hours later, before dropping back into space several hundred light-years closer to the edge of the Orion Arm. Ahead lay the region of the Long War, the main battleground of the Shoal's fifteen-thousand-year conflict with the Emissaries, and beyond that the Perseus Arm.
Once the all-clear had sounded, Lamoureaux climbed back out of the interface chair and nodded to Corso.
'We're pushing it with these jumps, Lucas. Too many and too often. This ship wasn't designed for that kind of stress.'
Corso glanced towards him. 'Objection noted,' he replied, and returned his attention to the console before him.
Lamoureaux thought of saying something more, then changed his mind and left the bridge: there was no point telling Corso what he almost certainly already knew. More than twenty drive-spines had failed this time. New ones were already being manufactured, but if they kept failing at this rate the Mjollnir's jump capacity was going to be seriously compromised. Ty had paused in his work when the jump alert sounded, waiting quietly until the all-clear followed a minute later.
He dreaded the next time he might be assigned to a repair crew with Olivarri. Following their encounter, he had buried himself in his work, running ever more in-depth and increasingly aggressive scans of the Mos Hadroch, trying to get some idea of its internal structure. And yet, despite all his efforts, it remained as frustratingly opaque as ever.
He thought frequently of Nancy, of drowning himself in the taut muscular curves of her body. The more rational part of him would then like to catalogue the risks inherent in their affair, or remind him of the impossibility of it continuing after their return home. To his eternal surprise and consternation, the thought of the relationship coming to an end left him desolate.
He was still sitting there brooding half an hour later when the Mjollnir 's primary control systems and life-support suffered a catastrophic failure, and another, more urgent, alarm began to sound. Dakota had picked a cabin located outside the centrifuge, having spent too many years working and living in zero-gee conditions to ever really be able to sleep comfortably in gravity, simulated or otherwise. She was still lying there awake when the alarm sounded.
She instantly sat up and locked into the data-space, only to find that large parts of it had gone offline. It was like walking into a deserted house and finding that most of the doors had been locked.
A moment later she felt Lamoureaux pinging her from within the centrifuge.
‹Something bad's happened,› he sent. ‹Most of the physical systems just shut down, from what I can tell. Life-support, fusion reactors, bays and fabricators – none of them are responding even to basic queries.›
Do we have any idea what's going on?
‹Not yet, but I'm heading back to the bridge. Lucas was there when I left, so maybe he'll know something.›
To her considerable alarm, the lights suddenly flickered and went out. Emergency lighting kicked in a couple of seconds later, bathing her in a blood-red light. Some data trickled in from the exterior sensor arrays: nothing out of the ordinary was taking place outside the ship, which at least ruled out an external attack.
If we can't get the life-support back online, we're in deep shit, Ted. This is starting to look like-
‹Sabotage. I know. But don't jump to any conclusions just yet. This isn't the kind of thing you can pull off by just crossing a few wires here or there. Shutting down systems like these one at a time is one thing. But all at once? That takes some serious skill.›
Dakota pulled herself over to the door of her cabin and pressed her palm against its access panel. Nothing happened. She slammed the flat of her hand against it, then remembered there was a manual override accessible through a side panel.
She pulled it open and tugged at the lever behind it. Something clicked loudly and the door slid partway open to reveal a sliver of red-lit passageway beyond. Dakota prised at the open edge of the door with the fingers of both hands until it finally slid all the way open with a protesting whine.
She headed straight for the bridge. The quickest way there was to board a car at the nearest transport hub, about a minute's walk away, but they all proved to be out of action as well. Dakota peered in through the window of one car and saw red failure lights blinking spasmodically on its dashboard. She turned back and made her way to a corridor that led directly towards the hub. Once it was clear that the Mjollnir had suffered a sudden catastrophic systems failure, there was a part of Corso that was not surprised, and his first thought was of Trader.