‹The consensus is we're taking too big a risk if we let those scouts get any closer. We're going to initiate that jump immediately.›
Consensus? You mean Corso and Martinez, don't you?
Lamoureaux didn't reply, but she could sense his tension and concern as if it were her own. Dakota pulled back into the real world, and she looked down again at Nancy. Her skin had reddened even more, and her lips trembled faintly.
Perhaps it was better she wasn't aware of what was happening. Dakota described the new plan to Trader. By now more than half the drones recovered from around the mouth of the cache had been destroyed.
‹Are any of the remaining drones recoverable?›
I don't think so, she replied. I could pull them back towards us, but all that'll do is draw the scouts straight to us.
‹Then we must abandon them.›
We have what we came for anyway. How long before we can jump?
‹Immediately.›
The frigate was already gone: it had slipped into superluminal space only seconds after she had spoken to Lamoureaux.
She switched her attention back to the cache. The scouts had rallied, throwing the last of their antimatter-equipped clones at the remaining Meridian drones with devastating effect.
Dakota opened her eyes and again checked on Nancy, thinking that, if she was lucky, she might live long enough to appreciate the irony of trying to save the life of a woman who'd like nothing better than to see her dead.
Time to go, Trader.
‹Initiating.›
The stars spun around the yacht and then, for one brief instant, vanished.
'That's it,' said Lamoureaux, leaning forward in the interface chair as he reached back both hands to massage his neck muscles. 'Twelve light-years, and just half an AU off-target.'
Corso nodded, looking up at the simulation of the system they had landed in as it floated beneath the ceiling. Each of the simulation's planets became gradually more detailed as additional data arrived from the hull's sensor arrays.
Martinez stepped away from the console he had been manning and slumped next to Perez on one of the couches. 'I guess all we can do now is wait and see if they make it, too.'
The next several minutes slid by at a glacial pace. Corso glanced around the bridge, at displays of intercepted tach-net feeds originating from the Perseus Arm: most of it indecipherable gibberish.
Thirteen minutes after they had jumped, an alert sounded.
'They made it,' Lamoureaux exclaimed, his gaze fixed on some faraway point. 'I'm picking them up now.'
Martinez clapped his hands a couple of times, and Corso found himself grinning as the tension suddenly lifted away.
'They're a couple of light-minutes away,' Lamoureaux added. 'That means a couple of hours before we can rendezvous.'
'Is the med-bay prepped for Nancy?' asked Martinez.
Corso didn't miss Lamoureaux's hesitation when he answered. 'I've unlocked the seals and reactivated the medboxes.'
Martinez merely nodded, as if satisfied with this answer, yet Corso knew they were all maintaining a fiction: there was likely very little they could do for Nancy Schiller. Even if by some miracle she was still alive by the time Trader's yacht docked with the frigate, it would almost certainly be far too late to save her. Lamoureaux stepped down from the interface chair and approached Corso. 'Have you had any more thoughts about what we found back by the reactors?' he asked him quietly.
Corso glanced towards Perez and Martinez, but they had stepped over to a console on the far side of the bridge, and were deep in a discussion over astrogational data.
'I think we're going to have to let Dakota see it,' he replied. 'If we're right about Whitecloud, she should be the first to know.'
'You realize that means telling her who he really is?'
'Yes… yes, I suppose I do,' Corso replied. 'Not that I'm looking forward to it.'
'Rather you than me,' Lamoureaux said softly. 'Rather you than me, any day of any year.'
Chapter Thirty-one
Whitecloud sat staring at a screen and nursing a bulb of coffee as Corso entered the lab a short time later.
'Found anything new?' Corso asked him, shooting a glance at the Mos Hadroch still wedged inside the enormous machine and surrounded by probes.
Whitecloud went on staring at the screen like he wasn't even aware of the man standing next to him.
'Ty?' Corso asked again, this time in a substantially lower voice.
Whitecloud finally turned to face him. Nobody home, thought Corso, chilled by the empty expression on the other man's face.
Whitecloud seemed to come back to life a moment later, and jerked backwards, clearly surprised to find Corso standing in front of him. The bulb of coffee went spinning out of his hand, but Corso reached out and caught it, then handed it back. His lingering doubts about Whitecloud being under some form of control had now vanished completely.
'I was wondering if you had anything new to report,' Corso started again, keeping his voice level even while his heart hammered inside his chest. It was important not to let Whitecloud suspect anything was amiss. 'You were supposed to file an update this morning, but I didn't receive anything from you.'
In truth, Whitecloud's reports rarely made for good reading. Rather than containing actual information or providing any insights, they tended more to be a list of tests, or variations of tests, that had been run on the artefact, all producing the same dismal results. The only time the derelict had shown any sign of being anything other than a dumb inanimate object had been that first time Corso had laid eyes on it.
Whitecloud blinked and pulled himself out of his chair, grabbing a rung in the low ceiling for support. 'New?' He scratched his head, staring around him as if he had been asleep for a long time. 'Yes. Yes there is, actually. Take a look at this.'
Whitecloud pushed past Corso and headed for a tabletop imager. He activated it first by passing his hand over its plate, then quickly sped through a series of holographic menus until he found what he was looking for.
A few moments later Corso found himself looking at the image of a translucent upright cylinder hovering above the plate, with thousands of hair-thin passageways extending outwards from it horizontally.
'That's a cache, isn't it?' remarked Corso.
'It is,' Whitecloud agreed. 'The one at Tierra, to be precise. I only got a chance to take a look at this for the first time the other night. The main reason I didn't get round to filing your report was because I wanted to check more of the correspondences before discussing it with you. But since you're here…'
Whitecloud reached up towards the floating cylinder and nudged it to one side with an expert flick of his fingers, then he quickly navigated through another menu. A second cylinder appeared, similar to the first except that, rather than having a single primary shaft, this one had two shafts that merged in the middle, forming a cross.
Corso started. 'That's…'
'The interior of the asteroid where we found the Mos Hadroch,' Whitecloud finished for him.
'But they look identical!' Corso exclaimed, coming forward and putting both hands on the rim of the imager's flat plate. 'Well, no, not identical, but…'
'But strikingly similar, wouldn't you say?'
'Yes.' Corso nodded. 'And you only just picked up on this?'
'You'll recall I was working outside on the hull during the briefing about the cache we just visited. A summary was forwarded to me, but I didn't get round to studying it until now. Still, I don't know how I missed it before,' he admitted, a touch of wonder in his voice. 'When I saw this for the first time yesterday, I was thunderstruck. The relationship was immediately obvious. Anyone with enough knowledge of the Atn could have made the connection, but there are so few of us left, really, and with the chaos of the last few years…'