Corso took the proffered hand and stood up laboriously, wincing as he pressed several fingers to his belly. ‘Forget it,’ he replied. ‘Udo’s a moron. As far as I’m concerned, he shouldn’t even be on this ship.’
‘So…’ she shrugged, ‘why did you help me?’
Corso shot her a curious glance. ‘Why wouldn’t I?’
She gave him a bewildered look. ‘You’re on the same side as them.’
‘You think we’re allies?’ Corso laughed. ‘Anything but. These people are my enemies.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You couldn’t have known,’ Corso replied, making to leave the bridge.
‘Wait.’ She put out a hand and stopped him. ‘Should you even have told me that?’
He looked back at her. ‘You mean, will it get me into trouble? Maybe. But I can’t do my job for them if they cut out my tongue.’
She gripped his arm hard. ‘Look, maybe you could tell me some things…’
Corso’s grin lacked sympathy. ‘Just do your job, Mala. Stay out of the way of the two Mansells. They’re killers.’
He made for the exit.
‘Udo said something, just before you walked in on us,’ Dakota called after him in desperation. ‘That if I only knew. Like there was something I haven’t been told about this expedition.’
Corso turned, his face as unrevealing as a mask. ‘Then he was speaking out of turn.’
He exited the bridge and Dakota stood there in silence for several minutes, filled with an unpleasantly familiar sense of foreboding.
Corso found his way partly along a corridor before stopping and leaning his back against a wall with a groan. His whole body hurt.
It was bad enough he was trapped on the Hyperion with men like Senator Arbenz and Kieran Mansell. Now he’d managed to make a deadly enemy of Udo as well. Perhaps I’ve just got a suicidal streak. Well, at least that would explain some things.
People back home were depending on him to do whatever it took, within the bounds of honour, to save them from a very unpleasant fate. Getting into a fight with Udo wasn’t helping them any. He’d acted without thinking…
Face it, you’d have intervened anyway.
He pushed himself away from the wall with a groan, and stared bleakly up and down the corridor. More than any other time since they’d left Redstone, he wanted to be back home.
Every day that passed made it clearer to him just how much Udo was a liability. Only now, he’d as good as told Oorthaus they’d hired her for a job other than the one they’d told her about. And that on top of threatening to kill her. That just made it even more likely she’d try and disappear once they got to the coreship. And then… well, then they’d either have to find another machine-head stupid or desperate enough to accept their terms, or try and figure out some other way of salvaging the Magi derelict when the time came.
And Corso had already learnt enough about the derelict to be certain their chances of salvaging it without Mala were close to nothing.
Still shaking, Dakota found her way back to her quarters, where she dimmed the lights and let her Ghost start to calm and soothe her with a steady trickle of empathogens into her cerebral tissues. Then she slept for a little while, curled up in her cot like a child, lost in the warm ocean tides of her back brain.
After a little while, the Piri Reis came to her, a soft, comforting presence in her thoughts.
‹Dakota, I have made progress in breaking some of the more difficult encryptions used within the shipboard data stacks. I can now make more information available to you concerning the background of the other passengers. However, please note this information is by necessity incomplete due to the nature of the encryptions
Good enough for me, Dakota replied silently.
Fresh knowledge started thudding into her forebrain, in sufficient quantity to overwhelm her Ghost and leave her momentarily disoriented.
According to what Piri had discovered, Lucas Corso was some kind of historian. A ‘xeno-data archaeologist’, to be precise, though she wasn’t at all sure what that was…
Her Ghost obligingly filled her in: xeno-data archaeologists attempted to glean understanding of Shoal super-science, usually by remote analysis. It was often, by necessity, an extremely covert science. In particular, Corso picked apart pieces of programming languages used by the Shoal.
Which sounded dull enough, but Dakota couldn’t begin to imagine what it had to do with exploring a new solar system. Yet she was sure that contained somewhere in this nugget of information lay a clue to what Udo had almost let slip earlier.
What was it he’d said? ‘If you only knew.’
Maybe, Dakota decided, she really didn’t want to know.
What she needed more immediately was something concrete against the Mansells-Udo, in particular. Halfheartedly, she had her Ghost circuits scan the morass of new data in the faint hope of finding something usable. At the very least she could find out more about how to deal with Udo the next time he-
‘Oh shit,’ she said aloud, though her voice sounded muffled in the cramped space of her cabin. ‘You have to be kidding me.’
‹Breaking the encryption on this particular data was surprisingly easy,› the Piri Reis informed her. ‹Please note that it concerns open financial transactions between Udo Mansell and a specific establishment on board the coreship we are currently approaching.›
Dakota couldn’t figure out if she was appalled or elated. Probably both. I thought those two were supposed to be running a security operation. So how did-
‹The encryption methods used by Udo Mansell in particular are out of date,› Piri explained. ‹This is likely more a result of limited resources available to the Freehold authorities on Redstone than to specific negligence on his part. However-›
Yeah, yeah. I get it. They have to make do with what they can get. But you’d at least think he could keep it in his pants for the duration of the expedition, rather than take the chance of someone digging this up.
She couldn’t keep the huge grin off her face. If anyone had been watching her at that moment in the privacy of her cabin, they’d have thought she’d completely lost it.
She scanned rapidly through more of the information, finding other pieces of electronic mail also using out-of-date encryption methods. Udo, Udo, Udo.
‹I draw your attention to a note alluding to reprimands relating to Udo Mansell.›