‘What? What is it?’ She sounded flustered.
‘Where were you?’ Corso gasped. ‘I heard the airlock working, and… were you outside the ship?’
Mala stared at him like he was mad. ‘No, I was right here, checking the manual systems prior to launch.’
‘Mala, I heard the airlock closing. That means somebody came in from outside, and you’re the only one around. If it wasn’t you, who was it, then?’
She shook her head like she was tired of talking. ‘You’re getting paranoid, Lucas. It wasn’t me. Go check the onboard records if you like.’
When he did so, what he found there was frustrating-and worrying.
The security logs showed his recent encounter with Mala, but that was all. There was nothing to suggest anyone apart from Arbenz had either entered or departed the Hyperion for days. Mala was clearly shown walking directly from her quarters towards the aft engines and right past the airlocks. Three of the others were already accounted for, while Udo remained lost to the world in his chemically induced sleep within the medical bay.
But he’d definitely heard the airlock mechanisms operating, whatever the security records showed. That wasn’t the kind of thing you could imagine.
There was something too convenient about it all. Was it possible, he wondered, for the logs to be faked? Or was he himself simply descending into irretrievable paranoia and madness?
Corso debated taking his doubts to Arbenz, but decided against that. Despite everything, Mala Oorthaus was not his real enemy here. She was not in any way responsible for the predicament facing his family, and he was increasingly ashamed to acknowledge how thoroughly complicit he had been in sealing her fate in a way not likely to be pleasant. In truth, he was no better than Senator Arbenz.
True, she was strange, but Freehold society placed clear formal limits on any social contact between men and women, so for him there was something brazenly different about Mala that made her seem far more attractive than any of the Freehold women Corso was used to.
Her obvious terror of what secrets Arbenz might be keeping from her had awoken within Corso an increasing awareness of their joint insignificance in the scheme of things. Once Arbenz and Gardner had achieved what they wanted, he himself would become an unwanted witness to a crime as yet uncommitted. Yet they meanwhile depended on him to open the treasure box.
What to do then, Corso wondered? Was the Senator a man he could trust to keep his word and give him as well as his family their freedom? Or was holding on to that belief just a way to keep himself sane?
And so he decided to remain silent, and bide his time.
Sixteen
Corso watched from his seat as Arbenz and Gardner stood in mumbled conversation by the meeting room’s doorway. In the past he had often entered this same room to find the two of them already in heated argument.
Each time, as Corso took his seat ready to give his daily briefing on the derelict, their voices would suddenly drop to low whispers, broken by sudden pauses, while they would both cast sideways glances towards him. If Corso hadn’t been so busy wishing the pair of them dead, it would have been comical.
But this time, they didn’t seem so concerned about Corso overhearing them.
A fresh news squirt from Redstone, picked up only a few hours ago, brought the news that Aguirre, a Freehold city on the coast of the Mount Mor peninsula, had surrendered to Uchidan military forces after a long siege. The siege itself was almost certainly in reprisal for bombing raids against Uchidan damming operations on the Ka River.
At almost the same time, disruptor probes had nearly destroyed the Freehold orbital frigate Rorqual Maru. With this grim news came the inevitable, though unfounded, rumours that the Consortium was engaged in talks about intervening on the Freehold’s side, but Corso remained sceptical that any such intervention would ever happen. After all, there were no valuable scientists like Banville for the Consortium to try and recover this time.
Corso had belatedly come to accept that Arbenz might be right in believing the Freehold’s only real hope of continued survival lay somewhere inside the derelict. That the Senator should represent the best hope of achieving that salvation was, to his mind, the greatest tragedy of all.
With the disastrous loss of Aguirre to the enemy, Arbenz had been torn over whether he himself should continue on to Nova Arctis, or instead make his way back to Redstone via the coreship. That would have meant leaving Kieran in charge of the recovery operation, a concept that understandably infuriated Gardner.
‘It’s an intolerable idea,’ Gardner now raged. ‘There is absolutely no excuse for you to simply walk away!’
‘David-’
‘I am not going to be left on my own to deal with Kieran or his appalling brother,’ Gardner spat. ‘Why, Senator, are they even here?’
‘They’re here because I trust them,’ Arbenz replied just as heatedly.
Gardner laughed in disbelief. ‘Look me in the eye, Senator, and tell me how much you really want either Kieran or Udo making decisions over how we handle the derelict. As talking guard dogs they’re great, but do you seriously want to give them that much responsibility? Do you?’
Arbenz opened his mouth to reply, then seemed to think better of it. The other man’s argument had clearly hit home to some extent. He shook his head angrily and took a seat at the table across from Corso, without another word.
‘He’s far too much of a wild card to be left in charge of something this vital,’ Gardner added as he took his own seat, though sounding more even-tempered now he’d made his point. ‘Retrieving the derelict, winning your war-they’re the same thing, Senator. One secures you the other, and you’ll do much more good for the Freehold here than back on Redstone.’
Without being asked, Corso activated the holo display, bringing up an image of their destination. Planets and gas-giants hovered in the air above the table, woven together by bright lines of plotted trajectory.
At that moment Kieran entered the room, as ever the last to arrive. He took a seat at the table.
‘Base Camp on the moon Theona reports no new systems activity on board the derelict since we delineated the parameters of its defence grids,’ Kieran informed them without delay. ‘We were worried it might be transmitting some kind of distress signal after we screwed up getting on board the first time, but it looks like it was just a glitch in our own monitoring systems.’
‘Good.’ Gardner folded his arms, looking pleased. ‘The last thing we want is it broadcasting anything the Shoal can pick up.’