Empire of Light

'Just in case what?'

'We can keep an eye on you through the spider's sensory systems,' Perez explained. 'Until we have a better idea what's going on.'

'I guess I don't have a problem with that,' Ty replied.

'One other thing,' said Dakota. 'We haven't heard or seen from Olivarri yet. Have you?'

Ty shook his head. 'No, not…' Not since he approached me to tell me he was spying on all of us. 'Not since our last shift together, no.'

Perez glanced at Dakota. 'I guess we keep on looking then.'

'Yeah. Listen, Nathan. Since we can stay in touch through the spiders, if you see or hear anything, let us know straight away. Especially if you see Olivarri.' A couple of hours later Dakota hauled herself back up to the bridge and collapsed on to a couch. Corso and Martinez stepped over to join her, while Willis worked away in the background at mapping the areas of the frigate that had already been checked out.

'I've had time to think about this now,' she told them. 'There are about a dozen key vulnerabilities at different points on the ship, based on what I've seen with my own eyes as well as via the spiders, and every one of them was hit individually.'

'Ted said pretty much the same thing,' said Corso, who had taken a seat next to a console and swivelled it around to face her. Martinez stood beside him, eyeing her like she was something you would grow in a Petri dish. His attitude towards Corso had clearly become somewhat strained ever since learning about Trader. 'So it's definitely sabotage?'

She nodded, and tried to blink away her fatigue. 'I think someone spent a lot of time setting things up. The data-space has recovered enough that I managed to track down software routines in the primary stacks which I can't even begin to explain. They might be viruses, or they might be something else. I'm guessing the former, but they've now been cleaned out or isolated.'

'And that's what caused the ship to shut down?'

Dakota shrugged. 'That's my guess.'

Martinez folded his arms and looked from one to the other. 'But still no sign of Olivarri?'

'Nope.' Dakota shook her head. 'The spiders are still out searching through the whole ship, but there's just too much space to cover. It could take us weeks to investigate every nook and cra

'All right, what about Trader?' asked Corso.

'Look,' she said, 'disregarding just for the moment the fact neither of us trusts him in the least, I just don't see any way he could have pulled this off

'But it's not like there isn't precedent,' Corso insisted. 'We know he's lied in the past, and we both know how machine-heads like yourself are vulnerable to-'

Dakota sat up and glared at him. 'Listen, I'm getting really sick of being treated like I'm some kind of bomb about to go off. Why don't you-'

Something beeped loudly, cutting her off mid-sentence.

'That's Dan on the emergency frequency,' said Willis, stepping over to an adjacent console. 'I'll put him through the overhead.'

Dan Perez's face appeared on a screen next to the couch. Nancy Schiller was visible just behind him, floating in a stretch of red-lit passageway.

'It's Olivarri.' Perez sounded out of breath. 'We just found him, down near one of the fusion-maintenance bays. He's dead.'

Chapter Twenty-five

By the time Corso and Martinez reached the maintenance bay, Perez had found some opaque plastic sheeting to cover Olivarri's body. Schiller had meanwhile headed back to the bridge.

Corso winced when Perez pulled the sheet back from Olivarri's head and upper torso, because the back of his head had been caved in. Dried blood had crusted around his mouth, and his nose was crushed flat against his skull.

He was barely recognizable, Corso thought.

Martinez leaned in close to the body and looked up at Perez. 'Where exactly did you find him?'

'Over there.' Perez nodded towards where a large steel panel had swung away from the wall. 'Whoever did this wedged him behind that maintenance panel, but it then set off an alert on one of the control boards. I got the shock of my fucking life when I pulled the door open to check it out.'

'Question is,' said Corso, 'why hide him here? Why not just drag him to an airlock and push his body outside the ship? That way we'd never have known what happened to him.'

Martinez shook his head. 'Too much chance of getting picked up by the hull's sensor arrays. They run on their own power and control systems, so whoever did this presumably knew they'd be spotted if they tried to do so. To be honest, we're lucky we found him at all. This ship is big enough that, apart from an alert being triggered, it might have taken a long time before we eventually found him.'

Perez looked up from Olivarri's pulped features. 'Look, this is pure speculation, but is it possible all this – the sabotage, the systems failures – was intended just to cover this up?'

The three men exchanged looks. 'The same thought did cross my mind,' said Corso. 'We've already got most of the primary systems back online. At first we thought we were looking at a catastrophic system failure, but in the end it proved to be not much more than an inconvenience.'

'A distraction, in other words?' said Martinez.

Corso stared down again at the dead man and felt a flash of resentment, as if this new crisis were somehow the victim's fault. It was hard to co

Martinez sighed and turned to Perez. 'Any sign of the weapon?'

'Not that I could find,' Perez replied. 'But I'd say it was a wrench or something similar. There are diagnostic programs we can run to figure out how it was done, within a fairly narrow margin of error. Same thing goes for any DNA or other chemical traces left behind – assuming we find them.'

'We're going to have to search everyone's quarters,' decided Martinez. 'These labs, the bridge, and anywhere any of us have spent much time.'

'Surely whoever did this wouldn't have been stupid enough to leave a murder weapon lying around their own quarters?' Corso protested.

'We don't know, do we?' said Martinez. 'Any idea who was the last of us to see him before he was killed?'

'He was outside doing hull repairs with Nancy and Nathan,' said Perez. 'But that was several hours before the outage.'

Corso recalled that Olivarri had spent a lot of time visiting remote parts of the ship, checking up on various life-support and maintenance systems in areas where the surveillance coverage was often less than adequate. There might have been any number of opportunities for someone to track him down and kill him.

Martinez glanced over at Perez. 'Dan, would you mind giving me and Lucas a minute alone?'

Perez looked warily at the two of them, then walked out into a passageway adjoining the bay. Martinez turned to Corso, his expression grim.

'I was still in the med-bay when that Shoal-member came on board,' he said, sounding heated. 'And since then I've listened to all your arguments about why he's here, but I don't get the sense you're anywhere near as much in control as you seem to think you are. Merrick didn't show herself until we were already on board, even though we needed her around well in advance of the launch. The way it seems to me, she doesn't give a damn what anyone else on this ship says or thinks, and now we're one man down, which means we've got a killer somewhere on board. Let's just say you're not inspiring my confidence in your leadership skills.'

Corso felt his jaw muscles tighten. 'I told you already why things are the way they are.'

'And yet I keep asking myself the same question again and again: who's in charge of this expedition? You or Dakota?' Martinez raised his eyebrows a fraction. 'Or maybe Trader's the one who's really ru