Perhaps Louise wasn’t so simple after all. Perhaps I’m just jealous.

“Going to tell us now, Captain?” she asked.

“Huh?” Joshua turned his head in her general direction.

“Why we’re here? We’re not chasing Meyer anymore. So who is this Dr Mzu?”

“Best you don’t ask.”

A circuit of the bridge showed her how irritated everyone was getting with his attitude. “Absolutely, Joshua; I mean, you can’t be sure if we’re trustworthy, can you? Not after all this time.”

Joshua stared at her. Fortunately, belaboured intuition finally managed to struggle through his moping thoughts to reveal the crew’s bottled-up exasperation. “Bugger,” he winced. Sarha was right, after all they’d been through together these people deserved a better style of captaincy than this. Jesus, I’m picking up Ione’s paranoia. Thank God I didn’t have to make any real command decisions. “Sorry, I just got hit by Norfolk. I wasn’t expecting it.”

“Nobody expected any of this, Joshua,” Sarha said sympathetically.

“Yeah, right. Okay, Dr Mzu is a physicist, who once worked for the Garissan navy—”

They didn’t say much while he told them what the flight was about. Which was probably a good thing, he guessed. It was one hell of a deal he’d accepted on their behalf. How would I feel if they’d dragged me along without knowing why?

When he finished he could see a mild smile on Ashly’s face, but then the old pilot always did claim to chase after excitement. The others took it all reasonably stoically; though Sarha was looking at him with a kind of bemused pique.

Joshua hitched his face up into one of his old come-on grins. “Told you, you were better off not knowing.”

She hissed at him, then relented. “Bloody hell, wasn’t there anybody else the Lord of Ruin could use?”