been mined to dust by the company. Cory goes on a space walk to check it out, and Dekker monitors her life signs while keeping track of the time with his watch, and then a driver comes towards, a driver not showing up on the official company charts, and doesn't slow down even when Dekker tries to hail them. He's been fretting about the time and his watch because the timer on Cory's suit wasn't reliable, so he was in charge of monitoring the time for her. William Payne, a company executive, is tasked with handling the case and avoiding bad publicity for the company, such as would be generated by reports of an unauthorised driver killing a freerunning miner. Then bureaucratic failures allow word of Cory's death to reach her mother, a powerful politician on Mars, and she accuses Dekker of kidnapping and killing her daughter so he could inherit the other half of their ship. The police question Dekker about what happened, suggest he made up the presence of a driver. Ben Pollard discovers that one of the asteroids he and Bird tagged as ore-rich had lost its tag before Big Mama could pay him and Bird for the claim. Then he finds the police have been searching his room, and Meg and Sal's room next door, though the police have yet to discover the datacard containing maps of that region of space, which he illegally took a copy of on the ship instead of wiping them from memory. Bird thinks about the fact that drivers are out there extracting ore from the asteroids and then throwing it towards the refinery so fast that it's dangerous for any craft to get in the way, so it makes no sense that the driver that was on Ben and Bird's charts they were given to check out the distress beacon was not on the charts Dekker had. The company wants to silence Dekker, avoid any publicity, whereas Cory's mother wants him prosecuted for her daughter's death. Sal reveals to Meg that Ben kept a datacard with charts from the ship, and that Sal had revealed its existence to other friends of hers on the Base, who now want a copy of it. Those friends are Shepherds, from an organisation that protests against the company, and they're also interested in Dekker's case. The company keeps pressuring Dekker to sign a release