‘From the swarm,’ she lied. ‘What you need to understand is that the Mos Hadroch is like a key. Take it into a cache and plug it into the cache’s drive-forge – that’s the device you need to manufacture a superluminal drive – and it gives you control over every one of the superluminal drives that ever came out of it.’

‘And what happens then?’ asked Willis.

‘My understanding is it’s possible to trigger a destruct sequence that will destroy not only the drives seeded from the forge, but also the ships carrying them.’

She watched them absorb this information for a moment.

‘How quickly does it act?’ asked Driscoll.

‘Given the entanglement, I’m guessing it’s as near as damn instantaneous.’

‘What about the Tierra cache?’ asked Perez. ‘Couldn’t the Mos Hadroch be used on that, too?’

‘It could,’ said Corso, leaning forward. ‘That makes it particularly important not to allow it to fall into the wrong hands.’

‘And the Shoal?’ asked Olivarri. ‘Surely it’s a threat to them as well.’

‘If you can find the cache from which the drives for the majority of their starships were manufactured, then, yes,’ said Dakota.

‘What concerns me,’ said Schiller, ‘is how well defended this Emissary cache we’re heading for must be. If it’s as old as I’ve been told it is, then they’re going to want to keep it safe.’

Dakota shook her head. ‘Not necessarily, because they have no idea that a threat of this nature even exists. Our destination is a relative backwater close to what used to be the heart of their empire, but the main centre of activity moved on a very long time ago. They rely far more now on much more recently discovered caches.’

‘Then why don’t we try and destroy those? asked Schiller.

‘Because, historically, the vast majority of their fleets use drives that were created in that less well-defended, older cache we’re heading for. Any ships using drives taken out of those newer caches won’t be affected, of course, but we’ll still be able to shut down or even destroy over eighty per cent of their existing fleets.’

‘But that still doesn’t tell us how the hell we’re going to get close enough to the cache without being blown to shit!’ Schiller insisted.

‘I’ve seen footage of the battle with the godkiller in Ocean’s Deep. How the fuck do we defend ourselves against something like that?’

Dakota nodded towards the star-simulation hanging just above the surface of the table. It faded and, then, for the next few minutes it played back the destruction of the corvettes and missiles by Meridian drones.

She made sure, however, to leave out the part where she destroyed her own ship.

‘Those things . . .’ Willis started, as the images faded.