‘Not to mention,’ Lamoureaux added, ‘a lot of ships are being retro-fitted to make it harder for them to be remotely grabbed by machine-heads. That means we might not be able to stop them, even with the help of the Magi ships. Unless we threaten to blow up their suns.’

‘Not even remotely funny,’ Corso muttered. Clearly he was going to have to intervene directly over the business of Eugenia’s drive. ‘Whatever else it is you came here to tell me, I really hope it’s good news.’

‘We received a transmission from Dakota Merrick.’

Corso tried not to look too startled. ‘It’s been, what, more than a year? I was beginning to . . .’ To wonder if she was even still alive, he almost said.

‘She’s rendezvoused with the Maker,’ Lamoureaux continued. ‘We received a targeted burst from her several hours ago. According to what she sent us, the Maker is really a swarm of space-going machines, quite vast in number. The evidence points to a single, unified intelligence, even though its individual components are apparently spread out across a number of light-years.’

Lamoureaux reached out to the imager once more, and the Tierra cache was replaced by something that looked more like a metal sculpture created by a psychotic than it suggested a space-going vessel.

There’s something evil-looking about it, Corso thought, even though he knew it was pointless to attribute human qualities to something so very clearly alien.

‘The swarm possessed data relating to something called the “Mos Hadroch”, which it apparently regards as a serious threat,’ Lamoureaux explained. ‘According to the Magi’s own records, it’s some kind of weapon of phenomenal power, but – until now – there was never any evidence that it even existed.’

Corso stared at the image of the swarm-component. ‘And this means it does?’

‘Dakota came up against a blank wall, and asked us to see if we could find any correlation with anything known to us. Imagine our surprise when we did. Now, look at this.’

The swarm-component was replaced by an image of a lumpy-looking asteroid. ‘This is an Atn clade-world,’ Lamoureaux explained. ‘You can find them out on the edge of many systems in the Consortium.’

‘I know something about them,’ observed Corso. ‘I studied some of their machine-languages. They travel everywhere at sublight speeds.’

‘And they usually stick to the very remotest part of a system. If Dakota’s findings are anything to go by, the depths of interstellar space are even more densely infested with them than we thought.’

An image of an Atn now appeared next to the hollowed-out asteroid. A large, rectangular metal body, covered in a curious alien calligraphy, sat on top of four stumpy legs. At the end of each leg, thick, splayed metal claws gripped the ground, while a mass of mechanical manipulators extended from a slot just below the brick-shaped head.