Later, on his way back to the labs, Ty once again stopped off at the mess hall, an idea forming in his head. One bulkhead was dominated by a display of ceremonial weapons: a dozen long knives of the type used in challenge fights were arranged in a circle, their blades all pointing inwards.

It took a little effort, but he managed to prise one loose, then concealed it inside his jacket and returned to the labs. He found several messages waiting for him, including a new shift-schedule put together by Willis, who had taken over that particular duty following Nancy’s death.

He activated the back-up stack system, and dug deep into its operational guts. He felt a flush of triumph when he traced the files he had seen on the video feed to a virtual buffer located in a linked stack in an entirely separate part of the ship. What those files might actually be was a question he couldn’t yet answer, but a lot of time and effort had been taken to hide them somewhere neither he nor anyone else might think to look.

He thought again of the monster staring at him from out of his own eyes, and felt a second flush of triumph: I’m on to you now.

Ty now used a set of software tools to study the contents of the files, and found them to be lightly encrypted command structures of a type he had never seen before, carefully modified to run on the imager array in which the Mos Hadroch still sat.

He regarded the unmoving artefact for a moment, and felt an uneasy chill. Surely it couldn’t be this easy.

He spent a few minutes loading the command structures into the imager array, set the probes to start recording, and activated them.

What happened next was far more than he could possibly have anticipated. A bass moaning sound filled the air, modulating every few seconds. The sound seemed to penetrate deep inside his body and mind, in a way that was far from pleasant.

At the same time, the artefact appeared to come apart – no, unfold – in some way that his human eyes couldn’t make sense of. He stared, utterly transfixed, as it appeared to grow larger over the next few minutes, its shape now constantly morphing and shifting. Jewel-like shards appeared all around it, hanging in the air, and glistening and twisting like a kaleidoscope projected in three dimensions.

A message alert flashed, but he ignored it.

The only way he could explain what he was seeing was by assuming the Mos Hadroch existed in more than three spatial dimensions. What appeared to be disparate shards might instead be components of this device that normally existed only in the other, higher dimensions, but were now briefly flickering into view.