‘You can see how badly trashed the hold is, but Ted was right: those landers look like they survived pretty much intact.’

Corso nodded and stepped back down from the dais. ‘Dan, come with me,’ he said to Perez, then stopped, before he left the bridge, to look back at her. ‘See what else you or Ted can discover before we arrive there,’ he said.

‘I’ll send a spider out on to the hull to retrieve a couple of field-generators,’ she said. ‘If we’re going to attempt a landing, we’re going to need all the protection we can get.’

Corso nodded and left, with Perez following.

Dakota linked into the remaining Meridian drones and prepped them for combat. At the same time, she noticed it was early evening, shipboard-time. She settled back in the chair and wished she had asked Perez for another shot.

Whatever happened after this, she already knew it was going to be the longest night of her life.

Trader swam through the dense, pressurized waters that filled his craft. Schools of tiny fish swam around him, and he snatched some up with his tentacles, devouring them as he studied the multicoloured projections all around him. The first jump had brought him within a few light-hours of the target system; subsequent jumps brought him closer to the inner system.

Defensive networks pinged his yacht constantly as it accelerated inwards, but he had obtained automatic response codes, leached from captured Emissary vessels, which fooled the networks into thinking he was one of their own. They would see through it eventually – particularly once he got within range of the cache – but it would meanwhile get him close enough.

He entered the chamber in which he had placed the Mos Hadroch. It hung there in the air, suspended in a series of interlocking shaped fields. Its mass was much greater than might be expected, but of course much of that extra mass was hidden in nonlocal spatial dimensions.

His ship spoke to him: All propulsion systems are currently optimal. The local Emissary population is primarily located aboard habitats orbiting the fourth world. Local comms traffic implies they are engaging in one of their periodic purges.

Trader’s fins shivered at the mention of the purges. The Emissaries were bad enough when it came to dealing with other species; they were hardly less harsh on themselves. Every now and then, they would set about destroying their weaker members in orgies of slaughter.

The ship provided him with images of the system’s innermost world. He saw enormous machines scattered and apparently abandoned all across its scarred and airless surface. Great holes had been drilled deep into the planet’s crust, so that Trader could see manufactories extending deep into the core. Godkillers guarded it, patrolling the volume of space surrounding the star, their hulls black and crystalline, and forbidding in their sheer strangeness.