After a couple of minutes, Dakota reached a side chamber. When she shone the torch inside it, it was to see a machine she recognized as a drive-forge. As she moved closer, she observed that the Mos Hadroch had been mounted inside it.

A moment later she nearly stumbled over Trader himself.

The tiny field-generators that normally held a protective sphere of briny water around him now lay scattered across the floor of the chamber. His enormous bulk somehow looked much smaller, lying unprotected on the dusty ground. His skin looked grey and cracked, as his manipulators twisted and slithered helplessly across the grey stone underneath him.

<Dakota.>

Jesus and Buddha. You’re alive?

<For now.>

Trader’s movements were growing ever weaker as she watched. She knelt beside him and touched the fingers of one hand to his side. His flesh felt rough, abrasive.

<It knew everything about me. Secrets buried so long I had forgotten them. But it will not function.>

Let me try, Trader?

The great bulk of his body shuddered one last time, and became still.

She remained kneeling by him for a few more seconds, wondering why she didn’t feel anything, not even vindication or triumph. Instead she only felt hollow, as if all this had been an anticlimax.

Finally she stood up and stepped past Trader’s inert form and towards the drive-forge.

She had been able to hear the artefact from the moment she entered the chamber: a high-pitched ululation like a thousand amplifiers feeding back all at once, throbbing constantly from low to high. But she had a sense of an underlying order that hinted at something else, something vast and cool and powerful.

She stumbled to a halt just short of the forge, and watched as the artefact flowered open the way she had seen it do on Whitecloud’s video recordings. The sound filled her head until she couldn’t form a single coherent thought, hammering its way into her brain almost like something physical.

And, just when she thought the worst was over, she felt that same intelligence she had sensed earlier suddenly focus all its attention on her.

She stood again on a snow-blasted highway on Redstone, surrounded by the bodies of the dead. Found herself in a bar called The Wayward Dragon with Lin Liao, waiting for his sister to arrive. Looked across the rooftops of Erkinning along with half a dozen other students with whom she had lived and loved and warred, and none of whom she would ever see again after that night.

She was dragged back farther and farther, reliving memories that she thought she had lost for ever half a galaxy away, suddenly as real in that moment as if she were experiencing them for the first time.

The last image that came to her was that single glimpse of a street in winter, and the memory of her mother’s hand laid on her head.