Lamoureaux didn’t say anything to that. He just stared past them all, like a blind man seeing visions, with sweat breaking out on his forehead.

‘Ted,’ asked Perez, ‘what is it?’

Lamoureaux seemed at last to remember they were there. ‘We’ve got bigger worries now,’ he said gravely. ‘I just picked up a second neutrino flux. The sun just went nova.’

The nova mine had been in close orbit around the star for over fifteen hundred years. Before receiving its activation signal, it had drifted insensate and silent, outwardly little different from any other piece of random junk caught in a similar orbit, betraying its purposefulness only on those occasions when it activated dormant guidance systems in order to guide it away from any imminent collision.

There had been others before it, spread out over the millennia, each one a potential sword of Damocles aimed at the heart of the star. Similar nova mines could be found in close solar orbits within every Emissary-occupied system, serving as ultimate safeguards against defeat or rebellion.

The activation signal had triggered ancient protocols and, within an hour, light had begun to build up around each of its drive-spines, reaching a crescendo in the moment before it briefly vanished from the visible universe.

It rematerialized less than a hundred kilometres from the star’s core. In the few brief nanoseconds before it was vaporized, a chain reaction deep within its drive caused a bubble of false vacuum to form, expanding outwards at the speed of light before collapsing within seconds.

Billion-kilometre tongues of fire rose up from the star’s surface like fiery wreaths, and over the next few hours it began to shrink in size. Its heart had been cut out, and its remaining lifetime was now numbered in hours.

When the star finally exploded, the shockwave reached the cache-world within minutes, sending rivers of molten fire pouring down the narrow valleys between the tiny planet’s mountains.

Tidally locked until now, it began to spin for the first time in a billion years, the light of a million dawns creeping slowly towards the mouth of the cache itself.

But it was already too late. The Mos Hadroch, the ‘Judgement of Worlds’, had sent out a signal that propagated itself across the galaxy instantaneously.

The last thing Dakota saw was a brilliant light, almost liquid in its intensity, surging in through the entrance to the chamber housing the drive-forge.

‘Explain this to me again,’ Commander of Shoals demanded, swimming across the command-chamber of a coreship located some tens of thousands of light-years away.

‘I can’t explain it,’ the aide stammered, instinctively darting closer to one wall as Commander of Shoals bore down upon him. ‘But something’s happening to the Emissary fleet. It’s . . . it’s self-destructing. There are no other words. Look.’