‘In return,’ Lamoureaux replied, ‘they’d either give us information about whatever was out there in the greater galaxy that the Shoal didn’t want us to know about, or they’d supply us with banned technologies.’

‘All right, but Crescent-over-Moon never dealt directly with humanity. We only know they even existed because I found one of their clade-worlds, and that turned out to have been abandoned for tens of millennia. The reference to Mos Hadroch is incredibly obscure. I still don’t understand why you care about it so much.’

Willis spoke up. ‘First things first, Mr Driscoll. Was there anything at all in the data we gave you that can help us figure out where the Mos Hadroch is, or what it can do?’

‘Yes, there was. Particularly the set of stellar coordinates.’

‘Coordinates?’ Lamoureaux asked, his eyes taking on a faraway look as he accessed remote information being relayed to him.

‘Laroque found them on one of the secret expeditions, and dismissed them. He believed Crescent-over-Moon were a dead end. If he’d even bothered just once to try and correlate his findings with my own, he might have been on to something. But he was too shortsighted.’

He paused for breath, aware of the way the two men were staring at him. He’d have to learn to control his outbursts.

‘You’re saying you might actually know where it is?’ asked Lamoureaux.

‘May I?’ Ty asked, nodding towards a comms unit in one corner of the room. ‘If you have a copy here of the same files you sent me, that is.’

Lamoureaux nodded to Willis, who shrugged and palmed the unit awake. Ty stepped past the two men and brought up a series of images of Atn glyphs arranged in tight spirals. Large pieces of these spirals were missing.

‘You know the strangest thing about the Crescent-over-Moon?’ Ty asked. ‘You can sometimes tell you’re on one of their clade-worlds just from the sheer destruction that’s been visited on them. At first I thought they might be targets of some kind of pogrom from other clades, since that might also explain their relative isolation.’

Lamoureaux got that faraway look again for a moment. ‘There’s no reference to that in any of your work,’ he pointed out a moment later.

‘That’s because it’s unsupported speculation, not fact. It’s possible some of their asteroids had merely suffered impacts with other stellar bodies long after they’d been abandoned.’

‘But you don’t believe that?’