The component had responded to Dakota’s careful probing of its memory banks by sending its own, undetectable feelers deep into the data cores of her Magi starship, entwining itself in the ship’s neural networks like a hand taking a firm grip on a living heart. At the same moment the swarm turned on her, the captured component launched its own, primarily informational attack from within.

Dakota spun through the starship’s limitless virtual depths, appalled by the wholesale vandalism the component had unleashed on her ship’s femtotech arrays, until she found Josef’s ghost waiting for her on the balcony of a library complex long since turned to dust and ruin.

‘Look,’ he said, gesturing at the sky.

Dakota gripped the balustrade and followed the direction of his hand, to see a black cloud of viral agents blotting out the sky.

She felt her insides grow cold and liquid. ‘There wasn’t any indication that the component was remotely capable of launching an attack like this! We analysed it inside and out. It just doesn’t make sense!’

She shifted into another virtual environment, and sensed Josef keeping pace with her. The next time she looked at him, she was appalled to see his features grow suddenly blurred before snapping back into focus.

‘We know now that the swarm can reassign each of its components to a new purpose at any time,’ he reminded her. ‘The component we captured was adapting itself to a new purpose from the moment we brought it inside the ship. We should never have let it remain in communication with the rest of the swarm.’

‘But why did it wait so long?’ she demanded. ‘Why not just attack us when we first got here?’

‘The only logical answer is that the swarm deliberately fed us the data about the Mos Hadroch. Notice, it didn’t attack until Corso sent back confirmation that he’d found something.’

‘The swarm used us to help it find the Mos Hadroch,’ Dakota realized. ‘It wants it just as much as we do.’

‘Exactly And now it’ll tear this ship apart until it finds those coordinates.’

Josef’s face began to melt and Dakota spun away in horror. She found herself in an environment she had never visited before, and watched with sick horror as viral agents tore it to shreds, leaving her tumbling into a chaotic void where once there had been land and sky.

She shifted to another, more stable environment, where Josef’s partly reconstituted form joined her after a little while.