He had been sheltered for a while by the Ascended War-Minds that ruled a dozen systems hard by the great black hole at the galaxy’s heart. Moss had fallen upon him once again, and Trader again fled for his life with mocking laughter ringing in his ears.

Centuries before, Hugh Moss had begun life as a Shoal-member called Swimmer-in-Turbulent-Currents. He had been made an example of by Trader as punishment for his attempt to broker peace with the Emissaries by having his body radically altered, cell by cell, until he was transformed into something neither human nor Shoal.

The process had driven Swimmer insane, and towards the end of the battle for control of Ocean’s Deep, Dakota had given Hugh the means to find Trader, regardless of how far he fled across the face of the galaxy, so that he could exact a terrible revenge upon his tormentor.

But now, at last, Trader would be free of the monster.

Trader had parked his yacht in orbit around the moon of a gas giant, in an unoccupied system no more than a few hundred light-years from the Hegemony’s borders. Within a few hours, a Shoal coreship had appeared within range of his yacht’s scanning instruments, a planet-sized craft with heavy weaponry dotting its armoured crust. The coreship had quickly manoeuvred itself into one of the moon’s Lagrange points, precisely balanced between the gravitational attraction of the moon and the gas giant it orbited.

When the arranged hour of the meeting arrived, Trader departed his yacht and dropped towards the moon’s dense atmosphere, protected from the hard vacuum of space by a shaped-field bubble that surrounded him and contained the liquid environment he required for breathing. A cloud of machines the size of dust-motes followed him down, spread out around him for kilometres.

Trader directed his descent with gentle pulses of energy applied to different points around the spherical field’s surface. Before long he was dropping down through a near-impenetrable layer of cloud until, at last, the darkened oceans beneath were revealed to him, and the great towers that rose from their liquid depths.

Trader guided his field-bubble below the surface of the waters. He had been one of the Shoal Hegemony’s most adept agents for more than a hundred millennia, tasked with suppressing any knowledge of the existence of the Magi ships, a duty he had pursued with aggressive diligence. That he had been granted this private audience with Commander-of-Shoals only proved how desperately the Hegemony needed his unique skills once more.

Trader made his way towards a cathedral-like building, its apex long ago drowned beneath the waters, and made his way inside. He soon found himself within a high-vaulted space and set about deploying the microscopic defensive units he had brought along in preparation for this meeting.