Once again, she placed her hand against the component’s hull. More data came pouring through, almost swamping her conscious mind.

The ghost grinned in jubilation. ‘Did you see?’

She nodded. ‘I saw it. We’ve really found something.’

A name, fished out of the depths of the Maker’s collective intelligence, and a little more besides.

‘Mos Hadroch.’ Severn rolled the phrase around his tongue.

They were walking side-by-side through a simulation of the streets of Erkinning, on Dakota’s home world of Bellhaven. The winter winds felt so entirely real that she had bunched her hands into fists, pushing them deep inside down-lined pockets, a padded collar pulled up close around her neck and chin. The scent of food and the sound of voices drifted to them from the direction of the city walls, where Grover refugees taking advantage of the daily amnesty had set up a market.

Dakota had murdered Chris Severn while he’d been recovering in an Ascension clinic, cutting out his heart and watching his life-support read-outs flat-line. Another figment of her mind made real, whether she liked it or not – dressed up in the skin of someone who’d died because he’d made the mistake of loving her.

‘Whatever it is, it means a lot to the swarm,’ Dakota replied. ‘It meant something to the Magi as well, but what that meaning is still isn’t clear.’

‘The Mos Hadroch is a legend,’ Josef told her, stopping off at a stall to buy hot tea for them both. ‘Or as good as, anyway. There are no surviving records to prove it really existed. It’s a weapon, supposedly, built by a predecessor civilization in the Greater Magellanic Cloud.’

Dakota drank the bitter black tea and felt its heat diffuse down her throat. ‘It can’t be that much of a myth if the swarm wants to find it. We need to try and find out what else it knows.’

Severn frowned. ‘You might want to exercise some caution. Trader found out, the hard way, that the swarm can be lethal.’

‘There’s not enough time to be cautious,’ she muttered irritably. ‘We need to find out everything we can.’

‘Knowledge won’t be much use to you if it only gets you killed. The swarm acts like we’re beneath its notice, but how can we really be sure?’

More days passed, and the starship learned how to decipher more of the data streaming through the captured component’s transceivers. For the first time, an accurate picture of the swarm’s origins began to form, where before she’d had only disparate fragments of knowledge loosely knitted together with conjecture.

Once the starship learned how to tap into the swarm’s senses, Dakota was able to look out on the universe through trillions of eyes.