She continued to scream her rage and beat the surface of the platform with her open palms, weeping and angry. She reached out with her mind and tried to take control of the Magi ship, still waiting on its rocky shore, but all she got for her efforts was a wash of pain that made her double up.

Once the pain had passed, she climbed back inside the submersible and let it take her back to the shore. She stared out at the ocean depths, without really seeing them, then slid down on to the submersible deck, hunched forward, knees up against her face, and hands pressed against her eyes.

Her instinct told her that everything the Shoal-member had said was probably true. But Trader was also a master of manipulation; what had been left unsaid could easily prove to be just as important.

The submersible broke through the waves a couple of hundred metres from the shore. A low rumbling sound caused her to look back towards the towers, in time to see Trader’s yacht lift out of the water and accelerate upwards. A moment later she felt the command structure for the Meridian weapons systems suddenly land in her implants. It felt like she’d instantly gained a couple of hundred extra limbs.

The submarine’s hatch snapped open once it reached the shore, and she pulled herself out, moving carefully while her brain assimilated what felt like a staggering amount of data. She waded through shallow surf until she once again stood in the shadows of the Magi starship.

Dakota collapsed on to the rough shale and closed her eyes, playing around with the command structure. Almost immediately something rumbled in the dense jungle beyond the cliffs, and Dakota opened her eyes again just in time to see a dozen silver spheres suddenly shoot up into the air above the cliffs, pieces of rock and dirt and shattered foliage sliding off their featureless carapaces. More rose from further inland, ascending to hover hundreds of metres above the ground, scattering more debris.

She turned towards the sea and saw a considerably greater number of identical spheres climbing out of the deep waters.

She sat there for a few minutes while the Magi ship’s minds analysed the complex subroutines and hard AI neural structures of the command structure. Then she played around for a while, making the weapons swoop and soar like balls thrown by a sky-high invisible juggler. One tore overhead at several times the speed of sound, the roar of its passing sending small winged creatures, too weird-looking to be called birds, scattering from their perches in great flocks.

If it was up to me I’d just fly away for ever and never come back, Dakota thought to herself. Her sense of resentment had grown rather than diminished and, despite the staggering levels of destructive power hidden beneath the smooth, featureless shells of the Meridian drones, she felt powerless.