Empire of Light

'What about stellar drift?' asked Lamoureaux.

'The Atn coordinate system was designed to take that into account, and as a result it's extremely reliable. The coordinates don't so much refer to a single point in space as a projected path for a star or group of stars. I've identified a white dwarf system in the catalogues that matches the numbers very closely.'

'That still leaves the question of what the Mos Hadroch is,' Willis remarked.

'We need to get this back to Dakota fast,' Lamoureaux muttered to Willis. 'To Senator Corso as well.'

Ty looked between the two men, his throat suddenly tight. 'You're going out there, right?'

'Where?' asked Lamoureaux.

'You've got material proof the Mos Hadroch is something tangible, with a defined location a thousand light-years from here. Until very recently a discovery like that was always going to be of purely academic interest, since the Shoal were never going to let us go that deep into the galaxy. But that's all changed now, hasn't it?'

'That's far from decided,' Willis replied.

'You lifted me out of Ascension, practically kidnapped me out of the hands of the security services. The Legislate is probably at your throats for that, am I right?'

Willis's face was carefully blank, but the look on Lamoureaux's face made Ty sure he was on the right track. 'Get someone else to check the data if you like,' Ty added, 'but there's no one better qualified. If you're going out there, you're going to need to take me with you.'

Chapter Six

When the attack came, it was swift, brutal and very nearly deadly.

With time, Dakota came to realize she had failed to pay proper attention to subtle changes taking place within the captured swarm-component. That it was a Trojan Horse became evident only with hindsight, its outwardly simple structure belying a technology far more sophisticated than she had even suspected.

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.

'I don't know how much longer I can hold myself together,' he warned her, little more now than a voice attached to a blur of static. The blur then shifted and almost resolved into other faces from her past: Corso, Severn, even her mother, all drawn from her dreams and memories. 'The data cores are starting to purge themselves, shutting themselves down as a last-ditch measure. The swarm's almost penetrated the ship's command levels. You have to…'

Dakota watched as Josef dissolved into a cloud of random noise – dead a second time. She burrowed her way deeper into the starship's networks, hiding in realms as yet unaffected by the ravages of the viral agents. A silent battle raged for the next several days. Huge swathes of the ship's neural structure were destroyed, but eventually the balance tipped, and another forty-eight hours saw the last few surviving viral agents isolated and finally destroyed.

As soon as Dakota had regained full control over her ship, she sent the swarm-component spi

It was a pyrrhic victory at best. The swarm had learned far more from her than the reverse. In the meantime her ship drifted, silent and crippled, its self-repair mechanisms struggling to mend the worst of the damage.

Dakota watched helplessly as the swarm all around now entered a period of renewed activity. Thousands of its components were being refashioned into weapons, and it wasn't long before the first of these came vectoring in towards her with deadly intent. A dozen hunter-killer components made contact with the hull of her ship and began burning and drilling their way into its interior. She reached out with her mind and shut them down before they could penetrate too deeply, but there were legions more to take their place. Another dozen separated from the main body of the swarm and closed in for the kill.

Her only recourse was to jump as far away from the vicinity of the swarm as possible, but the battle for control of the ship had drained the energy reserves it needed to make a jump of even a few light-years. Then she recalled that the swarm had been observed to maintain a certain minimum distance from the near vicinity of the red giant.

She might not have enough power for a long-range jump, but a very short-range jump was another matter.

Before the next wave of hunter-killers could reach it, the Magi starship summoned up just enough power to jump a few AUs closer to the dying star. The star field beyond the hull remained unchanged, but the red giant grew huge and corpulent.

A storm of transmissions flickered back and forth through the vacuum around the ship. Dakota knew she hadn't escaped the swarm, but she had managed to buy herself a few hours of breathing space.

Her ship once again began the process of clawing energy out of the vacuum in preparation for its next jump. In the meantime yet more hunter-killer components vectored inwards, and Dakota tracked their progress with sick despair.

The ship managed to repel them, but not before serious damage had been inflicted on its drive-spines. It managed to carry out a second jump regardless, less than an hour after the previous one.

This time the red giant blotted out half the universe, and the swarm had become distinctly less numerous.

The ship's sensors picked up a cluster of several hundred swarm-components undergoing heavy modification, at a distance of a few million kilometres. Closer observation showed that drive-spines were being fixed to the hulls of these components.