'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.

She eventually discovered that the swarm was very, very old – and not alone. There were others scattered through distant galaxies, having seeded themselves across the face of the universe over vast epochs of time. The origins of this particular swarm dated back to a time when the Earth's sun had barely coalesced from interstellar dust.

It was clear that these swarms maintained contact with each other, despite the vast distances that separated them, by some means Dakota did not yet understand. Although tach-net communications were instantaneous, the amount of energy required to boost a signal so enormously far staggered the imagination. How the swarm obtained the requisite energy was a question that, at least for the moment, might have to remain unanswered.