The elevator doors hissed open and they stepped into a suite of offices. Ted Lamoureaux was already there, sprawled on a couch. 'Ted,' said Corso, stepping forward and shaking Lamoureaux's hand, after the other man stood up to greet him. 'Good to see you. We'll talk through here.'

The starship navigator was a slight, pale-featured man in his thirties, with a perpetually worried look. He was also – in common with Dakota Merrick and every other Magi-enabled navigator within the Consortium – a machine-head, his skull filled with consciousness-altering technology that made him uniquely suited to interfacing with the starships that Dakota had summoned to Ocean's Deep.

Lamoureaux followed them into an office with a wide picture window. Hundreds of newly installed drive-spines – spaced equidistant from each other all around Eugenia's surface – were visible beyond the window. They were a recent addition, an essential part of the asteroid's slow transformation into a full-fledged starship. Each spine was hundreds of metres tall and gracefully curving, giving Eugenia the appearance from a distance of some enormous space-going bacterium coated in metallic cilia.

Corso dropped on to a couch. 'Whatever it is you wanted to talk to me about is going to have to wait a few minutes. I need to know why Eugenia's new FTL drive still hasn't arrived.'

'It's all in my report.'

'Yeah, I know. Just humour me, Ted.'

Lamoureaux shrugged and slipped a ring from the finger of one hand, then dropped it on to the active plate of an imager unit set up near the window. He touched the machine's controls, and an image of an airless dwarf planet appeared above the plate, slowly rotating. A Maker cache had been found there little more than a year before, at Iota Horologii – the Tierra system, as it was more commonly known. Other images appeared, cut-away schematics showing the cache's layout, a kilometres-deep shaft drilled deep into the planet's crust, with thousands of needle-like passageways extending out from the shaft.

One of these passageways, Corso knew, contained a machine called a drive-forge, a template-driven fabricator that could manufacture new superluminal engines for faster-than-light travel.

The Tierra system had briefly been home to a Uchidan colony before the Shoal Hegemony had reclaimed it without explanation. The uprooted colonists had been evacuated to a new home on Redstone, an ill-fated decision that left the Uchidans in a state of near-permanent war with the Freehold colony already long established there.

Much more recently, it had been discovered that the Shoal had been actively suppressing knowledge of the existence of these caches for a very, very long time. When they'd discovered this particular cache orbiting out in the very farthest reaches of the Tierra system, the Shoal had reneged on their existing contracts with the Uchidans.

But now the Shoal themselves were gone, and the cache had been quickly rediscovered, and subsequently placed under the control of the Peacekeeper Authority. Corso had been locked in a political battle with the Consortium Legislate ever since, desperate for the resources and personnel needed to exploit the cache, but forced to make more and more concessions in order to get them.

'All the latest research is right here on this data ring,' Lamoureaux explained. 'It can take up to a couple of weeks to produce a single superluminal drive, and as soon as one is finished half a dozen different colonial governments, with their own agendas, start threatening embargoes and worse if we don't give it to them. At the moment most of the drives are meant to go into ships intended for relief operations throughout the Consortium, but we've got no guarantees that's what they'll get used for. That and about a hundred other reasons are why there are so many delays, and why Eugenia doesn't have its drive yet. And that's before we even get to considering the increasing rate of neural burnout in our machine-head pilots. We've had to retire nearly a third of our longest-serving navigators in the past six months.'

'"Neural burnout"? Is that what they're calling it now?'

'That and the bends, but the neurologists prefer not to call it that. It's primarily affecting the ones who've been piloting Magi ships the longest.'

'Like yourself.'

'So far I've been fine, but it might only be a matter of time.'

'And we still don't know what's causing this?'

'Nope.'

Corso leaned back and stared up at the ceiling, suddenly feeling wearier despite the pills. 'In other words, we're even more fucked than we already were.'

Lamoureaux spread his hands. 'Look… I don't want to be the one to have to say this, but if things keep on the way they are, we're going to wind up losing navigators faster than we can replace them. We might then be forced to give the Legislate at least some of what it wants.'

'Specifically?'

'Relaxing the rules governing the recruitment of new navigators. Allow the Legislate, and the governments it represents, to share the responsibility for finding and training them.'

'Which would leave the Peacekeeper Authority without any purpose. Or authority.'

Lamoureaux's expression was carefully non-committal.

'Yugo,' Corso asked, 'your thoughts?'

'If I can speak candidly?'

Corso nodded.

'I think Ted's right. If we don't make major concessions now, the Legislate might claim we're being unreasonable and merely blocking them. That might be just enough of an excuse for them to try and make a grab for the Tierra cache. The Allocation Treaty means a certain proportion of finished drives go to them, so if they then decided to carry out a military action against us, they'd have the means and resources to do it.'

'Not to mention,' Lamoureaux added, 'a lot of ships are being retro-fitted to make it harder for them to be remotely grabbed by machine-heads. That means we might not be able to stop them, even with the help of the Magi ships. Unless we threaten to blow up their suns.'

'Not even remotely funny,' Corso muttered. Clearly he was going to have to intervene directly over the business of Eugenia's drive. 'Whatever else it is you came here to tell me, I really hope it's good news.'

'We received a transmission from Dakota Merrick.'

Corso tried not to look too startled. 'It's been, what, more than a year? I was beginning to…' To wonder if she was even still alive, he almost said.

'She's rendezvoused with the Maker,' Lamoureaux continued. 'We received a targeted burst from her several hours ago. According to what she sent us, the Maker is really a swarm of space-going machines, quite vast in number. The evidence points to a single, unified intelligence, even though its individual components are apparently spread out across a number of light-years.'

Lamoureaux reached out to the imager once more, and the Tierra cache was replaced by something that looked more like a metal sculpture created by a psychotic than it suggested a space-going vessel.

There's something evil-looking about it, Corso thought, even though he knew it was pointless to attribute human qualities to something so very clearly alien.

'The swarm possessed data relating to something called the "Mos Hadroch", which it apparently regards as a serious threat,' Lamoureaux explained. 'According to the Magi's own records, it's some kind of weapon of phenomenal power, but – until now – there was never any evidence that it even existed.'

Corso stared at the image of the swarm-component. 'And this means it does?'

'Dakota came up against a blank wall, and asked us to see if we could find any correlation with anything known to us. Imagine our surprise when we did. Now, look at this.'

The swarm-component was replaced by an image of a lumpy-looking asteroid. 'This is an Atn clade-world,' Lamoureaux explained. 'You can find them out on the edge of many systems in the Consortium.'