“Right,” Hardy said. “Jevlak, other than this being a horrific and confusing mess, what more can you tell me about the Pilgrims’ areas of operation?”

Jevlak, who had never much cared for the human tendency to soften reality, tapped her PADD and sent another packet of coordinates into the conference room’s main display. The Cardassian’s pale-grey skin caught the light, ridges along her neck and brow throwing sharp shadows as she moved.

“Captain,” she said briskly, “calling it a horrific mess does not, in fact, improve it. These are the confirmed sites.”

The new points flared on the screen. “Orantei Station,” she went on, tapping the brightest. “These trading depots and this refuelling station. Then the Pala Ridge farming colony. What is potentially of greater concern is that four of our communications relays have demonstrated erratic behaviour that matches observed Pilgrim formats.”

Kincaid made a soft noise in his throat. The older man sat half-slouched in his chair at the end of the table, long limbs folded up. Age had taken his youth but not his height, in that he seemed perpetually a little too big for whatever furniture he was given.

“This mystery becomes more unnerving the more we learn,” he drawled, his accent full of soft vowels. “The distance between all of these points would be too difficult for us to investigate each of them within a useful time period.”

Elkader stood with one hip braced against the edge of the table, arms folded, staring at the display. “We could make use of the runabouts and fighters,” she said. “But if any one of them were to make contact, reinforcements could be too far away. Can we narrow them down? Presumably they have a main base of operations?”

“These coordinates are based on my reading of signatures similar to the reliquary that we have studied,” Jevlak said. “We could assume that the smaller locations – the relays, for example – are not priority locations. But the Pilgrims, and whatever technology is behind them, may well be pursuing a wider plan that has more intelligence than we do. They may be smarter than we are.”

“Yes, at the moment, they might be,” Hardy said mildly. “But that’s an intolerable situation we’ll be correcting presently.”

He stepped closer to the screen, the light painting faint shadows into the lines of his face. With a few brisk gestures, he wiped away the lesser points and left a smaller number of coordinates hanging in the dark.

“Very well,” he said. “We have to make a judgement somewhere. This collection is close enough for us to investigate with small craft while the Victory remains in striking distance. And it has a sufficient number of larger bases or colonies.” He turned back to face the room. “We have our collection of bad ideas. What else do we think?”

Jevlak spoke up. “Captain, I have begun to suspect that our problem is that we have been plotting this in the wrong way.”

“And what would be the right way?” Hardy asked.

She manipulated her PADD, the gestures altering the depiction on the screen. She pinched two points together, then dragged them out along another plane. The points rearranged themselves, some drawing closer, others stretching away.

“We’ve been looking at distances,” she said. “Physical separations, travel times, our normal way of thinking. But my study of the reliquaries and the transmission patterns from Orantei suggest that they are less concerned with the physical location of objects and more concerned with the manner in which those objects are, or could be, connected.”

Hardy’s eyes narrowed. “Go on.”

Jevlak drew in a breath. “The transport corridors and trade routes that have been followed in the Expanse have been so for centuries, possibly much longer. Then colonisation has occurred along these flows, rather than the other way around. This is an unusual pattern of development. If I overlay our own records of Pilgrim movements with those provided by the Klingon, then, it appears that this area of the Expanse evolved according to a much older pattern of transmission and transportation that does not obey all of the physical laws that normally apply.”

Elkader whistled softly. “So the important thing is not the places themselves, but the places in-between.”

Hardy smiled, quick and sharp. “Our cosmological assumptions are wrong.”

He straightened and glanced at Kincaid. “Commander, humour me. I assume you’ve developed tactical plans while on the Farragut that display plausible supply routes for logistics?”

“We did,” Kincaid said. “Extensively. Many of the freighters we supported had no warp capability, so the routes I plotted are significantly denser than would be typical.”

He reached for his own PADD, his old fingers surprisingly nimble on the controls. A moment later, a new layer appeared on the screen: a dense network of lines, some bright, some faint, connecting systems and stations in a spider’s web of use. Major routes glowed thick and steady, the arterial paths of commerce while lesser routes threaded between them, thinner and messier.

“Jevlak, plot our relays along those routes,” Hardy said. “No Klingon, no Romulan, just Federation relays overlaying the routes used for centuries.”

Jevlak overlaid her points again. The infected sites clustered along certain intersections, sitting where routes overlapped or bent. Orantei hung at the junction of three major lines. Pala Ridge marked a point where two smaller currents met before feeding into a bigger one. The Federation relays were evenly distributed along the connected routes.

Hardy stepped closer, studying it in silence.

Kincaid cleared his throat. “Well,” he said gently. “That’s unpleasant.”

“They’re using our relays to light up this part of the Expanse,” Elkader said. “How the hell did that happen?”

“Without our knowledge,” Hardy finished. “All right,” he said. “Jevlak, if you were a vast, possibly superintelligent artefact trying to reconnect an ancient network using whatever scraps of modern infrastructure you could hijack, what would you be trying to achieve?”

“A coherent, unbroken chain,” she said, without hesitation. “Resonant enough to carry something. A signal. A thought. A presence. Whatever it is that the Pilgrims call a song’.”

“And if it works?” Hardy asked.

She hesitated. That, more than anything, made the room feel colder.

“Then the strength of the signal could grow exponentially,” she said. “Every infected station, ship, colony, relay. It could be thought of as one big subspace… shout. Every item or entity that is close enough to receive the signal then acts as an amplification.”

Kincaid let out a long breath through his nose. “Feels a little like we’re setting someone up to control this entire area of space.”

“Worse than that,” Hardy said. “I fear that could be sufficient for the transmission to reach a crescendo that would never stop.”

Elkader straightened, restless energy practically sparking off her. “So we destroy the nodes,” she said. “We know some of them. We have resources in the Expanse, including the Klingon pirate. We get out there and start breaking things before they finish connecting everything.”

“We do,” Hardy said. His voice had gone very calm. “But we don’t have the luxury of blundering around with a hammer and hope. Every node we smash is a colony, a station. There are a lot of terrified people woven halfway into a system they don’t understand. I fear that this would not be like unplugging a speaker, it would be like amputating limbs.”

He looked around the room.

“Jevalk,” he said. “You’re going to take K’halek’s coordinates and this mess of ours and see if you can give me three categories: nodes that are too far gone, nodes we might save, and nodes that haven’t noticed the infection yet. Kincaid, work with her. I trust you to be the voice of charitable pessimism.”

Kincaid inclined his head. “It’s what I was born for.”

“Elkader,” Hardy went on, “you’re going to start thinking like a raider instead of a squadron leader. I want hit-and-run plans on every node we can reach that keeps the Victory within a plausible margin for reinforcement distance. Assume compromised infrastructure, hostile subspace conditions, and the occasional ship full of zealots.”

Her eyes gleamed. “Now you’re speaking my language.”

“And I,” Hardy said, “will talk to the fine people of Starfleet Command. I will explain, as simply as I can manage, that the frontier is in the process of being rethreaded by an artefact that views us as convenient wiring, and that if they’d like to maintain even the pretence of free will out here, they will need to authorise us to break things.”

He straightened, smoothing the front of his jacket as if preparing for a social call rather than a bureaucratic skirmish. He smiled then, properly this time, the dry, wry curve that had got him through more than one impossible assignment.

“Cheer up,” he said. “It’s not every day you get to tell history you were there when someone tried to install a new nervous system in the galaxy and you politely declined.”