Free Empire of Light by Gary Gibson

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 spinning back out into space.
    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