Empire of Light (7 page)

Chapter Eight

A holographic simulation of the Milky Way filled the shallow dome of the debriefing room as Corso entered, angled so that the wispy trail of a spiral arm hovered just a few metres above the floor. The air inside the room felt pleasantly chilly, the atmosphere in the rest of the Bandati orbital station being too warm and humid for his comfort. He had only just arrived back at Ocean’s Deep aboard a transport called the
Kilminster,
along with more than a hundred newly recruited technical specialists who would continue on to the research base at Tierra.

Lamoureaux stepped towards him from out of the gloom. ‘Senator.’

Corso nodded and dropped into one of twenty chairs arranged around the circumference of the room and facing towards its centre. ‘I literally just came down the spoke. I got your report about White-cloud. Where is he now?’

‘Still up at the hub, on board a ship. Ray and Leo both felt it was safer keeping him there.’

Corso nodded tiredly and glanced towards the glistening star-simulation. ‘Fair enough. How about we get started?’

Lamoureaux nodded and stepped back towards the centre of the room. ‘This is where we are,’ he said, turning slightly to regard the simulation.

A minuscule ball of light representing the Consortium blinked into life deep inside the Orion spiral arm. It was easy to miss amongst the surrounding starscape.

‘I can never get over how tiny it looks,’ Corso muttered.

‘It
is
tiny,’ Lamoureaux agreed, ‘on the galactic scale of things. Now, remember some of what I’ll be showing you consists of best guesses and conjecture.’

‘That’s fine.’

Half a dozen yellow pinpricks, their brightness oscillating rapidly to make them stand out from the surrounding starscape, appeared at various points scattered through the Orion Arm and beyond. Lines representing trajectories connected each pinprick to the ball of light representing the Consortium.

‘The yellow dots represent the furthest points reached by our experimental probes,’ Lamoureaux explained.

‘I thought we sent out more than this,’ said Corso with a frown.

‘We did. We lost contact with some, particularly the ones we sent in the direction of the Emissaries. They might have been captured or destroyed, but they managed to return useful data before they disappeared.’

Corso grunted. ‘What about the Magi ships we sent out to reconnoitre?’

‘We suffered some losses, but there are others out there trying to trace the progress of the war. The probes are a lot more disposable, and even with just this many we’ve managed to identify the location of quite a few of the Shoal’s tach-net transceiver relays. The relays boost transmissions around the Shoal’s territory, and their signal strength is uniform. As a result we were able to work out the rough shape and size of the territory covered by the relays.’

As Corso watched, a roughly ovoid section of the Milky Way, encompassing a large chunk of the Orion Arm and reaching in towards the core, changed in colour to a uniform magenta.

‘And that’s the Hegemony?’ he asked, not quite able to keep his voice under control.
An empire made of light,
he thought to himself.

‘So we think.’ Lamoureaux glanced over at Corso and smiled on seeing his expression. ‘There’s some guesswork involved, like I said, but we’re still looking at a region several thousand light-years across at its widest point.’

‘It’s incredible, but it’s still not quite the galaxy-spanning empire they sold themselves as.’

Lamoureaux nodded. ‘Not quite, no. But huge enough.’

‘And the Emissaries?’

Lamoureaux nodded. ‘Coming up next.’

Another region of space, immediately adjacent to that representing the Hegemony, now changed colour. It reached towards the rim of the galaxy, and encompassed an area roughly half that of the Hegemony itself.

‘You can see the galaxy’s outer rim puts a clear boundary on their expansion,’ said Lamoureaux. ‘So, unless they want to stick to the halo stars, they have to pass through Shoal territory in order to access the rest of the Milky Way.’

A translucent blue panel appeared in the simulation, placed between the two empires and brushing against the outer rim of the Orion Arm. Corso recognized it as the region of the Long War.

‘We think their conflict with the Shoal has forced the Emissaries to expand sideways, up and down the outer arms,’ Lamoureaux continued. ‘But with the escalation to using nova-class weapons, they’re clearly pushing the Shoal’s fleets back towards us and deeper into the Orion Arm.’

‘And how long before the fighting actually reaches us?’

‘Based on the latest analyses, not long. We may have less than six months before they arrive here in force. Most of the strategic analysts I’ve spoken to think the Shoal are preparing for a major retreat in order to bolster older, better-defended systems closer to the heart of their territory. That way they sacrifice us as well as a lot of their other client species, but stand a much better chance of either surviving the war with their culture intact, or more likely – judging by how it’s playing out so far – reaching some kind of détente.’

Corso shook his head and quietly swore under his breath. A tightness in his scalp heralded an oncoming migraine. ‘So exactly where was Dakota last time we heard from her?’ Her garbled warning had been forwarded to him on board the
Kilminster
less than twenty-four hours before.

‘Over here,’ came the answer. Another brightly coloured pinprick appeared far around the curve of the galaxy, between three and three and a half kiloparsecs distant – a little more than seventeen thousand light-years from Ocean’s Deep. The simulation of the galaxy rotated rapidly until the icon representing her last-known location was directly overhead, while the Consortium now hovered just underneath the ceiling.

‘As you can see,’ said Lamoureaux, ‘she’s gone a long, long way.’

‘Show me the coordinates Whitecloud dug up. Draw a line from here to there.’

Lamoureaux nodded, and a single pale line reached out from the Consortium towards a sparse stellar region not much more than a thousand light-years away.

Corso let out a sigh and stood, before walking around under the simulation and peering up. ‘All right,’ he said, reaching up with both hands and wiping them across his face as if he could scrub the fatigue away. ‘What do we have that’s ready to travel to Whitecloud’s coordinates and see what’s actually there?’

‘There are five Magi starships here in Ocean’s Deep, but the only currently available navigators were all supplied by the Legislate. That means I can’t guarantee any of them aren’t supplying information back to the Legislate security services.’

‘That’s all?’ Corso snapped, sounding scandalized. ‘What the hell about our own people?’

‘They’re all either out on relief missions or they’ve been hit by neural burnout. The way things are going, we’re going to need more of our own ships to be equipped with superluminal drives than we thought. But in terms of our present situation . . .’ Lamoureaux hesitated.

‘What?’

‘Even if a Magi ship was available, it’s going to have to tow a ship with enough room for an expeditionary crew. There aren’t any big enough, apart from the
Mjollnir,
and she already has her own superluminal drive. But, as you know, she’s being prepped for a relief expedition to Ascension.’

‘Really?’ Corso thought hard for a moment. ‘Put her up there, Ted.’

Lamoureaux complied, the galaxy fading to be replaced by an image of the
Mjollnir,
a colony-class frigate belonging to the Freehold. She was similar in appearance and construction to her sister-ships
Agartha
and
Hyperion,
both long since destroyed within the Nova Arctis system. She was also one of the few vessels in existence with the capacity to carry a significant proportion of Ascension’s trapped population to safety, a task for which she was currently being readied at Ocean’s Deep. Her maiden faster-than-light voyage had brought her here from Redstone to be refitted just for that purpose.

‘The
Mjollnir
could do it, then?’ said Corso, staring up at the floating image. ‘How long before she’s ready?’

‘She’s ready now,’ Lamoureaux replied. ‘Senator . . . at the very least, you’d need to get the authority of the Consortium’s Central Trade Council as well as the Freehold Senate. And the fact is, they’re not going to give it to us. If you think things are looking shaky for us now, I don’t even want to think about what’s going to happen if we commandeered the
Mjollnir.
’

‘Screw the CTC,’ Corso replied. ‘And the Senate. I don’t need to ask anyone’s permission to commandeer her.’

Lamoureaux looked doubtful. ‘How does that come about?’

‘There are specific clauses relating to overriding emergencies. Just look them up. I think that beating Dakota’s swarm to the Mos Hadroch, assuming that’s really where it’s headed, fits anyone’s definition of an emergency.’

‘It’s going to break the Fleet Authority’s back, if you do this,’ Lamoureaux warned.

‘Let me worry about that. How soon could we reach those coordinates with the
Mjollnir?

Lamoureaux made a resigned sound. ‘Two weeks there, more or less. And the same again to get back home.’

Corso stared back at him, thunderstruck. ‘That fast? It’s taken Dakota, what, two years to get seventeen thousand light-years?’

Lamoureaux shrugged. ‘She didn’t go in a straight line, Senator, because she had to hunt far and wide to find the Maker’s trail. We’ve been sourcing data from the Magi ships that’s helped us greatly increase the efficiency and reach of the drives coming out of the Tierra cache.’

‘Then there’s no other recourse. Who’s in charge of the
Mjollnir
?’

‘Eduard Martinez.’

Corso nodded, recognizing the name. ‘I’ve met him,’ he replied. ‘Good, that might make things easier.’ Martinez was very much a progressive in Freehold politics, which meant Corso might not have to replace him in command.

‘But the Ascension relief operation?’ Lamoureaux reminded him. ‘The
Mjollnir
’
s
scheduled to be going there in the next couple of days. How are you going to square that with the Legislate?’

‘It’s a short-term loss for a long-term gain,’ Corso replied.

Lamoureaux gave him a strange look, and Corso realized just how cold-hearted he’d sounded. ‘If we save some people at Ascension instead of heading straight out to those coordinates, we might lose something that could save
us all
from the Emissaries,’ he explained. ‘If the Legislate doesn’t want to think ahead, then I’m going to have to do it for them. Get hold of Martinez for me, and set up a secure, one-on-one tach-net link to Akiyama at the Office of Representatives while you’re at it, and route it to my quarters. Flag it urgent and top-priority.’

‘Senator, with the very greatest of respect, do you really think we can pull this off?’

Corso glanced back at Lamoureaux, as he headed for the door. ‘You’d better hope we can, Ted. Because if we can’t, we’re screwed.’

Chapter Nine

The sun was low on the horizon. Cool wind teased her dark hair, while saltwater foamed and splashed over her bare toes where she sat at the water’s edge, her baggy cotton trousers rolled up above her ankles. She knew, without looking, that further up the beach behind her stood a single-storey cabin on stilts, with tatami mats scattered welcomingly on its floor and a futon rolled up in one corner.

None of it was real, of course, but she didn’t know who she was, so it hardly mattered. She knew something had been threatening her because, when she tried to remember where she’d been before the beach, all that came to her was a sense of unease and foreboding.

In the meantime, she knew she could happily wait here on the beach for ever.

Sometimes she glanced down at her arms and legs and didn’t recognize them. The knowledge that something was missing – that some essential part of her had been lost for ever – slowly formed in the back of her mind, but somehow she didn’t seem to feel anything about it: no anger, remorse or bitterness. Only the awareness that something that should have been there, now wasn’t.

After a long while she remembered a star, angry and red, reaching out to swallow her. She remembered there had been machines like dark metal locusts filling the universe like a plague.

A little while later, she remembered dying.

What might have been hours or days or years later, her name came back to her:
Dakota.
She formed the sound with her lips, working her jaws around it in ways that felt unfamiliar, as if trying the vowels out for size.

She turned, seeing that a bamboo table laden with fresh fruit stood near the cabin, and in that instant it was as if a switch was thrown inside her. Sudden hunger overwhelmed her, and she stood and walked over. Once she’d eaten her fill, she crawled inside the cabin, unrolled the futon and went to sleep.

She dreamed she was a little girl again. The cabin’s open doorway and the strip of beach it framed became a tall window looking out on cobbled streets lined with buildings made of brick and steel. She lay with her head in her mother’s lap, listening to the gentle rhythms of her parent’s voice, while flakes of snow drifted down from out of a sky so pale it was almost white.

The next time Dakota opened her eyes, she was somewhere else.

She knelt naked on a rocky shore entirely unlike the one she had found herself on before. Faces and places that should have been familiar to her spun through her mind like pieces of a shredded book flung into the heart of a whirlwind. She was incomplete, an unfinished puzzle with missing pieces.

The air had a strange, coppery taste to it, and when she turned to look behind her, instead of a beach hut and table she saw only forbidding-looking cliffs topped with tangled blue-green flora. The roofs of buildings like gold-plated tombstones rose above the jungle, while the distant peaks of mountains were visible further inland.

She looked out to sea, and saw massive towers like minarets rising out of the ocean, several kilometres out from the shore. Something about them made her sure they were very, very old.

A Magi ship rested on the shore, looking as if it had been beached there. It dwarfed the nearby cliffs and towered far above her, its bulbous body angled upwards as it rested on its drive spines. Waves lapped against the curve of its partially submerged hull.

That was when Dakota realized the Magi ships were never going to let her die.

She stood and stared up and down the beach, cold prickling her bare skin, and tried to remember what her mother’s face had looked like. Nothing came to her except the memory of gazing out on to a snow-laden street. It seemed much of her life on Bellhaven had been reduced to that one sliver of memory; the rest was gone for ever.

Somehow, whatever essence – whatever fundamental core of self-identity – she had carried within her had been transported across the light-years and used to rebuild her. Her memories of a beach and a hut had been part of the process of integration, as they had started to put her fragmented memory back together. It shouldn’t have worked, of course: she should have become a stumbling Frankenstein mess, a lopsided thing only half-alive, and yet here she was.

She heard whispering voices all around her, as if the beach or the waves or the sand itself had suddenly become conscious. It took her a moment to realize they were coming through her implants.

We had to make do with what we found,
they announced.

The minds of the Magi ship, she realized. Not the same one that had carried her to the Maker; that was gone, turned to superheated dust and scattered across the cosmos, along with the original Dakota.

‘But you didn’t do it to help me,’ she moaned. ‘You brought me back because you wanted me to lead you to the Mos Hadroch.’

It had to be done,
they replied.
We want to help you, Dakota. You don’t ever have to die if you don’t want to, not really. Not any more. We made you whole again – or as whole as we
could
make you.

She wanted to wade out into the water, to let herself sink as soon as she could no longer feel anything solid beneath her feet, but soon realized she didn’t have the strength or the will to do it. And even if she could, she knew the ship would just resurrect her again.

A bundle of what at first appeared to be rags lay close by but, when she stepped over, Dakota found they were clothes, identical to the ones she’d worn when she’d left Ocean’s Deep a few years before. She picked them up, thinking that at least she wouldn’t freeze to death if the nights here were as cold as the day was warm.

As she dressed, she glanced up at the curved underbelly of the Magi ship, and imagined it giving birth to her here on the shore, spitting the clothes out after her and watching over her until she blinked her eyes open for the first time.

She pulled the jacket around her shoulders. ‘Why am I here?’ she asked the air.

There was a message,
the voices whispered in reply.
It used Shoal protocols, and was directed to Ocean’s Deep. Indecipherable to all but you.

They fed the message to her: a stream of data encoded using encryption techniques developed jointly by the Shoal and Magi – before one had committed genocide against the other.

The message was from Trader in Faecal Matter of Animals, and it concerned the Mos Hadroch. It detailed a rendezvous here on this world’s shore, where dull grey waters lapped against broken shale.

What am I made of?
Dakota wondered, panicked by the thought. She reached down and pinched the flesh of her forearm between thumb and forefinger. It felt like ordinary flesh and blood but, if she’d been remade, how could she be sure her knowledge of what flesh should feel like hadn’t also been changed? After all, she wasn’t even real, just a dead woman’s memories prodded into life and given the illusion of independence.

Not true. You
are
alive,
said the voices from within the starship.

‘Shut up!’ she yelled, her hands curling into fists by her sides. ‘I didn’t ask for this.’

She stepped closer to the waves and bent down, scooping some of the water up in the palms of her hands. Feeling experimental, she called on her filmsuit, and to her amazement it coated her flesh at once.

They had rebuilt more than just her body: she still had her filmsuit, even her implants.

Your ship calculated the precise phase state and non-arbitrary superpositions for every particle within your body, as well as gathering together the remaining fragments of your mind that were distributed throughout its neural stacks,
said the voices.
That way when it transmitted—

‘I said
shut up!
’

The voices fell silent.

There was a disturbance in the ocean, and a moment later a submersible of some kind emerged, halting a few metres from the shore. Dakota saw its hull was covered with tiny waving strips like flagella, which presumably propelled it. A hatch opened on its upper surface.

He’s waiting for you,
Dakota heard the voices say.

She stared up at the starship one last time, with a mixture of unease and disgust, then waded out to the submersible.

The cilia began to thrash against the water as soon as she had climbed inside. She stared out through the submersible’s tinted, transparent walls as the hatch closed above her. The craft soon began to sink beneath the ocean’s surface.

Something else had changed, she realized. For all that she could still hear the voices of the virtual entities that occupied the Magi ship, that deep, near-instinctive grasp, the near-total symbiosis she’d felt with them, had somehow faded away to nothing.

The original navigators were born to their task,
the starship’s voices told her.
They were created, their genetics manipulated so they could fuse their minds with their ships almost from the moment they came into life. Other Magi ships remade the physical structure of your cortex, but it was only a temporary measure, a stopgap whose consequences could never be precisely modelled. We . . .

Dakota ignored them, squeezing her eyes tight until the voices finally retreated once more.

When she opened her eyes again, bright beams of pale yellow light had flickered into life, radiating out from a dozen points around the submersible’s hull and picking out ruins on the seabed.

The submersible diverted around a vast, weed-strewn hulk that must have been kilometres long. At first she thought it was a collapsed tower, but as the lights picked out the dark shapes of nacelles and heat-dispersal fins, she realized it was a spacecraft that must have plummeted into the ocean long ago.

The ocean floor gradually slipped out of sight, and the submersible began to thread its way between vast columns that Dakota guessed must be the towers she’d seen earlier from the shore. Eventually the submersible headed straight towards one, before passing through an oval opening in its side, which led into a shaft at least a hundred metres across. The submersible began to rise through that shaft, ascending before long into an air-filled cavity.

The hatch opened with a hiss. Dakota pushed her head out and saw that the submersible was now floating in a wide moat between the tower’s outer wall and an enormous circular platform surrounding a column rising at the tower’s centre. Windows made from some crystalline material provided a view of the ocean waves from a few metres beneath the surface.

The platform itself was quite wide enough to support a Shoal superluminal yacht, floating on a bed of shaped fields. Waiting next to it, as Dakota had known he would be, was Trader in Faecal Matter of Animals, safely contained within a field-suspended sphere of water.

Dakota pulled herself out of the hatch and jumped down on to the platform, which looked and felt like black glass as she reached down to touch it. Trader drifted closer, and she watched how his manipulators clutched and wriggled beneath the wide curve of his body.

When he spoke, the familiar tones of his synthesized voice seemed to fill that dank underwater space.

‘Once again, mellifluous greetings,’ he said. ‘Did you enjoy your trip to the Maker? And don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

‘F . . .’ She cleared her throat with some difficulty, and dug her fingernails into her palms, then tried again. ‘Fuck you, too, Trader,’ she finally managed to say, and touched her throat with nervous fingers.

‘I congratulate you on having survived your encounter, Dakota. Few ever do.’

She stared back at the alien and felt a familiar seething anger well up inside her. It was easier to give in to the feelings of the old Dakota – the
real
Dakota, as some treacherous part of her mind insisted on thinking of her.

‘Yes, Trader. I survived, and I got your message. Now tell me how you know so much about what I found out there.’

‘The Consortium is an open book to those with the means to decrypt its most secure transmissions.’

‘Not good enough. I was only ever in contact with other machine-head navigators.’

‘The Shoal could not have brought about the deaths of the original Magi navigators without having the means to intercept their communications traffic, a skill that remains with us. You can be assured, however, that the coordinates you recovered from the Maker stay a secret with me. Even the Shoal Hegemony remains unaware of the expedition.’

‘What expedition?’

‘The expedition your friend Lucas Corso recently sent out towards the coordinates associated with the Mos Hadroch, of course, Dakota.’

She nodded mutely, and realized she had no idea just how much time had passed since the red giant had turned nova. It might have been days, or weeks, or much more.

‘I don’t know what it is you want, Trader, but there are a thousand reasons why I shouldn’t listen to anything you have to say.’

‘And yet here you are.’

I didn’t ask to come here, damn you.
‘The last time I saw you was on Morgan’s World. You already knew about the Mos Hadroch, didn’t you?’

‘In this I must confess my guilt,’ Trader replied smoothly.

‘You could have just told me, and then I never would have needed to go out there.’

‘But I had little more than a name at that time, Dakota. You found out more than I ever did when I myself visited the swarm long ago. You even managed to find a possible location.’

Dakota felt her hands twitch with barely suppressed anger. ‘If I could, I’d kill you, Trader. I’d . . .’

Her heart was hammering, and she felt on the verge of a panic attack. Too much was happening too soon.

She slumped down on the slick black glass extending underfoot, and listened to the wet slap of water against the platform’s edge. ‘Why here?’ she asked, looking briefly around. ‘I mean, what is this place?’

‘This world?’ Trader turned slowly within his sphere of water, glancing from side to side. ‘Its occupants have long since passed on, as you may have guessed. There was a time when the civilization that built these towers strode amid the stars. They had an empire of a kind that stretched across thousands of light-years. Their name for themselves might be loosely translated as “Meridians”.’