Nova War (18 page)

And yet, and yet . . .

And then she realized she was ready, at last, to do what had to be done.

The Blackflower facility was much more than a holding pen for spacecraft and robot atmosphere dredgers. Away from the docks, the facility – more of an orbital city – boasted a population of more than four thousand Bandati, all employed in the extraction of helium three from the upper reaches of the gas giant called Dusk. Refineries, transport hubs and industrial complexes were woven around the docks and bays.

Suddenly, without warning, a pulse of incandescent destructive energy radiated outwards from the derelict’s skin. The vast steel ribs surrounding it tore apart in an instant in a stupendous flash of heat and energy. A large chunk of the facility’s superstructure was destroyed in the process, leaving a gaping hole with the derelict at its dead centre.

The derelict began to move, rapidly picking up speed and accelerating away from the ruins of the facility. The blast continued to ripple through the rest of the city’s superstructure, shattering transport systems and sending large-scale pressurized habitats crashing into each other, their atmospheres spilling out into the vacuum.

From the viewpoint of the very few survivors of this cataclysm, the derelict dwindled rapidly from sight, boosting out of Blackflower’s gravity well, and towards Dusk’s swirling clouds of hydrogen and helium.

Dakota floated, loose-limbed, close to one curving wall of the garden-room. The vast bulk of Blackflower filled her mind’s eye, the slow whirl of the moon gravity as the derelict accelerated away feeling like the insistent tugging of a child at its mother’s sleeve.

I just killed all those Bandati,
Dakota thought.
Everywhere I go, there’s a trail of death, and I can’t make any excuses for myself this time. I’m the one responsible – not the Freehold, the Uchidans or the Bandati. Nobody but me.

She tried to tell herself it was better to lose a few thousand lives in order to get rid of the worst threat to life the galaxy had ever known, but her own words sounded just as ridiculous, just as hollow as she’d expected them to. The knowledge was an acid sensation in the pit of her stomach, and she had to struggle not to throw up.

The old religions of Bellhaven came back to her, with their prophecies and prophets, stories and fables. Maybe, after she was long dead, she’d become one of those stories, a kind of warning to future generations – or more likely something to scare children with.
Do what you’re told, or Dakota Merrick will come and kill us all.

And now, with any luck, Days of Wine and Roses would kill her for what she had just done.

He returned some time later, just as the derelict began to dive down towards Dusk’s upper atmosphere.

Roses’ wings beat spasmodically as he alighted in a crouch beside her. She opened her eyes and watched with casual interest as he pulled his shotgun loose from his harness and pressed its barrel firmly against the side of her head.

His interpreter glowed softly in the subdued light of the garden-bubble. ‘Whatever you’re doing, if you’re responsible for this, stop it now,’ he told her.

She smiled. ‘I can’t stop it. Even if I wanted to, I can’t.’

Which was a lie, of course.

Roses pushed the shotgun’s barrel more firmly against her temple. ‘I know you’re making this happen. So stop.’

Dakota felt a calmness like nothing she’d experienced before, except perhaps for the time she’d tried to kill herself back on a frozen roadside on Redstone.

She closed her eyes and simply ignored Days of Wine and Roses.

The derelict picked up speed as it continued to accelerate down through the upper layers of Dusk’s swirling atmosphere. She saw planet-wide rivers of gas layered over each other; it was like staring into the clouded depths of a gem. Scorching heat tore at the skin of the derelict as it dived downwards, the burning friction of its passage feeling like soft summer sunlight playing on her own human flesh.

‘Stop.’ The voice sounded distant, grating; and a moment later pain flared across her entire range of senses, snapping her awareness back to the garden-bubble, and the filtered sense-data from the derelict was temporarily pushed to the back of her mind.

Swinging it like a club, Roses had hit her across her head with his shotgun.

Why don’t you just kill me
? she wondered, staring up at the alien. She could taste blood in her mouth, and the side of her face now throbbed with terrible pain.

‘Too late,’ she whispered, half to herself.

This way was better. She would keep telling herself that.

The derelict left a trail of white-hot plasma as it passed through and beyond the upper cloud layers, before beginning its final descent into a sea of liquid metallic hydrogen. Below that lay a dense, rocky core, but the ship would cease to exist long before it got that far.

Dakota maintained contact with the ancient starship for as long as possible, as the force of its passage tore the ship’s drive spines away and sent them spinning off into the crushing darkness all around. The enormous atmospheric pressures squeezed the ship’s hull until it shattered.

And then, finally, it was over. The dream-city she’d first woken in was gone, as were the vast virtual libraries she’d wandered through, and the long-dead voices of the Librarians who had served her – the very same ones who had laboured to transform her into their new navigator.

All gone.

She opened her eyes just as the derelict slipped out of contact for ever, and found she didn’t particularly care what happened to herself next. Maybe two, possibly three minutes had passed in the real world. Days of Wine and Roses was still standing nearby, still brandishing his shotgun, but he’d lowered it until the barrel pointed away from her.

He turned away, listening to a long series of clicks that emerged from his interpreter, before turning back to her.

‘You did this,’ he said. ‘You destroyed the derelict. You are responsible.’

She stared up at him. Wasn’t he going to kill her now?

‘Sure, I was, but it could all have been so much worse.’

‘Worse?’

‘I could have sent the ship flying into the heart of the sun instead. Don’t you remember what I told you?’ She shrugged. ‘So what are you going to do now? Kill me or let me go?’

‘Why would we kill you?’

Dakota felt her temper flare. ‘I just
destroyed
the thing you’ve all been fighting for, or didn’t you notice?’

Pulling his shotgun back before once again swinging it towards her head in a long, low arc, Roses hit her a second time. She saw what was coming and instinctively started to duck, but the alien moved too quickly. The barrel caught her on her chin and she spun away, head over heels, drifting towards the centre of the garden-bubble. Sharp, bright pain blanketed her thoughts once more, and she waited for it to pass, her hands clamped tightly over the lower half of her face. One of her teeth felt loose.

Something hit her again and she wrenched away with a scream, hearing a sound much like dry paper being rubbed between fingers. Small, hard-skinned hands pushed at her, and a few moments later she landed against the opposite side of the garden-bubble.

She curled into a defensive ball and waited long seconds for whatever might come, hyperventilating, her hands clamped over her injured jaw. After a few moments she felt a shadow cross over her.

‘In terms of our immediate plans, nothing changes,’ said Roses. ‘We will be continuing on to our destination. When we get there, you’ll do exactly what the Queen of my Hive wants you to do, and answer every question she has. Do you understand me?’

‘Yeah, I understand,’ Dakota mumbled, feeling her jaw with her fingers to see where it hurt most. She tried swallowing, but it still hurt. A lot.

And then they’ll kill me when they finally realize I’ve taken away the thing they all wanted the most.
The fight was over and out of her hands. What use could Corso’s protocols be now?

She tried to reach out to the electronic systems all around her, but there was nothing. She was a normal person again; trapped in her own body, confined within the prison of her skull.

There had been a time, not so long ago, when Dakota had been unable to imagine life without the constant background hum of her machine-head implants, the extra ghost in the machine that had gradually become an indispensable part of her mind. She had thought it would hurt worse than it actually did.

‘You think you understand this situation,’ Roses’ interpreter rasped at her. ‘You
understand
and are less than nothing. We know who and what you are. You were a thief, and now you are a murderer. This is
not
over, Miss Merrick, however much you might wish it was.’

Of course it’s over,
she protested numbly in her own thoughts.

Roses departed once more, swooping away on wide-spread wings, and all she could do was wonder just what he had meant.

Thirteen

Several hours after the destruction of the Blackflower facility, a small maintenance tug departed what appeared to be a disused refinery complex placed at a marginally higher orbit above the surface of the moon.

By now, salvage crews were already beginning the long and difficult process of finding survivors and recovering what they could from the still-orbiting wreckage. The bright sparks of their fusion drives registered on a series of displays spread out before Hugh Moss, the tug’s sole occupant and pilot.

He watched as a series of detonations rippled through the structure of the orbital refinery, destroying the Perfumed Gardens for ever. He took a moment to reflect, and found he didn’t regret the loss as much as he might have expected.

It was a shame to destroy what might have been his greatest legacy bar one, but perhaps he’d become too caught up in the business of helping human beings kill each other; perhaps he had become distracted from the one true purpose in his life – destroying the Shoal Hegemony, starting with Trader in Faecal Matter of Animals.

Moss had been more than a little surprised when what appeared to be a Darkening Skies task force kidnapped Dakota in a military operation clearly calculated to cause maximum damage. But when Dakota had to all appearances
destroyed
the same derelict that had brought her to Night’s End, he’d been forced to abandon his plans to take the derelict for himself – as well as grudgingly concede a degree of respect for her.

He had entered Alexander Bourdain’s employ some years before because, amongst other things, Bourdain had been in the business of buying and selling information. Moss had hoped to track down the source of rumours that Immortal Light had a secret of enormous value; and what sparse details he managed to glean through Bourdain’s network of spies and smuggling contacts slowly filled him with the sense that his long quest for vengeance might actually be nearing fulfilment.

It had been cause enough for him to approach the Queen of Immortal Light and request permission to relocate his Perfumed Gardens research and training facilities to the Night’s End system, in the hope of finding further clues regarding what he had at first, mistakenly, suspected to be a Maker cache as yet undiscovered by the Shoal. In fact, as he soon found, Immortal Light had discovered their own Magi derelict thousands of years before, in a nearby system that remained as yet outside the Shoal’s coreship routes; and there it had remained ever since, locked into a facility purpose-built for its study.

So when Dakota and her own derelict starship had suddenly appeared in this very system as if out of nowhere, it had appeared to be overwhelmingly fortuitous. His original plan to steal the one derelict Immortal Light had found could safely be put to one side. It had also become necessary to discard Bourdain, who had long since outlived his usefulness: the siege on the restaurant had supplied him with the perfect opportunity to rid himself of Bourdain while appearing blameless in the eyes of Immortal Light. He had slashed the wings of the Bandati agent responsible for tracking Bourdain down, knowing the little alien would discharge his weapon into the worm’s tongue, triggering a violent reaction.

Unfortunately, it was not proving so easy to rid himself of Dakota Merrick. Rather than being safely dead and unable to interfere with his plans, she had once again survived – and destroyed the Nova Arctis derelict before he could take it instead.

But no matter: he was nothing if not adaptable. A Magi ship still remained a few light-years distant, in a system whose star the Bandati had named Ocean’s Deep. He would have to step up his original plans and travel there forthwith. And, given what he now knew – that Immortal Light had, against all sanity, engaged the aid of the Emissaries – things were clearly about to get interesting.

With so very much at stake it was impossible not to reflect back on the events that had brought him to this place; impossible, indeed, not to recall the act of rape Trader had performed on him – no, on what he
had been,
so many long years before.

They were events that had long since slipped into the past, but they stood as fresh and clear in Moss’s mind as if they had occurred only yesterday.

A few centuries before, and several thousand light-years distant, a tiny Shoal yacht equipped with its own FTL drive had materialized on the edge of a system dominated by a large red star. This system was close to the heart of the primary zone of conflict between the Emissaries and the Shoal; close to the point where the Orion arm ended and a relative wasteland of dust and stellar debris began.

The yacht’s sole inhabitant was a Shoal-member known to his own kind as Swimmer in Turbulent Currents. He had arrived at the prearranged coordinates several days in advance, eager to make sure there were no Emissary spy drones lurking in ambush.

But all that Swimmer in Turbulent Currents found there was death.

Before the destruction of the Long War, the system had been briefly colonized by an Emissary client-species known as the So’Agrad, now scattered through a dozen other systems. Shoal and Emissary forces had once engaged with each other on several occasions in this very system, and the result had always been the same; either the Emissaries were pushed back towards a band of dust-wisped nebulae several light-years distant, or the Shoal were forced into retreat. Inevitably one or the other would creep back once more, only to be challenged yet again.

Swimmer studied his instruments, waiting while his ship extracted information from data stacks buried kilometres deep beneath the surface of worlds whose atmospheres had been ripped away during those long-ago battles. In the meantime, he guided his yacht closer to the system’s star – he learned that the So’Agrad had named it Te’So – and soon found himself in orbit above what had been their primary colony.

The planet’s airless surface was pockmarked with massive impact craters, with only a few tumbled ruins left to testify to what had gone before. Swimmer toured the remains of one of the largest metropolises, guiding remote probes into darkened crevices and underground shelters, finding only silence and a few flash-frozen corpses that were miraculously intact despite the devastation.

It was a grim demonstration of the deprivations of war and yet, in the scale of things, the near-total annihilation of an entire civilization had amounted to not much more than a minor skirmish in the Long War.

Swimmer couldn’t have found a better testament to why the Long War had to end, and why some kind of peace had to be made with the Emissaries.

He now floated in the pressurized, water-filled centre of his ship, his thoughts full of death and decay as the yacht lifted off once more from a shattered plain. A while later it was accelerating, at a sizeable fraction of the speed of light, towards a new destination – and to a meeting with Trader in Faecal Matter of Animals.

A day or two after he had lifted off from the surface of the dead world, his yacht’s systems picked up something that looked like a jagged half-moon, locked into a long elliptical orbit around Te’So; the blasted, ten-thousand-years-gone remains of a coreship, victim of one of those ancient battles. Random lights glinted within its depths as ancient autonomous defensive systems, still functioning after all this time and against all the odds, targeted his ship on its approach.

Swimmer’s yacht, like Trader’s own, was a heavily modified personal craft rigged with advanced weapons systems, courtesy of their superiors within the Shoal Hegemony. That their ships were also equipped with superluminal drives stood as further testament to their joint standing within the Shoal hierarchy.

Swimmer’s yacht broadcast an identification code that hadn’t been used in a thousand years, and the coreship’s defensive systems stepped down automatically.

He meanwhile leached ancient video recordings from the coreship’s surviving stacks, and hence witnessed its destruction. An asteroid equipped with nuclear-pulse engines had slammed into the coreship, reducing half its mass to molten rubble and destroying every living thing inside it.

Swimmer directed his yacht towards the starship’s exposed core, watching as layer after layer fell away on either side. First he passed what was left of the outer crust, raised high on enormous pillars, and then the layer beneath, where vast populations had lived and finally died together. And then, lastly, he arrived in the empty hollow at the centre, where the vessel’s Shoal crew had lived within a lightless artificial ocean.

Trader was waiting there, in the ruins of the command centre, a pyramidal shaped building located on the curving inner surface of the central core. It was like a vast stele marking the grave of a giant – cold, empty and airless. Swimmer set his yacht’s defensive systems to high alert and scanned Trader’s own near-identical craft parked a short distance away before finally disembarking.

He found Trader waiting for him, his shaped-field bubble glowing faintly as it floated next to a window that had once looked out into ocean depths. He watched carefully as Swimmer approached.

‘You took your own good time,’ said Trader, guiding his field-bubble closer to Swimmer’s own. ‘I was waiting for—’

‘I’d prefer not to merge bubbles, Trader,’ Swimmer interrupted. ‘I’d also prefer to ask why all the skulduggery. And why’ – his tentacular manipulators wriggled for a moment as he searched for the right words – ‘why have you forced me to come here to this, this
mausoleum
?’

‘Why here? To remind us both of what we’re fighting for,’ Trader replied. ‘And I should point out I did not force you to come here.’

‘I have been barred from my rightful place within the Hegemony’s electoral council!’ Swimmer in Turbulent Currents exploded. ‘
Accusations
have been made. I barely held on to my personal yacht when they rescinded my privileges. Then I made inquiries as to who might have caused this, and those inquiries led me to
you. You
made the accusations, the lies, the—’

‘You met with the Emissaries,’ Trader stated.

It seemed to Swimmer in Turbulent Currents that the words somehow hung in the air between them, full of anger and accusation.

‘I met with one of their agents, yes,’ Swimmer stated, ‘on behalf of certain of our superiors who, you should know, are in agreement that peaceful negotiations are absolutely necessary. This ridiculous tit-for-tat aggression is beneath our kind. It’s the sort of primitive territorial tribalism our client species might engage in, but we—’

‘Did you meet an Emissary directly, Swimmer?’ Trader asked. ‘I mean face-to-face with an actual Emissary.’

‘Unfortunately, no,’ Swimmer replied. ‘As you know, they refuse to deal directly with the members of any other species.’

‘Precisely They use other races within their domain to communicate on their behalf. Creatures like the So’Agrad once were – artificial species whose sole purpose is to act as mouthpieces for them. They tricked you.’

‘They didn’t trick me, Trader. Mouthpieces or not, they still spoke for their masters. I was already aware of the nature of the So’Agrad before I met with them. And you must know that I acted on a far higher authority than that of the Deep Dreamers. You yourself rely on their half-baked predictions too much, Trader.’

‘Higher authority?’ Trader’s tentacles wriggled in amusement. ‘Your superiors are under arrest, Swimmer. It was
you
that instigated the offer of negotiations, not them.’

Trader drifted a little closer. ‘Tell me something,’ he asked, ‘have you ever even been to see the Deep Dreamers? It’s a remarkable experience, the chance to see all the possible futures open to our kind. Do you know what the galaxy would have become if we hadn’t killed the last of the Magi? We’d have been just another client race, nothing more, begging for scraps at their table.’

‘And that would have been so bad?’

Trader’s fins stiffened in anger. ‘Reduced to servility in the shadow of another species? Listen to yourself! That was never to be our future.’

‘We were seduced by the Deep Dreamers, Trader.’ Swimmer had carefully studied the interior layout of the coreship’s command centre before departing his own ship. ‘They gave us our first taste of empire, but in reality we serve
them,
not the other way round. Your slavish devotion to their predictions is pathetic.’

‘I have no delusions about the Dreamers’ limitations, nor do I have the time for wishful thinking and fantasies. Don’t you even want to know why I brought you here?’

Swimmer in Turbulent Currents made a show of looking around him. ‘Why, to kill me, of course – far out of view of the Hegemony and our masters. Try anything, however, and my ship will destroy this building with both of us inside it.’

‘I wanted you here not because I think you’re a fool I can talk round, but because you can make others listen to you,’ Trader continued, more quietly this time. ‘That makes you dangerous. Choose to believe what you wish, Swimmer, but the Emissaries have no interest in compromise, regardless of what their servants might have told you.’

‘And yet the Emissaries are winning, Trader. They just keep coming, and we keep getting pushed back.’

‘Precisely! So we must use our nova weapons to—’

‘To what?’ Swimmer’s amusement was mixed with disgust. ‘To destroy not just the Emissaries with the one weapon we said we’d never use, but the entire galaxy as well?’

‘Listen to me.’ Trader’s tone became more urgent. ‘I’m offering you a chance—’

‘I already know what you want: a first strike against the Emissaries, to disable them. But how could that do anything but accelerate their own research into constructing their own nova weapons? How long before they realize they’d possessed the capacity to construct them all along?’

‘We’ll be overrun if we don’t act immediately.’

‘No, Trader, we won’t. We can still survive, even if we lose our Hegemony. Anything else would bring only untold trillions of deaths.’

‘We will engineer the war so that the Hegemony will survive.’

‘To rule what?’ Swimmer scornfully demanded. ‘The ashes of dead stars? I reject your offer, because to do otherwise would be to make myself as much a criminal as you are. I would rather die.’