Nova War (37 page)

Moss remained silent.

There was an almighty crack, like thunder, and they both glanced up at the ring’s ceiling far overhead. Cracks were spreading across it, and a series of explosions sounded in the distance amid the steady whine of venting atmosphere.

‘I have a suggestion,’ she said, looking back down at him. ‘By way of a trade.’

‘Go on.’

‘I know you can still call your yacht back – and if you do, I can help you find Trader, wherever he goes. He’s initiated a nova war against the Emissaries. Remote superluminal drones were scattered across the border between your two empires and used to destroy key systems.’

Moss still said nothing. But she could tell he was listening carefully as she described the Emissaries’ response for his benefit.

Moss frowned. ‘That isn’t—’

‘Possible? That the Emissaries would turn out to have had nova weapons all along? Of course it is.’

‘And Trader?’

‘Right at the centre of things – or, at least, that’s according to what I’ve been able to find out.’

He stared at her. ‘Trader’s not in this system any more,’ Dakota continued. ‘But I can make sure you find him long before the Hegemony does, because all he’s going to be doing from now on is running.’

‘No. The Shoal will still take him back,’ Moss replied, a faraway look in his eyes. ‘He’s stayed alive this long. Now they’ll need him to survive this war.’

‘Not from what I’ve found out. They’re actively hunting him down.’

Moss was looking at her with, Dakota realized with amusement and not a little horror, a certain respect. ‘All that power in your hands, all those secrets. And they could have been mine.’

‘It’s not for you, Hugh. There are things you don’t know – things neither the Shoal nor the Emissaries are even aware of. Things that will make all the difference. The outcome of this war isn’t decided. I couldn’t stop it starting, but there’s a chance I can help bring it to an early end with minimal devastation and loss of life. It would, however,’ she added, ‘be at enormous cost to the Hegemony’

‘Is that so.’ He smiled thinly, pale skin stretched tight over hard bone. ‘The yacht is recalled. Now tell me what I need to know. Tell me how I can find Trader.’

Dakota nodded faintly, and the knowledge he needed was suddenly there in his head. ‘His yacht’s ident,’ she added. ‘Trackable across light-years, if you know how to look.’

‘I will hold you to your word, Dakota Merrick,’ Moss said. ‘But if you ever stand between me and Trader, I will hunt you down. And when I find you, I will make a symphony of your pain.’

Dakota smiled thinly. ‘There’s a small dock nearby with some escape pods stored in it. Use your field-bubble if the air runs out before you get there.’

Before very long, an escape pod launched from the ring-segment, burning hard g’s to put distance between itself and the blaze of radiation that surrounded the black hole. Far below, but looking close enough to touch, continent-sized clouds drifted around the equator of Leviathan’s Fall.

Just as the escape pod accelerated away, the ring-segment blew apart, transformed instantly into an expanding cloud of debris. A second and far larger ship, with long spines spreading out around its body, emerged from the cloud, picking up speed as it too accelerated away.

Just south of the Seven Stars of Evening, though invisible from the surface of Bellhaven, a starship materialized several AUs out from the sun. It had a lozenge-shaped body with long, curving drive-spines that lent it a sinuous appearance, and it carried precisely two passengers.

Dakota gazed towards the distant light of her home world and felt a burst of nostalgia, promising herself in that moment that, yes, she
would
return to those familiar rain-slicked and cobbled streets. One day.

But first she had to make sure she’d still have a home to return to.

Lower equatorial orbital space around Bellhaven was, as Trader had pointed out, thick with junk, some of it potentially deadly, some of it still active. Surveillance satellites in higher orbits, and around other planets in the system, picked up the Magi ship’s gravitic pulse immediately, and started firing alerts back to their respective governments on Bellhaven, announcing that the newcomer was clearly no coreship.

The primary question in Dakota’s mind was whether Trader would activate the nuclear platforms still floating high above the surface of Bellhaven. The Magi ship, after all, could hardly be of use to him any more, not now he was almost certainly being hunted for starting a war he was supposed to prevent. Dakota knew the Shoal-member well enough, however, not to give him the benefit of the doubt.

She got her answer before long. All around Bellhaven, military spaceports and air bases went on full alert as orbital platforms supposedly long since decommissioned suddenly came to life, launching missiles towards the cloud-streaked skies below. The missiles were linked both to each other and to their respective launch platforms by a series of dedicated tach-net transceivers located in unmanned bunkers deep beneath the planet’s surface.

At Dakota’s command, the Magi starship penetrated Bellhaven’s military security networks with ease, locating the network of transceivers in a matter of seconds. New override commands began firing out towards the missiles, deactivating them before they could reach their targets.

One missile thundered across the damp morning skies above the city of Erkinning, before suddenly shattering into fragments that were strewn across a thousand square miles. Others crashed into shallow seas or came down in scattered pieces across mountains and remote valleys, the contents of their nuclear-tipped warheads sending Geiger counters quietly ticking in university departments and surveillance labs all around the planet.

The Magi ship, meanwhile, began to accelerate once more, swinging past a small green-grey gas giant ringed by a dozen small rocky moons, and boosting on a long curving trajectory that would have carried it out of the ecliptic plane if its superluminal drive hadn’t engaged once more, sending it back to Ocean’s Deep.

Autonomous hunter-killers were meanwhile still tracking each other through the asteroid belts of Ocean’s Deep, their numbers gradually dwindling through a process of mutual attrition. Localized defensive units orbiting the coreship dealt with anything that came too close, while Shoal drones dived in turn towards the God-killer.

Encounters between manned craft were short, brutal and deadly; the Emissaries had by now destroyed most of the Immortal Light fleet with targeted strikes. Their ruined and lifeless husks, still sparkling with intermittent fires, spun slowly through the endless starry night.

And then, something remarkable happened.

A few minutes after the Magi ship rematerialized in the Ocean’s Deep system, as mysteriously as it had departed the better part of a day before, the Emissary attack drones scattered for more than a light-minute’s distance around the Godkiller all shut down at the same time, leaving the Godkiller itself wide open to direct attack. The nearest of the Shoal’s hunter-killer drones launched towards it unchallenged, immolating itself in a strategic strike against a jump-spine.

More such strikes quickly followed.

The Godkiller began to accelerate in the direction of the outer system, trailed by a wake of offensive drones boosting to catch up with it. Manned Shoal vessels that had been maintaining their distance took advantage, launching yet more drones in their thousands and setting them to chase the Godkiller like jackals running down exhausted prey.

The Emissary vessel was exhausting its fuel in a desperate bid to achieve jump speed, despite serious damage to several of its spines. The Shoal drones came in firing, their particle beams and pulse-lances raking the remaining jump-spines and leaving the target crippled and venting atmosphere. More drones struck fragile plasma conduits and sun-hot energy spilled out, consuming the Godkiller from the inside out. Light blazed from deep within its hull.

But it wasn’t quite over.

A single, unmanned drone equipped with a superluminal drive launched from the Godkiller in the moments just before its destruction. The drone boosted to high relativistic speeds within seconds, skipping past the marauding hunter-killers and out of detectable range, as it jumped out of normal space.

At that time, none of the forces in the system could have guessed where the drone might be heading. But when comms traffic from Night’s End fell abruptly silent several hours later, it didn’t take long to realize what had happened.

Monitoring systems dotted around Ironbloom picked up a sudden gravitic pulse, rapidly triangulating the location, trajectory and speed of a superluminal drone that had materialized barely half an AU out from Night’s End’s sun.

The drone took a few minutes for calibration and navigational checking before initiating a chain reaction deep within its drive, then it briefly slipped back out of normal space. It rematerialized near the star’s core, protected for a few millionths of a second by a shell of exotic energy surrounding it.

The shell collapsed almost at once, reducing the drone to a smear of white-hot plasma and laying bare the
n-
dimensional discontinuity that had formed within its drive. The discontinuity’s interaction with normal space triggered a runaway phase change, and a sphere of absolute nothingness expanded through the core at the speed of light, tearing it apart and generating a lethal storm of singularities. These spun throughout the star’s convection layer, disrupting billion-year-old heat flows, and sending great spumes of heat and radiation spilling out from the surface and across tens of millions of kilometres.

The star began to shrink, a process that was soon going to end in its destruction.

Priority alerts automatically triggered deep within the navigational complex of a coreship that had only just materialized in the outer reaches of the Night’s End system. The coreship was still busy decelerating, its guidance systems directing it towards a cluster of mining habitats orbiting a gas giant called Bluegas, three light-hours out from Night’s End’s sun.

Lines of communication throughout the system were pushed to capacity as the news leaked out that something was happening to the sun. The neutrino burst caused by the initial phase change had been detected, but its significance was understood only by the Shoal-members dwelling within the coreship’s central ocean.

The coreship changed course, using the gas giant’s gravity to help boost it outwards, as it once more began to accelerate. The drive spines jutting from its surface began the long recharging process, but it was still going to be some time before it would be ready to boost back out of the system.

The Queen of Immortal Light received the first reports of unusual solar activity not long after the first neutrino pulse had been detected.

Senior Court Adviser Dampened Woodsmoke was at hand while the Queen had been resting in an antechamber next to the birthing chamber. She had recently dismissed the court attendants who had been preparing her for a state ceremony – the promotion of a new batch of Hive Administrators – but instead now found herself embroiled in constant communication with a dozen different military, scientific and intelligence specialists scattered across the entire system.

The news was appalling. She had taken an enormous risk by dealing with the Emissaries, and now her entire Hive was going to have to pay a price more terrible than she could possibly have imagined.

She became aware that Woodsmoke was still waiting patiently on the scaffold next to her enormous head.

‘Where are my proxies?’ she demanded. The five royal proxies meant survival for the Hive in some form, if nothing else. She still couldn’t quite believe what her most trusted scientific advisers were now telling her.

‘Four are in the inner system – all except the Scion Amber Rust. She just returned to Night’s End on board a coreship making a scheduled stop.’ Woodsmoke paused before continuing. ‘There are reports that the coreship hasn’t begun its routine deceleration and is blocking all incoming comms traffic. Based on what we know now, it’s almost certainly intending to escape our system before . . . well, before our sun goes nova.’

The Queen stared up at the high windows of her chamber. She had never been able to fly; no Queen could. Their wings were vestigial, even in youth, leaving them utterly dependent on their subjects. The afternoon light cast shadows on the chamber’s pale walls, then darkened briefly as clouds passed in front of the traitorous sun. She could see the peaks of the great Hive Towers of Darkwater, some of which dated from the earliest days of settlement.

All gone, just minutes from now.

‘Nominate the Scion Amber Rust to assume full duties as Queen of Immortal Light, effective immediately – priority transmission and encryption. I also want a separate, equal priority transmission sent to my sister instantly. I ask that, in the name of filial loyalty, she extend the hand of friendship and support to the new ruler of Immortal Light.’
Not that there’s going to be much left for the proxy to rule.

She peered across at her Adviser. ‘You understand how important this is?’

‘I do.’

The Queen watched as the Adviser departed in order to make the final arrangements.

So simple, so quick; the work of millennia undone utterly in a few short hours.

At least she wouldn’t have to mourn for long. Or suffer the knowledge that her sister had won an admittedly pyrrhic victory.

Six hours later, the delicate balance between the star’s energy and its gravitation seesawed out of control, and in a fraction of a second it shrank before releasing almost all of its energy in one single cataclysmic blast.

A second neutrino burst heralded the star’s death. Seven billion years’ worth of stored solar energy was released at once, sending a shockwave of plasma spreading out through the densely populated system at a quarter of the speed of light.

When the star detonated, the coreship was already deep into its gravity slingshot past Bluegas. The crew picked up and intercepted tach-net traffic from inner-system probes and satellites that hadn’t yet been wiped out. From the point of view of the habitats orbiting Bluegas, the sun was as tiny, serene and distant as ever. But their days were numbered regardless.