by Gary Gibson
Corso felt a warm trickle of urine slide down over his chest as he hung there, hyperventilating. There were, he now realized, worse things than even Emissary KaTiKiAn-Sha.
'Corso?' Honeydew's synthesized voice emerged again from out of the darkness.
'Yes?' he croaked.
'Watch carefully.'
The field-bubble dissipated instantly, and the maul-worm came rushing upwards a second time. Corso croaked in horror, incipient madness fracturing his thoughts.
Just before those vile lips closed around him, the field generators snapped on a second time. Pale striated throat-muscles vainly attempted to crush the uncrushable.
Again, the monster retreated. Honeydew's voice once more came out of the darkness.
'The next time, we might not switch on the field-bubble, Lucas. We might just let the maul-worm eat you. Tell me, do you think you're still useful enough for us to let you live?'
Something snapped inside Corso, and he bellowed to the walls around him. 'Don't you understand that it doesn't matter whether you or the Emissaries, or anyone else, has working protocols or not, Dakota is here in this system, and she could be in touch with the derelict already. Those protocols won't make a damn bit of difference if she decides to take the derelict away from you!'
'Is he telling the truth?'
Corso tensed, his muscles rigid, his eyes staring down into the darkness. It wasn't Honeydew who had just spoken. The voice he'd heard was unmistakably human.
Not only that, it was one he recognized.
'I believe so, yes,' he heard Honeydew reply.
'And she can do that? Just… grab the derelict and fly away with it?' the human voice continued.
The accent was Redstone old colonial: soft, rounded tones that spoke of a life of privilege.
'So our previous interrogations suggest, assuming we can't find a way of preventing it.'
'But it's so obviously unbelievable. How can you possibly give credence to something so-'
'She's already destroyed one derelict. If there's any chance we can find the means to keep her from doing the same to the one located here, we must find the means.'
'Yes, but like this? This is… barbaric.'
Sal?
Sal.
Sal who'd driven down to Fire Lake with him when he'd been determined to kill Bull Northcutt. Sal who had been one of his oldest friends, and whom he'd last seen while looking out of the cockpit window of a helicopter lifting up from a frozen Redstone shore a million years ago.
'Sal!' Corso screamed, just as he was being winched lower into the pit. He glanced upwards, dizzy from the blood pooling in his head, and saw only a dim circle marking the rim of the pit.
His throat was too sore to scream, but he could hear the monster approaching once more. He could smell its awful fetid breath, a stench even worse than that of the pit's slimy walls.
The worm surged up towards him and, at the very last moment, the shaped fields switched on. Corso closed his eyes tight and prayed for oblivion, not wanting to see the monster's throat as it tried to crush the fields surrounding him.
The worm slithered back down the pit, and the field snapped off. Again.
As if awaiting its cue, the worm immediately rushed up and engulfed him. Once more the shaped fields snapped on at the very last moment.
Corso tried to scream for mercy, but his throat was so raw that the words were unintelligible.
The worm retreated for the last time.
'-God's sake, that's enough!' he heard Sal yell. 'If you kill him, he's no use to anyone.'
'He deliberately deceived us. Do you have any idea how many Bandati have died because of him?'
They were starting to winch him back out of the pit. The shaped fields flickered into life, and stayed on this time.
'Permission for torture came directly from the Consortium,' he heard Honeydew say. 'And from your own superiors. I believe you already stated that you understood the necessity for this approach, given the circumstances-'
'Yes, but… I mean, not like this! This, this is…'
'I believe the word you are looking for is necessary.'
Hands reached for him and dragged Corso back out of the pit. One after the other, the nova-equipped drones – which Trader had placed near strategic systems throughout the Long War's primary zone of conflict – now received their activation signals. They began slipping in and out of normal space like stones being skipped across the still, flat waters of a lake, while making their way towards their respective target stars.
The first to reach its goal translated deep into the stellar core of a small yellow sun that had burned steadily for three and a half billion years, triggering a deadly phase-change that caused a cataclysmic implosion within just a few hours. Energy and light sufficient to power the star for another ten or twelve billion years erupted in a single incandescent outwards burst, the destruction spreading like flames through dry woodland after a long, hot summer.
Entire systems scattered across a belt of stars a thousand light-years wide soon burned with nova light, like a bright cancer staining the face of the Milky Way. Trader listened and watched from within his private yacht, linked in to the heart of the Hegemony's secure tach-transmission networks, as the first reports came in of devastation occurring the length and breadth of the Long War. Eleven systems were wiped out, most of them sparsely populated by the Emissaries' own client species, but of strategic value to them nonetheless. The enemy beachhead within Hegemony territory had finally been wiped out – fifteen thousand years of slow losses to the Shoal recouped in the course of a single day.
The Long War was as good as over.
Trader passed the rest of his time rehearsing his testimony. After he returned to the home world, and presented the Hegemony's ruling council with the details of his fait accompli, he would finally make those cowards understand just how necessary, how inevitable using nova weaponry had been, regardless of snivelling doubts expressed in certain quarters. This first strike would come to be seen as a historically necessary blow against the encroachment of a destructive enemy who…
A fresh deluge of data began to pour in through his yacht's tach-net transceivers, accumulated from a thousand different sources.
But what they were telling him couldn't possibly be true.
Trader locked his mind into the tach-net flow, swimming through this flood of data, trying to discern the key facts buried in the inrushing chaos.
But it was true. More detonations had been detected – more nova fire on the nearer fringes of the Long War. Hegemony-controlled systems were rapidly dying, one after the other.
Trader stared at the report summaries and conflict analyses, and felt a cold horror creeping through him. The only way to make sense of what he was now seeing was if the Emissaries already possessed their own nova weapons. That was impossible, inconceivable…
And yet the cold hard evidence remained, for all to see.
He had to fight down a sudden surge of panic, and focus again. He ran analyses on the data coming to him, but the conclusions remained the same. Long-range detection systems were all picking up the same signature, double-neutrino bursts that signified the deployment of nova weapons within Shoal-controlled systems. And then those same systems had fallen out of contact shortly thereafter.
First, Trader decided, he had to put some distance between himself and the forces commanded by General Desire. His yacht was still locked into its cradle at the coreship's heart, so he sent out an automated request for permission to exit the coreship, and waited.
And waited.
The tension was growing unbearable. The coreship's commanding officer reported directly to Desire, so perhaps the old fish had already seen reports of the Emissaries' retaliation.
But, then again, Trader recalled there were privileged backdoors programmed into every coreship's primary stacks. As long as he hadn't been completely locked out of the starship's systems, perhaps he could It worked: permission was finally granted. An automa
ted response appeared on one screen, and the Shoal-member's blubbery bulk quivered with relief. The yacht lifted from its cradle and began to make its way towards one of the exit ports.
Recalling Desire's words, Trader meanwhile pored frantically through a database of recent Dreamer predictions. He soon found the details the General had mentioned, but they were so far off the main curve of probabilities…
But not, he finally realized, impossible. They had gambled, and lost.
There had always been some ambiguity in intelligence reports relating to the Emissaries. It wasn't impossible that they had nova weaponry but, given their tendency to overwhelming aggression at the best of times, it seemed unlikely in the extreme that they wouldn't have used it long before now. Ergo, it was assumed they had none.
But, clearly, that assumption was deeply flawed. Someone out there was retaliating with a series of devastating strikes against Shoal-governed systems.
And it could only be the Emissaries. Twenty-three That first day, Dakota walked for several hours, then rested as night fell. She woke the next morning to find breakfast waiting for her, rare Bellhaven delicacies she hadn't eaten since childhood. They had been wrapped in soft crinkled paper and laid by her head.
There was only one path to follow, and nothing else to do but walk. The path ran first through grasslands and then through wide dark forests, eventually becoming a highway that led through one deserted town after another. There were no other roads, no other paths to follow; for all she knew she might walk right around the world she had woken up in until she came back to her starting point.
Days became weeks. And, although eating was not a necessity in this virtual environment where she found herself, she always woke to find breakfast waiting for her, always found more left for her to eat as the day wore on, as if someone were constantly running just ahead of her, just out of sight, preparing her way as she continued on her long journey.
At first she couldn't rid herself of the constant state of anxiety she'd been suffering ever since the cataclysm at Nova Arctis but, as more and more subjective time passed, she realized she finally had a chance to rest. The sun was unfailingly warm and the skies uncannily clear, and when night fell she slept wrapped in blankets she'd found waiting for her on a low wall on her first morning of walking.
Dakota passed through uninhabited towns that became larger and larger, separated from each other by long stretches of carefully cultivated forest. She spied once again the spires and grandiose structures of the city, much closer now, and realized her journey must be approaching its end. She walked on steadily, never hurrying, aware that time within the derelict was not equivalent to time outside it.
Finally Dakota reached the outskirts of the city and, lacking any other clue, made her way towards the largest, grandest building that rose in the centre. She took her time as she progressed, wondering if the derelict had drawn inspiration for the architecture here entirely from her own imagination, or if this had all once been real, but destroyed in the nova war occurring in the distant Magellanic Clouds.
Dakota carefully explored some of the inner city's buildings; found books and recordings that showed creatures looking vaguely human if seen from a distance, but overwhelmingly alien when viewed up close. Their name was revealed in the form of a song that took seventeen hours to sing, and required a tag-team of vocalists.
She lingered, knowing that virtually no time whatsoever would be passing in the outside world. For the moment at least, the Emissary hunter-killers could wait. The Shoal could also wait – along with the Bandati, and everything and everyone else vying for her attention or trying to take something from her.
They could all wait. Dakota spent one final night in what might have been a palace designed for some alien king and queen. To no surprise on her part whatsoever, she had come across an entirely human bed ready waiting for her. Yet the city had been as deserted as every town she had passed through so far, as if its inhabitants had got up as one and simply decamped for ever.
The air around her sang with information. The Magi had lived in a constantly shifting web of data that encompassed their entire galaxy, using tach-comms technology of a sophistication even the Shoal couldn't conceive of. In a crude but nonetheless real sense, they had been a society composed of machine-heads – like herself. When she woke again, she realized at once that she was no longer in the bed she'd gone to sleep in. Instead she rested on a richly upholstered chaise-longue, its fabric decorated with bright and complicated patterns that glittered under the sunlight that slanted down on her from far above.
She was clearly no longer in the palace, since the roof above her culminated in an onion-shaped dome supported on artfully twisted girders and ornate metalwork that rose to a central point perhaps forty or fifty metres above her head. The sun leaked through this elaborate structure, casting a complex pattern of light and dark on a stone-paved floor covered by dozens of finely decorated carpets.
On every side, the walls of the building were lost in the gloom beyond these sprayed patterns of sunlight. A short distance away, almost directly beneath the apex of the onion dome, was another chaise-longue, close to a high-backed armchair. Next to them stood a machine Dakota couldn't at first identify.
She stood up warily, and realized she was dressed in the same clothes she'd worn when still a student on Bellhaven – soft loose trousers and a quilted blouse. There were slippers also waiting for her, but she didn't take advantage of them. The carpets that covered the floor felt warm and comfortably itchy under her bare feet.
Dakota walked over to the chair and chaise-longue and recognized that the machine was in fact an orrery mounted on a heavy circular base. Brass and copper balls and levers gleamed dully in the sunlight.
She realized with a start that the high-backed chair was already occupied by a man with one leg comfortably crossed over the other, his hands resting loosely on the chair's arms. The way the light fell from above, only his legs and lower torso were illuminated, while everything from the chest up was cast into shadow. He was wearing the stiff-necked formal coat and clothes of a Bellhaven tutor. Clearly, she had been cast in the role of student.
'Sit.' The figure gestured to the chaise-longue. 'Please.'
She perched on the edge of the chaise-longue, leaning forward a bit to peer at her host. She still couldn't make out a face. 'Why can't I see you?' she asked. 'What's with the cheap dramatics?'
'It's a personal choice. If you could see a face, you might make the mistake of thinking I was human.'
It felt strange, speaking, after so long. The muscles of her throat and jaw felt stiff as she formed each word. 'I spoke with Magi Librarians before, and they always looked human to me.'
'Merely helper programs: intelligent, but not genuinely self-aware. They simply looked the way you wanted them to look.'
'Are you self-aware?' she asked.
The figure shifted slightly. 'I've been programmed to always say "yes" in response to that question,' it replied.
'Did you… I'm sorry, but did you just make a joke?'
'If you believe I'm self-aware, then, yes, I did. If you don't believe I am, you can blame the creatures who programmed that answer into me.'
Dakota tried a different tack. 'Are you a Librarian? Like the ones inside the… the derelict I found in Nova Arctis?'
She had almost said the derelict I destroyed, but then hesitated as if fearful that the creature before her might seek revenge for destroying one of its own kind.
'It might,' the darkened figure replied, 'be more accurate to think of me as a Head Librarian – a caretaker intelligence, if you will, always in thrall to its navigator. You might also think of me as' – and with this, the shape raised one entirely human-looking hand as if grasping an idea out the air – 'an adviser of sorts.'
Dakota glanced towards the orrery, and realized it was a representation of the entire Ocean's Deep system. The star at its centre was a golden sphere, with a brass gas giant slowly ticking its way around it. Small
, rough-edged rocks that looked like uncut diamonds apparently represented the asteroid fields, while dark, streaky balls of marble stood in for the smaller planets. A ball of dark obsidian represented the black hole that orbited Leviathan's Fall, and there were even tiny models of the coreship and the Emissary Godkiller, now visibly clicking their way closer and closer to Leviathan's Fall.
She leaned in closer, fascinated, and realized there was even a minute model of the scout-ship carrying her and Days of Wine and Roses ever nearer to the gas giant. A model of Darkening Skies' secret colony was attached to Leviathan's Fall by a filigree wire.
The Head Librarian leaned forward. 'You're admiring my machine.'
'It's… very complicated.'
'Crucial moments in history usually are, when you're involved in them. Historians with the benefit of hindsight have a habit of rendering such moments far more intelligibly than they might have seemed to those actually caught up in them.'
'All right, Head Librarian, why am I here? Why did you drag me here just when…' She left the end of her sentence hanging in the air. Just when we were about to die.
'So I can help you in making a decision,' the shadowed form replied. 'It might benefit you,' it added, 'to think of me as a distant cousin of the AI on board the Piri Reis. I must apologize, by the way, for the damage caused to it.'
'That was you?'
'There was a… confusion when it came to identifying you from a distance of several light-years. I suspect you don't realize it, but machine-heads can, over time, imprint an unconscious pattern of their own thought processes on systems like the Piri's AI. From a distance, it can appear as if you are a single mind.'
The shape affected a shrug of the shoulders. 'We attempted to reorganize its core programming, believing it was part of your conscious mind. But as we soon discovered, its mechanisms are too crude for genuine consciousness. By this point, you yourself were already deep in the process of navigator maturation – by which I mean the changes to your original machine-head implants, which have now been fully replaced with something far more compatible with my own systems. You can thank the ship you found in Nova Arctis for that.'
