by Gary Gibson
Then he realized something was wrong with Lamoureaux. He sat bent forward in the interface chair, clutching at one side of his head with a pained expression.
Corso stepped forward quickly, catching him before he could fall out of his seat. The navigator’s skin had turned pale and waxy.
‘What the hell is going on?’ said Perez.
‘I don’t know,’ Corso snapped, pulling himself up on to the dais to help Lamoureaux back properly into the seat. ‘Ted, what is it?’
When he replied, Lamoureaux sounded groggy, unfocused. ‘I don’t know. It was like there was this enormous pressure inside my head and . . . oh, damn.’
The bends, thought Corso; his Magi-boosted implants were finally burning out his cortex.
Corso moved out of the way as Lamoureaux leaned forward, and to one side, and vomited noisily on to the deck. Corso held him by the shoulder and ignored the shocked expression on Perez’s face.
‘Where’s Olivarri?’ Corso demanded.
Perez stepped over to another console, and Corso watched Perez’s face change from orange to blue as the console’s display flickered with bright colours. ‘He’s on his way here,’ Perez replied after a moment. ‘I’m reading him as just entering the wheel.’ He reached out and tapped at the screen again. ‘I can activate the external feeds from here.’
A moment later the dark bowl of the bridge’s ceiling filled with stars and with the broad curve of the planet below, along with a simulation of the Mjollnir as it would appear at a distance of a few kilometres. Smoke from the explosion had already been sucked away by the ventilation system.
Corso could see the fine network of work-bays and pressurized cabins surrounding the frigate, and several tiny craft moving steadily away from it. One was a shuttle carrying Simenon’s skeleton crew, while the rest undoubtedly contained the engineers and repair specialists who had been working on the hull until the order to evacuate.
According to a string of data floating next to the frigate it was indeed under way, but its speed was still relatively incremental despite the enormous amount of energy flowing out of the fusion drives.
‘Any sign of Dakota’s ship?’ asked Corso, still holding Lamoureaux upright. He appeared to be barely conscious.
‘I think she’s on the frigate’s far side,’ Perez replied. ‘One moment.’
The starscape overhead wheeled suddenly, spinning around by a hundred and eighty degrees. Now Corso could see a Magi ship rapidly approaching. It looked, as ever, like some creature born to live between the stars, its forward-reaching drive-spines like the grasping tentacles of a monstrous sea-creature.
Lamoureaux’s head flopped against Corso’s arm, and he grasped the machine-head under one shoulder and guided him down from the interface chair. Perez helped drag him over to one of the couches lining the walls of the bridge.
Leo Olivarri suddenly appeared, looking breathless. He glanced from Lamoureaux to Corso with a questioning expression.
‘Leo,’ said Corso. ‘I need you to get Mr Lamoureaux here to the med-bay.’
Olivarri nodded and came over, clearly recognizing this was no time for questions. Lamoureaux’s skin was clammy but together they managed to get him back on to his feet. He gradually seemed to become a little more aware of his surroundings, and then Olivarri helped him out of the bridge.
Perez looked worried. ‘Senator, without someone manning the interface chair, we’re going to be at a very serious disadvantage.’
Corso sucked in a breath and turned back to study the overhead projection. By now the Mjollnir had mostly passed out of the orbital dock, while the Magi ship had drawn abreast of it. The two hostile corvettes, identified by icons floating beside them, were still a few thousand kilometres distant.
Another string of data appeared directly between the Magi ship and the frigate, marking a single blip moving quickly across the gap between the two craft.
That’s her, Corso thought. But why was she leaving her ship? Surely she was intending to accompany the Mjollnir from inside her own vessel?
‘Senator.’ Corso turned to Perez. ‘We have pulse-weapons mounted on the hull, but we’ve had to divert most of their power to the fusion drives. Unless you can come up with something very soon, we’re going to be sitting ducks for those corvettes.’
Corso nodded, and stepped forward until he stood directly underneath the projection of the Mjollnir. It looked real enough to make him feel he could reach up and touch it. He watched as the blip representing Dakota reached one of the frigate’s external airlocks, and disappeared from sight.
‘Dan, patch me into the frigate’s general address system. Dakota just came on board, and I want to be sure she hears me.’
‘Patching you in now,’ Perez replied, his hands sliding rapidly across the surface of his console. ‘One moment and I’ll have a visual on her.’
The Mjollnir and the surrounding starscape began to shrink overhead, as if receding at enormous speed. In its place appeared a larger-than-life image of Dakota, now inside an airlock already halfway through its opening cycle.
She was naked, but her skin was coated in what looked like thick black oil, her eyes gleaming and alien-looking. She had a bag slung across one shoulder, out of which she pulled a jumpsuit.
Corso glanced over at Perez and saw a censorious look on his face. It was hard to remember that he too had been that buttoned-down before he first left Redstone.
Overhead, Dakota pulled on the jumpsuit, the black slick coating on her skin draining away. She glanced briefly towards the microscopic lens buried in one wall of the airlock with a sardonic smile, and Corso felt his face redden.
‘Dakota, if you can hear me, we need you on the bridge right now. We’ve got a couple of corvettes approaching and Ted’s—’
She had stepped out of the airlock and was now pushing her way down a connecting shaft towards the centrifuge hub. ‘I know about Ted,’ she replied, as if addressing the air. ‘Just hang on. I’ll be there soon.’
Dakota disappeared from the overhead display, replaced by the previous view of the local starscape. The corvettes had by now resolved into distinct shapes.
‘We’re being signalled by one of the corvettes,’ Perez announced. ‘They’re warning us to shut down the engines or they’ll start shooting.’
‘Bullshit,’ Corso heard himself say. ‘They’re bluffing. This is the only colony-class ship the Senate has left.’
‘Maybe so, Senator, but if whoever ordered those corvettes to come after us lets us get away, he’s going to face a firing squad, or at least a challenge from a queue of subordinates. Blowing a hole in our side might look like a safer bet, with that in mind.’
Damn you, Dakota. How long could it take to get to the centrifuge hub, then to the bridge?
‘They must know there’s no way we can just stop the acceleration. Even if we shut down the fusion drive, and used the manoeuvring systems to push us back, it’d be hours before we could come to a halt relative to the docks.’
‘Look, Senator,’ said Perez, ‘I’m not necessarily counselling surrender, but if they do fire on us, they could cripple us, or a lot worse.’
Corso shook his head and licked suddenly dry lips. ‘No. We keep going. Don’t respond to their messages.’
‘They’re getting ready to fire on us,’ Perez retorted, growing visibly angrier and stepping out from behind the console, with bunched fists. ‘They’re letting us see their targeting systems to make sure we know exactly what they’re intending. Senator, if we don’t signal them now and agree—’
Perez stopped abruptly at a sudden bright flare of light from the overhead display. Corso looked up to see that several pale spheres had now appeared between the frigate and the two approaching corvettes.
Except the corvettes weren’t there anymore.
‘What—?’ Perez stopped and turned back to the console, staring down at its softly glowing surface as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. ‘They just . . . hang on.’
P
erez replayed what had just happened. They both watched as bright beams of light flickered out from the spheres, tearing the two ships apart.
Dakota entered the bridge at that same moment, looking breathless. Perez stared up again at the overhead display, then at her, clearly putting two and two together.
‘Tell me everything I need to know,’ she said, stopping briefly to draw breath at the edge of the dais supporting the interface chair.
‘We’re breaking orbit,’ Corso told her. She dropped her bag on the floor next to the dais and pulled herself up and into the interface chair. ‘But it’s taking too long,’ he warned.
Dakota nodded, and Corso watched the intense way her small white fists gripped the chair’s armrests.
She closed her eyes and for a few moments fought to steady her breathing, then nodded tightly. ‘I’m going to ramp the drive up for a premature jump. If we can get out of range of the orbital defence systems, we might be able to take our time before making a longer jump.’
Corso watched as the petals surrounding the interface chair began to fold up around it, surrounding Dakota in silent darkness. He could feel the frigate’s acceleration beginning to bite. Much like the Mjollnir’s sister-ships, its centrifuge could be spun down during periods in which it was performing an extended hard burn, when each of the living spaces contained within it rotated on massive hydraulics so that the acceleration provided a comfortable level of gravity. When the acceleration ceased and zero gee returned, the centrifuge could once again be spun up.
He glanced back up at the projected starscape. The Magi ship that had brought Dakota to the frigate was slipping out of range. It was also beginning to slowly spin as if out of control, edging towards the delicate filigree of the orbital dock the Mjollnir had now left behind. Something was wrong.
Dakota.
Her eyelids trembled, then opened on to nothing.
‘What is it, Lucas?’ she asked, the sound of her own voice close and flat within the confined space.
Your ship, what’s happening to it?
‘I don’t have any choice,’ she replied in a half-whisper.
Don’t have any choice about what?
‘About leaving it behind.’
Chapter Seventeen
Even as she locked into the Mjollnir ’s sensory data-space, Dakota could still hear the Mos Hadroch whispering to her.
It was so close to the edge of perception that she might have dismissed it as only her imagination had she not been able to filter it through the rapidly receding Magi ship. There was something alive nestling within the carapace of the dead Atn – and it, in turn, could sense her.
Until that first moment of contact, as she made her way across the empty space that had separated the now rapidly receding starship from the frigate, she had assumed the Mos Hadroch would prove to be some inert device, a tool and nothing more.
But instead she was beginning to suspect it was something much more akin to the Magi’s highest levels of technological achievement, so that to say it was merely sentient would be to do it a severe injustice. What she was now picking up through her enhanced senses was more akin to an artificial god, though not much bigger than a human skull, and fashioned to one very specific purpose.
Dakota closed her eyes tightly, sensing faint tendrils of enquiry from the dead minds that lived inside the Magi ship. So far, she was pretty sure they had no inkling of the act of betrayal she was about to commit. There had been a time when she had been greatly worried about their ability to see inside her mind, but since those early days she had learned how to mask her thought processes from their attention.
We’ve got fresh contacts, she heard Perez say, panic edging into his voice. Missiles. Approaching fast, launched from the surface. I’m reading a hundred and eighty seconds to impact.
She had seen them already. She felt her subjective experience of time shift, so that seconds seemed to take minutes to pass, as she locked completely into the Mjollnir ’s data-space.
There was none of the pain or confusion she had endured in every attempt to interface with the Magi ship at anything more than a very low level following her resurrection. The frigate’s data-space was tragically primitive by comparison . . . but it worked.
The Meridian drones had emerged in their hundreds from the Magi ship, and now some of them darted towards the missiles which were accelerating towards the frigate at more than twenty gee. The drones blazed with intense heat in the instant just before they sent out a pulse of fire bright enough to be visible from the planet surface below.
Alarms blared throughout the Mjollnir as this flash of energy overwhelmed its external sensor arrays. Down on the surface of Redstone, technicians and officers in both the Freehold and Uchidan territories were roused from their sleep inside armoured subsurface bunkers, as early-warning systems mistook the sudden flash for an attack.
The missiles meanwhile were reduced to spatters of molten metal that registered on the bridge’s overhead display as fuzzy-edged splashes of colour rapidly fading from white to orange.
Dakota opened her eyes and let her breath out slowly.
She had saved their skins, and she had not needed the Magi ship to do it. The Meridian drones had responded to her commands with deadly efficiency, whispering to her of attack and defence, strike and counter-strike.
For the first time, she began to believe they might actually be able to take on the Emissaries.
Dakota
The air inside the petals tasted warm and slightly metallic. She sat motionless, alone in the darkness, and enjoyed a brief moment of silence.
Dakota can you
She let the last of the air out of her nostrils and waited for her heart to stop thumping.
hear me?
‘Dakota! I . . .’
Corso paused in mid-sentence as the chair’s petals folded back down. Dakota surveyed the bridge, full of light and sound and motion.
‘I took care of it,’ she said, slowly lifting herself out of the interface chair and stepping carefully down from the dais. ‘There won’t be any more missiles.’
‘How?’ Corso demanded, his face damp with sweat. ‘I mean, I saw it on the overhead. It was incredible. But . . . how?’
She looked past his shoulder to see a man she didn’t recognize standing by one console. He studied the data scrolling in front of him so intently it was obvious he was deliberately trying not to look at her.
‘I told you,’ she said. ‘I got my hands on some weapons – very old, very powerful weapons left behind by a dead civilization.’
‘We’re being hailed from the ground, Senator.’
Corso turned to the man by the console and nodded distractedly. ‘Any news?’
‘There are more missiles on their way. They say they won’t pull them back unless we stop and surrender.’
Dakota walked past Corso to join the other man sitting at the console. ‘What’s your name?’ she asked.
‘Dan Perez.’
She nodded to the console. ‘Please.’
He shrugged and stepped aside. She studied the data displayed there and frowned.
‘These missiles aren’t tacticals,’ she announced, looking over at Corso. ‘This is the kind of ordnance that could vaporize the frigate. It doesn’t make sense.’
‘Why not?’ asked Perez, still standing beside her.
‘Because they’ve lost,’ she replied. ‘There’s nothing to be gained in destroying the frigate.’
‘You haven’t spent a lot of time around Freeholders, have you, Ma’am?’ suggested Perez. ‘Apart from the Senator here, that is.’
She turned to face him. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Just that if you had, you’d know they’d rather blow the frigate out of the sky than let her escape. The consequences don’t matter. To them it’s all about honour.’
She glanced at Corso, who affected a weary shrug. ‘He’s right, Dakota.’
She shook her head in irritation. ‘Then they’re a bunch o
f fucking idiots. All right, we could hang around here and take all those missiles out with the drones, but we’d just be wasting valuable time.’ She headed over to the interface chair. ‘I’m going to jump us out of here now.’
‘The drive batteries are low,’ warned Corso. ‘It’s not enough to even get us out of this system.’
‘We’re not going to jump out of this system,’ she replied, pulling herself back into the chair’s embrace. ‘Remember I said I wanted to make a premature jump? Well, we’re going to take a hop and a skip, just a couple of million kilometres here or there. It doesn’t really matter where we come out, as long as it puts some distance between us and Redstone.’
Corso had followed her back over, and Perez watched them carefully as Corso stepped up on to the dais and gripped the side of the chair.
‘How sure are you that you know what you’re doing?’ he demanded, keeping his voice low. ‘You disappeared for a hell of a long time, and I can’t tell you how difficult that made things for me. And what the hell’s going on with your own ship?’
‘I am frequently very far indeed from knowing just what I’m doing, Lucas. I just take each minute as it comes. And as for my ship,’ she added, ‘just wait and see.’
She closed her eyes, shutting out the bridge and dipping back into the data-space. The new batch of missiles – built for hard acceleration and tipped with antimatter warheads – wouldn’t get in range of the frigate for at least another thousand seconds.
She looked up at the overhead projection and saw that the drones were now spiralling back in towards the Magi ship. Clearly some of its minds had finally realized what she intended, and it had already begun to accelerate away from Redstone – but still not fast enough.
Some of the drones began to burn with a furious incandescence, focusing this energy into highly destructive beams that played across the hull of the Magi ship. Corso watched with slack-jawed horror as it began to disintegrate under the intensive fire.
Corso grabbed Dakota by the shoulder, almost pulling her out of the interface chair. ‘What the hell are you doing?’
