Empire of Light s-3

by Gary Gibson

  'You know the strangest thing about the Crescent-over-Moon?' Ty asked. 'You can sometimes tell you're on one of their clade-worlds just from the sheer destruction that's been visited on them. At first I thought they might be targets of some kind of pogrom from other clades, since that might also explain their relative isolation.'

  Lamoureaux got that faraway look again for a moment. 'There's no reference to that in any of your work,' he pointed out a moment later.

  'That's because it's unsupported speculation, not fact. It's possible some of their asteroids had merely suffered impacts with other stellar bodies long after they'd been abandoned.'

  'But you don't believe that?'

  Ty thought for a moment. 'Let's say that the overwhelming consistency with which their clade-worlds appeared to have been targeted suggested other explanations.' Ty manipulated the images until some of the damaged text-spirals were aligned next to each other. 'Some of these partial glyphs were taken from Crescent asteroids found after I went on the run. Bring them together with fragments taken from other Crescent asteroids, and there's a clear match.' Ty caused the fragmentary spirals to slide on top of each other until they clearly matched.

  'I'm still not sure what we're looking at,' said Willis.

  'These glyphs, when put together, refer specifically to the Mos Hadroch. They're essentially a set of galactic coordinates referring to a region of stars a little over a thousand light-years away,' Ty explained, his finger pointing to different parts of each spiral.

  'What about stellar drift?' asked Lamoureaux.

  'The Atn coordinate system was designed to take that into account, and as a result it's extremely reliable. The coordinates don't so much refer to a single point in space as a projected path for a star or group of stars. I've identified a white dwarf system in the catalogues that matches the numbers very closely.'

  'That still leaves the question of what the Mos Hadroch is,' Willis remarked.

  'We need to get this back to Dakota fast,' Lamoureaux muttered to Willis. 'To Senator Corso as well.'

  Ty looked between the two men, his throat suddenly tight. 'You're going out there, right?'

  'Where?' asked Lamoureaux.

  'You've got material proof the Mos Hadroch is something tangible, with a defined location a thousand light-years from here. Until very recently a discovery like that was always going to be of purely academic interest, since the Shoal were never going to let us go that deep into the galaxy. But that's all changed now, hasn't it?'

  'That's far from decided,' Willis replied.

  'You lifted me out of Ascension, practically kidnapped me out of the hands of the security services. The Legislate is probably at your throats for that, am I right?'

  Willis's face was carefully blank, but the look on Lamoureaux's face made Ty sure he was on the right track. 'Get someone else to check the data if you like,' Ty added, 'but there's no one better qualified. If you're going out there, you're going to need to take me with you.'

  Chapter Six

  When the attack came, it was swift, brutal and very nearly deadly.

  With time, Dakota came to realize she had failed to pay proper attention to subtle changes taking place within the captured swarm-component. That it was a Trojan Horse became evident only with hindsight, its outwardly simple structure belying a technology far more sophisticated than she had even suspected.

  The component had responded to Dakota's careful probing of its memory banks by sending its own, undetectable feelers deep into the data cores of her Magi starship, entwining itself in the ship's neural networks like a hand taking a firm grip on a living heart. At the same moment the swarm turned on her, the captured component launched its own, primarily informational attack from within.

  Dakota spun through the starship's limitless virtual depths, appalled by the wholesale vandalism the component had unleashed on her ship's femtotech arrays, until she found Josef's ghost waiting for her on the balcony of a library complex long since turned to dust and ruin.

  'Look,' he said, gesturing at the sky.

  Dakota gripped the balustrade and followed the direction of his hand, to see a black cloud of viral agents blotting out the sky.

  She felt her insides grow cold and liquid. 'There wasn't any indication that the component was remotely capable of launching an attack like this! We analysed it inside and out. It just doesn't make sense!'

  She shifted into another virtual environment, and sensed Josef keeping pace with her. The next time she looked at him, she was appalled to see his features grow suddenly blurred before snapping back into focus.

  'We know now that the swarm can reassign each of its components to a new purpose at any time,' he reminded her. 'The component we captured was adapting itself to a new purpose from the moment we brought it inside the ship. We should never have let it remain in communication with the rest of the swarm.'

  'But why did it wait so long?' she demanded. 'Why not just attack us when we first got here?'

  'The only logical answer is that the swarm deliberately fed us the data about the Mos Hadroch. Notice, it didn't attack until Corso sent back confirmation that he'd found something.'

  'The swarm used us to help it find the Mos Hadroch,' Dakota realized. 'It wants it just as much as we do.'

  'Exactly And now it'll tear this ship apart until it finds those coordinates.'

  Josef's face began to melt and Dakota spun away in horror. She found herself in an environment she had never visited before, and watched with sick horror as viral agents tore it to shreds, leaving her tumbling into a chaotic void where once there had been land and sky.

  She shifted to another, more stable environment, where Josef's partly reconstituted form joined her after a little while.

  'I don't know how much longer I can hold myself together,' he warned her, little more now than a voice attached to a blur of static. The blur then shifted and almost resolved into other faces from her past: Corso, Severn, even her mother, all drawn from her dreams and memories. 'The data cores are starting to purge themselves, shutting themselves down as a last-ditch measure. The swarm's almost penetrated the ship's command levels. You have to…'

  Dakota watched as Josef dissolved into a cloud of random noise – dead a second time. She burrowed her way deeper into the starship's networks, hiding in realms as yet unaffected by the ravages of the viral agents. A silent battle raged for the next several days. Huge swathes of the ship's neural structure were destroyed, but eventually the balance tipped, and another forty-eight hours saw the last few surviving viral agents isolated and finally destroyed.

  As soon as Dakota had regained full control over her ship, she sent the swarm-component spinning back out into space.

  It was a pyrrhic victory at best. The swarm had learned far more from her than the reverse. In the meantime her ship drifted, silent and crippled, its self-repair mechanisms struggling to mend the worst of the damage.

  Dakota watched helplessly as the swarm all around now entered a period of renewed activity. Thousands of its components were being refashioned into weapons, and it wasn't long before the first of these came vectoring in towards her with deadly intent. A dozen hunter-killer components made contact with the hull of her ship and began burning and drilling their way into its interior. She reached out with her mind and shut them down before they could penetrate too deeply, but there were legions more to take their place. Another dozen separated from the main body of the swarm and closed in for the kill.

  Her only recourse was to jump as far away from the vicinity of the swarm as possible, but the battle for control of the ship had drained the energy reserves it needed to make a jump of even a few light-years. Then she recalled that the swarm had been observed to maintain a certain minimum distance from the near vicinity of the red giant.

  She might not have enough power for a long-range jump, but a very short-range jump was another matter.

  Before the next wave of hunter-killers could reach it, the Magi starship summoned up just enoug
h power to jump a few AUs closer to the dying star. The star field beyond the hull remained unchanged, but the red giant grew huge and corpulent.

  A storm of transmissions flickered back and forth through the vacuum around the ship. Dakota knew she hadn't escaped the swarm, but she had managed to buy herself a few hours of breathing space.

  Her ship once again began the process of clawing energy out of the vacuum in preparation for its next jump. In the meantime yet more hunter-killer components vectored inwards, and Dakota tracked their progress with sick despair.

  The ship managed to repel them, but not before serious damage had been inflicted on its drive-spines. It managed to carry out a second jump regardless, less than an hour after the previous one.

  This time the red giant blotted out half the universe, and the swarm had become distinctly less numerous.

  The ship's sensors picked up a cluster of several hundred swarm-components undergoing heavy modification, at a distance of a few million kilometres. Closer observation showed that drive-spines were being fixed to the hulls of these components.

  Another attack. Dakota jumped her ship so close to the red giant that it was effectively inside the star, orbiting at the very outermost limits of its atmosphere: an attenuated red mist heated to a few thousand degrees Kelvin. There were limits to how long the ship could survive in such an intense environment, but Dakota was running out of options.

  More importantly, it was too hot for the swarm, and for the moment the attacks ceased.

  Hours and then days passed in the external universe, and Dakota watched as the swarm's newly constructed superluminal fleet jumped en masse out of the vicinity of the red giant.

  She had little doubt they were making straight for the coordinates pinpointing the location of the Mos Hadroch. She had got what she wanted from the swarm, but it was a victory laced with a particularly bitter aftertaste. Dakota drifted on through the remnants of dead worlds, her mind filled with the confused whispers of terminally damaged Magi minds, their voices like ghosts in the ether, half-heard gabbles lost in hissing static.

  There was a slim chance she could still make a long-range jump to safety before the star blew but, given that her starship had been almost terminally crippled by the swarm's concentrated attacks, there were no guarantees it would survive the attempt. Instead a plan slowly formulated in her mind: to use the remaining energy reserves to transmit a warning back to Ocean's Deep.

  It was one of the hardest choices Dakota had ever had to make, but she came to a decision quickly. She fired off a single high-energy burst of coherent data towards Ocean's Deep, across the immensity of the galaxy, an act that left her starship nearly powerless and adrift.

  And then something strange began to happen, over the following hours and days. In the face of its inevitable destruction, Dakota became aware the starship had spontaneously abandoned all efforts to repair itself. For reasons she could not yet understand, it instead began working at reintegrating whatever scattered fragments of her mind hadn't been compromised or destroyed by the swarm's vandalism.

  The star itself entered a period of increased activity during this time, sending great fiery gouts of plasma sailing out across the void. Meanwhile her ship picked up major disruptions in the heat-flow at the star's core. There were, perhaps, only a few hours before the star went into terminal collapse and shrank, before ejecting its outer layers. There was enough energy to make a short-range jump, but she already knew she could never outrun the impending nova.

  In the last few moments before the end came, Dakota found herself in a room full of objects that might have been mirrors – mirrors capable of capturing the light from several more spatial dimensions than her mind was capable of perceiving.

  She saw reflections of herself, of other lives she might have lived if she had only made the choices that led to them. They were hazy reflections at best, might-have-beens and never-weres, glimpses into worlds that never quite became solid enough to be real.

  Dakota found her attention drawn to one particular such vision, clearer than all the rest. She saw herself as she had been before the swarm attacked, when most of her memories had still been intact.

  She never had a chance to find out why the ship had shown her this. The red giant's core chose that moment to collapse, releasing all its energy in a titanic blast that would, with time, become visible throughout the entire galaxy.

  In her last moments of awareness, before the wave-front tore the ship apart, Dakota saw the billions of swarm-components nearest the expanding wave-front suddenly focus and direct the explosive energy of the nova in a way she couldn't even begin to understand.

  A few seconds later, there was nothing left of Dakota or the starship itself but a whirl of superheated plasma, carried onwards and outwards.

  Chapter Seven

  He had sheltered within a dozen systems scattered across the great starry whirlpool of the galaxy, some of them inhabited, most long abandoned but still filled with billion-year-old ruins; and yet no matter how far Trader in Faecal Matter of Animals fled, the creature that called itself Hugh Moss always found a way to track him down.

  He had almost been caught in the ruins of a vast dome rising from a plain of ashes, all that was left of a vast repository of knowledge left behind by a civilization that would have dwarfed the Shoal Hegemony, had it not immolated itself a hundred million years before. Trader had sought shelter in the cold iron ruins of a star caught for eternity in a temporal loop, now home to insane AIs imprisoned for crimes long forgotten; and yet Moss tracked him down even there.

  He had been sheltered for a while by the Ascended War-Minds that ruled a dozen systems hard by the great black hole at the galaxy's heart. Moss had fallen upon him once again, and Trader again fled for his life with mocking laughter ringing in his ears.

  Centuries before, Hugh Moss had begun life as a Shoal-member called Swimmer-in-Turbulent-Currents. He had been made an example of by Trader as punishment for his attempt to broker peace with the Emissaries by having his body radically altered, cell by cell, until he was transformed into something neither human nor Shoal.

  The process had driven Swimmer insane, and towards the end of the battle for control of Ocean's Deep, Dakota had given Hugh the means to find Trader, regardless of how far he fled across the face of the galaxy, so that he could exact a terrible revenge upon his tormentor.

  But now, at last, Trader would be free of the monster.

  Trader had parked his yacht in orbit around the moon of a gas giant, in an unoccupied system no more than a few hundred light-years from the Hegemony's borders. Within a few hours, a Shoal coreship had appeared within range of his yacht's scanning instruments, a planet-sized craft with heavy weaponry dotting its armoured crust. The coreship had quickly manoeuvred itself into one of the moon's Lagrange points, precisely balanced between the gravitational attraction of the moon and the gas giant it orbited.

  When the arranged hour of the meeting arrived, Trader departed his yacht and dropped towards the moon's dense atmosphere, protected from the hard vacuum of space by a shaped-field bubble that surrounded him and contained the liquid environment he required for breathing. A cloud of machines the size of dust-motes followed him down, spread out around him for kilometres.

  Trader directed his descent with gentle pulses of energy applied to different points around the spherical field's surface. Before long he was dropping down through a near-impenetrable layer of cloud until, at last, the darkened oceans beneath were revealed to him, and the great towers that rose from their liquid depths.

  Trader guided his field-bubble below the surface of the waters. He had been one of the Shoal Hegemony's most adept agents for more than a hundred millennia, tasked with suppressing any knowledge of the existence of the Magi ships, a duty he had pursued with aggressive diligence. That he had been granted this private audience with Commander-of-Shoals only proved how desperately the Hegemony needed his unique skills once more.

  Trader made his way towards a c
athedral-like building, its apex long ago drowned beneath the waters, and made his way inside. He soon found himself within a high-vaulted space and set about deploying the microscopic defensive units he had brought along in preparation for this meeting.

  Through the lenses of more devices seeded through the ocean surrounding the tower, Trader watched the descent of Commander-of-Shoals's own private vessel. Its belly cast a deep shadow across the ocean, before plunging deep beneath its surface. It came to a halt on a sub-aquatic plain a few kilometres distant before disgorging its sole occupant.

  After that, it was just a matter of waiting.

  'Trader in Faecal Matter of Animals,' said the Commander once he arrived within the cathedral chamber, 'I can't say it's a pleasure. Why did you pick this… place for our meeting?'

  'It used to be a Meridian outpost, Commander,' he explained. 'They disappeared off the galactic stage a long time ago, a fact that tends to curb occasional bouts of hubris on my own part.'

  'I see,' the other Shoal-member replied, clearly unimpressed. 'I presume you heard about General Desire?'

  Desire-for-Violent-Rendering had been Trader's superior commanding officer. 'Executed for crimes against the Hegemony,' Trader replied, noting how the Commander's manipulators were tipped with razor-sharp steel. 'Or so I heard.'

  'Oh, it's quite true. And the same would happen to me if anyone got even an inkling I was here with you. Now why don't you say whatever it is you have to say, so I can get out of this hell-hole?'

  All around the chamber, a thousand tiny but lethal devices armed themselves. 'I take that to mean you've considered my terms?'

  Commander-of-Shoals twisted his manipulators in anger. 'Have you no conception of what's happened in the last few days? The home world is destroyed, and the Hegemony is on the verge of being torn apart. Do you really think I have any interest in playing these ridiculous games of yours?'