by Gary Gibson
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 of 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?'
'Fixing a problem,' she replied, before closing her eyes and ignoring him.
The petals began to fold around her once more, and Corso began yelling and cursing as he moved out of their way. She knew he wouldn't meanwhile try to take control of the frigate away from her; if he did, he'd only be making it into an easy target.
Once the petals had enclosed her, she opened her eyes to see the universe unfold around her.
She could feel the different parts of the frigate as if they were parts of her own body. The mass of electronics and machinery linking the frigate's drive-core to the external drive-spines was a tangled nightmare, but at least it was functional.
Dakota took one last glance at the Magi ship. It was now spinning out of control, its drive-spines shattered, unable to leap out of local space. She queried it tentatively, but there was no reply.
The drones struck again. They finished the job, and the Magi ship began to descend towards the upper reaches of Redstone's atmosphere, where it would start to burn up. Hot salt tears ran down her face, and she gripped the armrests so hard she thought she might break them.
The drones were already racing back towards the Mjollnir. She waited until they got nearer, drew them close against the hull and activated the drive-core.
Redstone vanished instantly from the overhead display. They had crossed more than sixty-five million kilometres in a fraction of a second.
It was going to take time to power the drive up for the next, hopefully much longer, jump, but for the moment they were far away enough to be safe.
She let the petals fold back down, and slumped forward in her chair. The sweat was literally dripping from her. She found Corso waiting for her, his expression furious.
'What the fuck just happened there?' he demanded.
'There are things I know,' she replied, 'that you don't, but I'm not ready to talk about it yet.'
'You destroy
ed your own ship and you don't feel like talking about it right now?' he bellowed.
Perez sat tight-mouthed, and clearly unsure of what was going on. Dakota stared back defiantly at Corso. 'We're out of range of Redstone, and we're going to jump again in a couple of hours. That's all you need to know right now.'
'And what happens when we get within range of the Emissaries?' he grated through clenched teeth. 'What the fuck are we supposed to do without your Magi ship? How are we going to get past their defences-?'
'We'll do fine with the weapons I brought with me,' she snapped. 'I know what I'm doing.'
She met his eyes and saw for the first time how frightened he was. She nodded towards Perez. 'Who else is on the ship?'
Corso glanced over his shoulder at Perez before replying. 'Eight of us came on board, but one got wounded when we tried to take control of the bridge. He's currently in the med-bay. We also brought an Atn specialist who seems to know something about the Mos Hadroch. He went with some others to make sure it was still on board. It is.'
'I spoke to Ted on the way in, but what happened to him? He was there one second, then gone. Is he all right?'
'He's in the med-bay too. Whatever it is that's been happening to other machine-heads, it finally got him, too.'
As Corso started to step down from the dais, Dakota reached out and touched his elbow. He paused, looking back at her.
'I wouldn't have been able to do anything with the Magi ship, even if I wanted to, Lucas. It's not like it was before, when I had real control over it. That's all gone for me now, and it will be for Ted, too. The ship was more like a prison at the end, and destroying it was the only way I could get free of it.'
Corso shook his head as if in disbelief, and headed over to the bridge entrance.
'I think it's about time,' he said, turning back to her, 'to head down to the labs and see just what it is we went through all this for. But first we're going to the med-bay.'
Chapter Eighteen
Once they had exited through the hub, they stopped frequently so that Corso could consult the map-projections that hovered over major intersections. Localized micro-relay systems, tied into the frigate's central stacks, showed Dakota exactly where they were at every step, yet one look at Corso's grim expression made her reluctant to point this out.
He pushed ahead of her without looking back once, and she wondered if he had experienced the same powerful sense of deja vu she herself had felt from the moment she had boarded the frigate. It seemed very much like being back on board the Hyperion, except this time they were the ones in charge. It was a strange feeling because so very much had changed since then, but perhaps nothing quite so much as Corso and herself.
They boarded a car at a transport station, and sat in uncomfortable silence for several minutes until Corso finally broke his silence. He leaned towards her, his face red and angry.
'Why did you wait this long, before just appearing out of nowhere?' he demanded. 'Did you have all this planned before you turned up on Redstone?'
She cleared her throat before replying. 'Some of it,' she admitted.
'But you just couldn't be bothered letting me in on it.'
'Of course not,' she replied.
'Why the hell not?'
'Because… I was afraid you might try to stop me.'
He waited several more seconds, clearly expecting her to continue. When she didn't, he just shook his head in disgust and stared away from her until they reached their destination less than a minute later. Corso took the lead again once they disembarked. The med-bay was much more up-to-date than the Hyperion's had been. Even though the Mjollnir had been constructed centuries ago, she had clearly undergone a thorough refit.
Dakota gazed down at Lamoureaux through the transparent lid of a medbox. Another medbox nearby contained a distinguished-looking man in late middle-age.
She heard a soft hum and looked over to see that Corso had activated the examination table. Its bottom edge slowly tilted towards the deck, while a tangle of ceiling-mounted diagnostic equipment whirred and clicked as it dropped into place above the table's headrest.
'Who is he?' asked Dakota.
'That's Eduard Martinez, who led the expedition to find the Mos Hadroch. On the table, please, Dakota. I want to run a full scan on you.'
'Why?'
'Because we can't afford you keeling over the way Ted Lamoureaux did.'
'You don't actually need a machine-head navigator to make a superluminal jump,' she pointed out. 'You could just set the parameters yourself
'Yes, but we still need you to tell us which way we're heading, and you can't do that if you wind up in a coma or worse.'
Conceding this point, Dakota reluctantly climbed up on to the examination table and lay back, sliding her fingers around thick moulded plastic handholds on either side. She watched the diagnostic gear move slowly down the length of her body, imaging her internal organs while simultaneously mapping her nervous system.
'I don't suppose there's a real doctor anywhere on this ship?'
Corso didn't reply, instead pushing himself away from the table and towards the desk and chair that formed the nurse's station. He grabbed hold of the back of the chair as he studied whatever analysis the med-bay's computers were now coming up with.
'Okay, Dakota.' He turned and glanced at her. 'I think it's time we talked. What did you mean when you said you destroyed your ship to get free?'
'I told you, I wasn't ready to-'
'Bullshit. You just don't want to talk about it, full stop. I don't care, but I want an explanation. I deserve an explanation.' He nodded towards the two occupied medboxes. 'Those two wouldn't be in there if they didn't believe in what we've been trying to achieve over the last couple of years. People got killed when we boarded this frigate. Most of them weren't bad people either, Dakota. They were just doing their job, and now they're dead. So don't try and feed me any more crap about not being ready.'
Dakota realized that the corners of her eyes were damp, and blinked the incipient tears away. 'I told you things were different after the Magi brought me back from the dead.'
'Different in what way?'
'In that now I only ever go where the Magi ships want me to go. I don't get to have a say any more, not since I was resurrected. They made me, rebuilt me, and that makes me part of them. But I'm still useful to them, whether I like it or not.'
'So you decided to do something about it.'
'The thing you have to understand,' she said, 'is that the Magi ships are hardwired to track down and destroy caches, and to find the entity that made those caches – the entity we know as the Maker. Right?'
Corso nodded.
'Hardwired, Lucas. That means finding the Maker has a higher priority than anything else where the Magi ships are concerned, even higher than obeying their navigators.'
'So their original navigators weren't really in charge of their ships either?'
'It's more complicated than that. The original navigators were bred to their purpose, and because of that they shared the same obsessive goal as their ships did – there could never be a conflict of interest. But they were all wiped out, and when we came along, instead of making everything better again, it presented the Magi ships with a conflict. On the one hand they're programmed to obey our orders, but on the other they're overwhelmingly programmed to track down and destroy any caches and ultimately find the Maker.'
'So what can they do?'
'They can try to change their human navigators: remould them into something more compatible with their own mission. Except, instead, it's turning them into vegetables or – if they're lucky – just leaving them with permanent brain damage.'
'Jesus and Buddha,' Corso exclaimed. 'You're talking about the bends?'
There was a soft electronic chime and then the whirring diagnostic equipment slid back up towards the ceiling and fell silent. Dakota pulled herself upright and clasped her hands over her knees.
Corso glanced towards Lamoureaux's me
dbox, then back again, with an appalled expression on his face. 'You're seriously telling me the Magi ships are trying to turn our navigators into something that isn't human?'
'Trader once told me he didn't regard me as human anymore. I didn't really believe him at the time, but I understand what he meant a lot better now.'
She could see Corso was still struggling with this revelation. 'But it's not working, is it?' He nodded at Lamoureaux.
'No, it's not,' she admitted. 'At least not for most of us. But I can't say for certain they haven't already succeeded in turning other machine-heads into the image of their original navigators. Maybe we won't find out until something happens.'
'Like?'
'I think their first priority would probably be to destroy the cache at Tierra.'
She watched Corso try to assimilate this. 'What?'
'Remember their original mission, apart from tracking down the Maker, was to destroy caches wherever they could find them. They don't make exceptions.'
'But the Magi ships don't have weapons,' he pointed out. 'How could they…?'
She smiled as Corso reached the obvious conclusion on his own, his eyes widening in horror. 'By destroying whichever star the cache is orbiting, of course,' she said, finally pushing herself off the examination table.
'We have to warn them,' he said, in a half-croak.
'Sure, you could,' she replied, stepping over to the screen to study the details of her diagnostics, noticing the dark patches inside her skull where her implants were located. 'But think about it, Lucas. I heard the news about Consortium forces moving in and taking over the Tierra cache by force. They're not going to listen to anything you have to say. But, if it came to the worst and we did lose the Tierra system altogether, there are other caches out there, and we still have other ships we can use to find them.'
She watched him think this over. He'd try to warn them anyway, she had no doubt, because that was the kind of man he was: endlessly drawn to hopeless causes.
'So you destroyed your ship…?'
'Because I couldn't trust it any more.'
