by Gary Gibson
On the screen, she could see the cache growing bigger as she dropped towards it. According to the signal she was still picking up from Trader's yacht, he was more than thirty kilometres directly down the throat of the shaft.
Something about the thought of descending into that bottomless hole made her skin prickle with terror.
Down, down, down she went, the cache expanding towards Dakota like a wide and hungry mouth.
More pulse-beam fire blasted out from defensive structures scattered around the mouth of the cache. The lander spun under another direct hit, and alert messages flared across her screens.
She caught one brief glimpse of vast fields of slag and rubble around the mouth of the shaft, before the lander began to drop down into limitless darkness. Faraway lights, mounted on the sides of the shaft, illuminated what looked like abandoned cities or factories clinging to the walls.
She left the two drones on guard near the surface. They wouldn't be able to hold off a full-frontal assault for long, but at least she would have some warning if the Emissaries were about to follow her in.
The lander dropped down farther, while the mouth of the cache seemed to grow smaller and smaller, increasingly far overhead.
Trader, I'm not going to let you get away with the artefact. Do you hear me?
Silence.
Either something had happened to him, or he wasn't interested in talking.
Trader? Are you there? It had all been going so well until he had tried to activate the Mos Hadroch.
Trader had placed it in the mouth of the drive-forge, and then accessed the command structure he had retrieved from the Greater Magellanic Cloud so very, very long ago, activating it through a meshlike apparatus woven around two of his secondary manipulators.
The effect had been spectacular.
During his initial experiments, using Whitecloud as his proxy, it had become rapidly clear the artefact was much further beyond his understanding than he had anticipated. Aspects of its operation pointed to a powerful, almost godlike intelligence buried somewhere within its depths.
At first, the device had appeared to unravel, its outer shell peeling open to reveal internal components that defied comprehension. Its shape had mutated rapidly, expanding well beyond the drive-forge, and Trader had felt the presence of that overwhelming intelligence, for the first time, as it ransacked his yacht's onboard systems and even, to his shock, his own mind.
He had turned to flee, recognizing that events were already spinning far out of his control. But it was far too late: the artefact had already expanded to surround him, its malevolent intent suddenly and startlingly clear.
Chapter Thirty-seven
The lander kept following the signal from Trader's ship, until it dropped down on to a shelf extending out from a darkened side passage no different from the thousands of others she had seen during her long descent. The onboard systems told Dakota there was a protective field placed over the mouth of the passageway that retained a breathable atmosphere.
She exited her craft quickly, a torch in hand, and soon spotted Trader's yacht resting nearby in the gloom, on a bed of shaped fields. Most of its drive-spines were either broken or melted or both. She flicked the torch on, then bounded forward in long, loping strides due to the minimal gravity, manoeuvring her way past cluttered wreckage and abandoned machinery.
After a couple of minutes, Dakota reached a side chamber. When she shone the torch inside it, it was to see a machine she recognized as a drive-forge. As she moved closer, she observed that the Mos Hadroch had been mounted inside it.
A moment later she nearly stumbled over Trader himself.
The tiny field-generators that normally held a protective sphere of briny water around him now lay scattered across the floor of the chamber. His enormous bulk somehow looked much smaller, lying unprotected on the dusty ground. His skin looked grey and cracked, as his manipulators twisted and slithered helplessly across the grey stone underneath him.
‹Dakota.›
Jesus and Buddha. You're alive?
‹For now.›
Trader's movements were growing ever weaker as she watched. She knelt beside him and touched the fingers of one hand to his side. His flesh felt rough, abrasive.
‹It knew everything about me. Secrets buried so long I had forgotten them. But it will not function.›
Let me try, Trader?
The great bulk of his body shuddered one last time, and became still.
She remained kneeling by him for a few more seconds, wondering why she didn't feel anything, not even vindication or triumph. Instead she only felt hollow, as if all this had been an anticlimax.
Finally she stood up and stepped past Trader's inert form and towards the drive-forge.
She had been able to hear the artefact from the moment she entered the chamber: a high-pitched ululation like a thousand amplifiers feeding back all at once, throbbing constantly from low to high. But she had a sense of an underlying order that hinted at something else, something vast and cool and powerful.
She stumbled to a halt just short of the forge, and watched as the artefact flowered open the way she had seen it do on Whitecloud's video recordings. The sound filled her head until she couldn't form a single coherent thought, hammering its way into her brain almost like something physical.
And, just when she thought the worst was over, she felt that same intelligence she had sensed earlier suddenly focus all its attention on her.
She stood again on a snow-blasted highway on Redstone, surrounded by the bodies of the dead. Found herself in a bar called The Wayward Dragon with Lin Liao, waiting for his sister to arrive. Looked across the rooftops of Erkinning along with half a dozen other students with whom she had lived and loved and warred, and none of whom she would ever see again after that night.
She was dragged back farther and farther, reliving memories that she thought she had lost for ever half a galaxy away, suddenly as real in that moment as if she were experiencing them for the first time.
The last image that came to her was that single glimpse of a street in winter, and the memory of her mother's hand laid on her head.
But this time, when she looked up, she saw her mother's face clearly.
Dakota came to, some indeterminate time later, to find herself sprawled on the chamber floor.
She pulled herself to her feet and stumbled closer to the drive-forge. The Mos Hadroch had unravelled yet more, like some multidimensional kaleidoscope expanding to surround her, penetrating deep inside her body until she had no idea where she ended and the artefact began.
And in that instant, she discovered the terrible price she was going to have to pay. 'That's another drone gone,' Lamoureaux cried hoarsely. 'And more scouts on the way!'
Corso looked up at the overhead display and saw that only one of the three godkillers guarding the cache remained and, by the looks of it, was charging up for an imminent jump. But now a constellation of pixels showed an enormous number of scouts were heading for the frigate. More than they could possibly fight off.
Lucas.
'Dakota?' Corso spoke out loud, unconsciously reaching up to touch the comms bead in his ear. He ignored the looks he received from the others.
Are you ready to jump out of the system?
'No, not yet. We won't be for some time. There's severe damage to the drive-spines, we've lost functionality in more than three-quarters of them. It's not looking good.'
You can still get away in time if you stick to short incremental jumps. As long as you can stay just ahead of the shockwave, you can gradually build up enough power for a long-range jump -particularly if you can get into the shadow of one of the outer gas giants. What's happening back there?
'The Emissaries' bigger ships are starting to jump out of the system, but I don't see how they can get more than a fraction of them away from here before it's too late. What's happening with the artefact? Did it work?'
I think so, yes.
'What do you mean you thin
k so?'
It's going to be a little while yet before it takes effect.
'Then you need to get back here. Their main ships may be leaving, but we've got a force of their scouts currently on the way. Is the lander still operative?'
Lucas… I'm not coming back.
Corso stared across the bridge with a stunned expression. 'What?'
I'm not coming back. I can't.
'Bullshit, you just told me you activated the damn thing. We won, right? So now we can go home.'
No, Lucas. I have to stay here with the Mos Hadroch. I won't ever be going home. The artefact can't function unless it's merged with a living mind. In the meantime you need to get the Mjollnir as far away from here as possible.
Corso felt a sudden tightness in his throat. 'I won't allow this. There's always a way.'
Goodbye, Lucas. I'm glad we had a chance to know each other. She cut the connection before he could say anything more. Dakota felt numb, as if the reality of what was happening to her hadn't sunk in yet.
The artefact pulsed with light, all around her, inside her, even entwined with her. She had since lost all sense of her own body. She seemed to see the floor and walls of the chamber from a dozen different points of view simultaneously. Her mind was being unravelled like a piece of cloth slowly teased apart into disparate threads.
She slipped in and out of consciousness, as the hours passed like minutes. The artefact occasionally fed her glimpses of the Mjollnir, which had already started taking incremental jumps away from the cache, making the most of its remaining drive-spines. Hordes of scouts followed her, diving towards the frigate in a strategy all too reminiscent of the swarm's tactics. She could see that the frigate was taking heavy damage.
She sensed the artefact was beginning to approach some kind of peak of activity. The chamber began to shake, while a shell of burning energy surrounded the drive-forge. Lamoureaux gazed down at Martinez with haggard eyes. 'We can initiate one more jump, on your call,' he said. 'After that, nothing. I'm sorry.'
They had lived through hours of endless terror since their last communication with Dakota. The scouts had chased them throughout the night, tearing and hacking at the hull wherever the field-generators failed. The frigate had already executed more than half a dozen short-range jumps, but every time the scouts caught up eventually, materializing all around and diving inwards towards them with the mindless efficiency of machines. The star system might be doomed, but the Emissaries clearly weren't going to let them escape.
Martinez was sweating profusely, still being careful with his injured arm. A scout had reached as far as the bridge before being taken out by Perez and Martinez, both armed with pulse-rifles. The air still smelled of burnt wires and plastic.
'Do it anyway,' said Martinez. 'I don't want to have to stay-'
'Wait. Wait a second,' interrupted Lamoureaux.
The machine-head gripped the arms of the interface chair, staring at some point far beyond the bridge as if he couldn't quite believe what he was seeing.
'What?' said Corso, speaking for the first time since the scout had tried to cut its way in. Ever since they had successfully repelled it, he had remained collapsed in a seat, too weary and shell-shocked to say or do anything.
'Look,' Lamoureaux stuttered, pointing to the overhead display. 'Just look.'
They all stared up and saw the Emissary scouts were self-destructing.
'Perhaps it's just local,' Martinez mumbled.
'No,' insisted Lamoureaux vehemently. 'The last godkiller – it's burning.'
'It's Dakota,' Corso yelled, standing up at last. 'It has to be!'
Lamoureaux didn't say anything to that. He just stared past them all, like a blind man seeing visions, with sweat breaking out on his forehead.
'Ted,' asked Perez, 'what is it?'
Lamoureaux seemed at last to remember they were there. 'We've got bigger worries now,' he said gravely. 'I just picked up a second neutrino flux. The sun just went nova.' The nova mine had been in close orbit around the star for over fifteen hundred years. Before receiving its activation signal, it had drifted insensate and silent, outwardly little different from any other piece of random junk caught in a similar orbit, betraying its purposefulness only on those occasions when it activated dormant guidance systems in order to guide it away from any imminent collision.
There had been others before it, spread out over the millennia, each one a potential sword of Damocles aimed at the heart of the star. Similar nova mines could be found in close solar orbits within every Emissary-occupied system, serving as ultimate safeguards against defeat or rebellion.
The activation signal had triggered ancient protocols and, within an hour, light had begun to build up around each of its drive-spines, reaching a crescendo in the moment before it briefly vanished from the visible universe.
It rematerialized less than a hundred kilometres from the star's core. In the few brief nanoseconds before it was vaporized, a chain reaction deep within its drive caused a bubble of false vacuum to form, expanding outwards at the speed of light before collapsing within seconds.
Billion-kilometre tongues of fire rose up from the star's surface like fiery wreaths, and over the next few hours it began to shrink in size. Its heart had been cut out, and its remaining lifetime was now numbered in hours.
When the star finally exploded, the shockwave reached the cache-world within minutes, sending rivers of molten fire pouring down the narrow valleys between the tiny planet's mountains.
Tidally locked until now, it began to spin for the first time in a billion years, the light of a million dawns creeping slowly towards the mouth of the cache itself.
But it was already too late. The Mos Hadroch, the 'Judgement of Worlds', had sent out a signal that propagated itself across the galaxy instantaneously.
The last thing Dakota saw was a brilliant light, almost liquid in its intensity, surging in through the entrance to the chamber housing the drive-forge. 'Explain this to me again,' Commander of Shoals demanded, swimming across the command-chamber of a coreship located some tens of thousands of light-years away.
'I can't explain it,' the aide stammered, instinctively darting closer to one wall as Commander of Shoals bore down upon him. 'But something's happening to the Emissary fleet. It's… it's self-destructing. There are no other words. Look.'
The aide's stubby little tentacles, reflected Commander of Shoals, had never been used in combat, had never been used to slash an enemy's belly open, or to tear away that same enemy's fins. These were the soft appendages of a civilian, with no place on board this world-sized warship.
They were deep within the ruins of a star system whose population had numbered in the billions until it had been destroyed, more than a year before, by the Emissaries. This was the first time the General had returned here since that awful day. He and the forces he commanded had done their utmost to prevent that particular tragedy, but the Emissary ships had continued to fill the skies, intent on carrying out surgical strikes against the defensive installations on all the system's worlds – while one single enemy drone had found its way past their coreships and dived into the living heart of the system's star.
The Shoal's forces had rescued pitifully few in those last frantic hours before the star detonated. Even if there had been enough coreships to carry away every last one of the system's inhabitants, the basic logistics of such a mission would have rendered their efforts almost pointless. It would have taken the better part of a year to transport all of them safely away from the various planetary bodies.
Instead, they had a scant few hours to save what and whom they could.
And therein lay the terrible tragedy of the nova war: those left behind had no choice but to wait for the end as the departing coreships jumped to safety. It was a scenario that had been repeated in so many other systems that he could not even bring himself to contemplate their number.
They had now returned to retrieve certain items of value from the wreck of a coreship partia
lly destroyed by that nova, but had themselves been ambushed by a cloud of Emissary scouts hidden within the tangled smoke of the newborn nebula. A godkiller had unexpectedly appeared, drawn there by the scouts, jumping to a point less than a light-minute distant and then quickly vectoring inwards to deliver the final death-blow.
Commander of Shoals stared at the data coming in from his ship's external sensor arrays. What it told him was utterly preposterous. And yet, despite this, more data was pouring in from other sources, all appearing to support the most unlikely conclusion: that the scouts had somehow, inexplicably, self-destructed.
There had also been an enormous explosion on board the god-killer. Adrift and aflame, it now spun out of control through the nebula.
Fresh data-glyphs kept appearing in the murky water filling the chamber, carrying high-priority reports from far-flung sectors of the galaxy – indeed, from the very farthest corners of the beleaguered Hegemony. Huge swathes of the Emissary fleets were reported to be spontaneously self-destructing.
Commander of Shoals found himself looking at images of other godkillers, their shattered hulls tumbling through the skies of a thousand worlds.
It was as if something had affected them all instantaneously.
It was only in that same moment that he recalled his final meeting with Trader in Faecal Matter of Animals.
Commander of Shoals whipped around in a half-circle, his enormous bulk smacking into that of the timorous aide, sending the underling tumbling and squawking with fright.
Commander of Shoals's manipulators twisted with giddy joy and he spun wildly around the chamber, while his support staff fled, unnerved by this most uncharacteristic behaviour.
Trader had done it. The vicious old fool had actually pulled it off.
He had ended the war.
Chapter Thirty-eight
Five Years Later Corso glanced to the west and saw the Lantern Constellation rising into view as the sun set. He checked his pressure suit's filters, took one last glance at the ruins that had been his principal occupation for the last few years, and was on his way back to the truck parked nearby, when suddenly Dan called in over the short-range.
