Empire of Light

Chapter One

Consortium Standard Year 2544 Seventeen thousand light-years from home, drifting through an unmapped star cluster on the edge of the Core, Dakota Merrick finally stumbled across the first faint signals that betrayed the Maker's whereabouts.

The signals utilized compression techniques of dazzling sophistication in order to cram the maximum amount of information into the smallest possible packet burst. A less sophisticated vessel than her Magi starship might never have been able to distinguish the signals from random noise.

She followed the transmissions back to their point of origin, passing through a dense cloud of cosmic dust filled with stars so young that their planets had barely formed. When her ship finally emerged from the cluster, she came across dozens of shattered Atn clade-worlds orbiting far out on the edges of much more ancient systems.

More stray transmissions drew her towards a halo cluster a thousand light-years above the galaxy's ecliptic plane. She drove her starship forward until the Milky Way slowly revealed its shape astern, the Core now a brilliant bar of light wreathed in black smoke.

As time passed, she picked up the signals of ancient emergency beacons, still active after more than a hundred and fifty thousand years. Before very long it became clear she'd stumbled across the remnants of Trader's own expedition from long ago. She found coreships that had been reduced to airless hulks, their hailing systems still firing out fading requests for help long after their crews had turned to dust.

The transmissions grew more dense, and Dakota found her attention drawn more and more to the vicinity of a red giant on the edge of a star cluster. Long-range sensors finally revealed the nature of the Maker: rather than being a single entity, it proved instead to be a vast swarm of objects interlinked via instantaneous, faster-than-light tach-net transmissions. There were trillions of them, scattered across an area of several light-years, with the red giant at its centre.

The swarm filled the superluminal ether with short-range bursts of data, a cacophony of unintelligible voices all shouting to each other across enormous distances. While the ship closed in, Dakota spent her time drifting through the infinite virtual worlds held in the Magi ship's memory stacks, subjective days and months passing in what were only seconds in the universe beyond the hull. She became a flock of birdlike creatures that flew through the dense air of a high-gravity world, diving into the waters for prey. She experienced life as a twist of self-aware magnetic vortices in the photosphere of a star, then searched through the ruins of a drowned city in the body of an eel-like creature whose remote ancestors had built it, then forgotten their past. Her own body felt like a distant memory, and in truth it had long since been subsumed into the body of the ship, freeing her mind to roam at will.

There was a part of her that wanted to stay locked away in these worlds for ever, while another part still remembered what it meant to be human. Dakota had become aware she was being haunted.

At first the ghosts remained out of sight, vague presences of whom she caught only fleeting glimpses, but over time they grew more solid, more real. They carried the voices and faces of people she'd known and loved, and who had died because of her. She found herself wondering if it meant she was losing her mind.

'Do you see?' one of them cried, following her through a maze of data. It had Josef's face. 'The swarm isn't just a cloud of interconnected objects – they're a single entity. When we listen to its transmissions, we're listening to its thoughts.'

'Go away!' she screamed, fearful of the memories he aroused. But even as his ghost faded, she realized what he'd said was true. Each member of the swarm – each component – was a single neuron in an enormously distributed brain. The Maker was alien in a way she had never encountered before; it had taken the principles of instantaneous communication by tach-net signal and used it to create a new kind of machine life. But then she remembered what she had become, and wondered whether she was really so different. A few days later – as measured in the external universe, at any rate – Dakota had the ship rendezvous with one of the swarm-components. She proceeded cautiously, wary of how it might react to her ship's presence, or her gentle probing of its internal systems. When it appeared that no resistance would be offered, she had the starship draw the component inside it.

For the first time in over a year, Dakota reconstituted her physical body, creating a space within the starship both for herself and for the newly captured component. Her dark hair flopped across her eyes, the deep browns of her pupils again topped by the thick black commas of her eyebrows.

The swarm-component was perhaps ten metres in length, delicate sensors and neural conduits hidden beneath a series of tough plates streaked and pitted from centuries of microscopic impacts. That it was a Von Neumann machine, capable of endlessly replicating itself, was clear; isotopic measurements and analysis of its hull showed that the raw materials used to construct it had been drawn from asteroids and drifting interstellar bodies.

Since her arrival in the red giant's vicinity, Dakota had discerned a variety of different types of component. Some appeared to act primarily as relays for transmissions within the body of the swarm, while others did nothing but carry out repairs on other components, either by manufacturing parts or breaking down older machines in order to construct new ones. Still more appeared to be scouts ranging far from the main body, perhaps in order to locate resources. The particular component Dakota had chosen to study was, she suspected, close to the end of its useful life.

She flexed her fingers, feeling the half-forgotten play of muscles, and realized that she wasn't alone. She felt her skin freeze when the ghost stepped out from behind the component's pitted bulk to regard her with calm grey eyes.

He wasn't a true ghost, of course, merely a doppelganger of her dead lover, Josef Marados, now made flesh from her own memories. A way, perhaps, for her increasingly rebellious subconscious to combat the growing loneliness of being so very far from home.

At least, that was the rational explanation.

'This thing's alive,' he commented casually, as if picking up the thread of a conversation. 'You know that, right? But it doesn't seem to know we're here.'

Dakota had a sudden vivid recollection of Josef's bloodied corpse lying crumpled on the floor of his office on Mesa Verde. She hadn't been to blame for his death, not really; at the time she'd been under the murderous control of Trader in Faecal Matter of Animals, an agent of the Shoal. He had exploited fatal weaknesses in her machine-head implants and turned her into his unwitting puppet. She knew this, and yet the guilt remained.

If I act like the ghost is real, then that means I really am crazy.

But she did, anyway. She couldn't help herself.

'I… I think, with some time and effort, I could use it to try and communicate with the rest of the swarm.'

The ghost laughed, eyeing her with a half-smile that suggested he saw through to the deep well of uncertainty at the core of her soul. 'Time,' he replied, 'is the one thing you might not have.'

He meant the red giant, of course. It was now weeks, perhaps only days from death. A new and entirely natural nova would result, as it expelled most of its mass in one single cataclysmic blast. Despite the obvious danger, untold billions of the swarm-components remained within close proximity to the star, like fireflies dancing at the edge of a forest fire.

'Don't.'

Dakota stared at the ghost with a puzzled expression. 'Don't what?'

'You were about to apologize. Don't start saying you're sorry for killing me.'

'I wasn't-'

'You made me, spun me out of your memories, and that means I know every thought in your head even before it appears. Now,' he said, leaning down with hands on knees to peer at the component's hull, 'this is interesting…'

Part of her wanted to touch the back of his neck, in case his skin was still warm and soft and carried the same scent as the man she'd known. Instead, she had her ship feed her highly magnified images of the component's exterior. It was studded with millions of extremely miniaturized tach-net transceivers, each one packed with dense molecular circuitry.

This particular component appeared to have a relatively simple function, storing and analysing data from all across the electromagnetic spectrum as well as more exotic phenomena such as gravitic fluctuations and superluminal tachyon drift. If the swarm did have an overarching intelligence, as she suspected, it was almost certainly an emergent property resulting from its sheer complexity.

Dakota lightly touched the fingers of one hand to the component's hull and closed her eyes, tense despite herself. She could hear the whisper of its transceivers, and realized it was still in communication with its brethren.

Perhaps she could tap into that flow, talk directly to the swarm…

She hesitated, drawing her hand back.

'Go ahead,' the ghost prompted. 'It's the opportunity to talk to something that's been alive for billions of years.'

'It's also responsible for creating the caches. The same ones that destroyed the Magi and could still destroy us. What if I… made it angry?'

'Life, Dakota, is a series of opportunities preceded by risks. We have the chance to finally find out what the swarm's ultimate purpose is. So go ahead and try.'

She nodded, and put her fingers once again on the component's hull, listening to the swarm's chatter. What had been unintelligible noise suddenly became clear, and what she learned was so shocking she pulled her hand back with a gasp.

'It's trying to…'

'Re-engineer the universe,' the ghost finished for her. 'A project it doesn't expect to finish until billions of years from now.'

'That's incredible,' she said, 'but how does it help us?'

'Look here,' said the ghost, directing her attention to one particular strand of data. 'There – a way to stop the nova war.'

Once again, she placed her hand against the component's hull. More data came pouring through, almost swamping her conscious mind.

The ghost grinned in jubilation. 'Did you see?'

She nodded. 'I saw it. We've really found something.'

A name, fished out of the depths of the Maker's collective intelligence, and a little more besides. 'Mos Hadroch.' Severn rolled the phrase around his tongue.

They were walking side-by-side through a simulation of the streets of Erkinning, on Dakota's home world of Bellhaven. The winter winds felt so entirely real that she had bunched her hands into fists, pushing them deep inside down-lined pockets, a padded collar pulled up close around her neck and chin. The scent of food and the sound of voices drifted to them from the direction of the city walls, where Grover refugees taking advantage of the daily amnesty had set up a market.

Dakota had murdered Chris Severn while he'd been recovering in an Ascension clinic, cutting out his heart and watching his life-support read-outs flat-line. Another figment of her mind made real, whether she liked it or not – dressed up in the skin of someone who'd died because he'd made the mistake of loving her.

'Whatever it is, it means a lot to the swarm,' Dakota replied. 'It meant something to the Magi as well, but what that meaning is still isn't clear.'

'The Mos Hadroch is a legend,' Josef told her, stopping off at a stall to buy hot tea for them both. 'Or as good as, anyway. There are no surviving records to prove it really existed. It's a weapon, supposedly, built by a predecessor civilization in the Greater Magellanic Cloud.'

Dakota drank the bitter black tea and felt its heat diffuse down her throat. 'It can't be that much of a myth if the swarm wants to find it. We need to try and find out what else it knows.'

Severn frowned. 'You might want to exercise some caution. Trader found out, the hard way, that the swarm can be lethal.'

'There's not enough time to be cautious,' she muttered irritably. 'We need to find out everything we can.'

'Knowledge won't be much use to you if it only gets you killed. The swarm acts like we're beneath its notice, but how can we really be sure?' More days passed, and the starship learned how to decipher more of the data streaming through the captured component's transceivers. For the first time, an accurate picture of the swarm's origins began to form, where before she'd had only disparate fragments of knowledge loosely knitted together with conjecture.

Once the starship learned how to tap into the swarm's senses, Dakota was able to look out on the universe through trillions of eyes.

She eventually discovered that the swarm was very, very old – and not alone. There were others scattered through distant galaxies, having seeded themselves across the face of the universe over vast epochs of time. The origins of this particular swarm dated back to a time when the Earth's sun had barely coalesced from interstellar dust.

It was clear that these swarms maintained contact with each other, despite the vast distances that separated them, by some means Dakota did not yet understand. Although tach-net communications were instantaneous, the amount of energy required to boost a signal so enormously far staggered the imagination. How the swarm obtained the requisite energy was a question that, at least for the moment, might have to remain unanswered.

Mos Hadroch. The term turned up again and again, and it soon became clear that, whatever it might be, the swarm regarded it as a major threat to its primary mission, even while its precise nature remained frustratingly elusive. 'We're getting nowhere in trying to work out what the Mos Hadroch is,' said Dakota. 'I'm going to get in contact with the other navigators back home, see if they can help.'

She was standing with Josef's ghost on the roof of a kilometres-high structure on an otherwise deserted world drawn from the ship's memory. A real-time image of the red giant hung above them, great loops of fiery plasma torn from its surface outlining the flux of its magnetic fields.

He looked at her with a doubtful expression. 'What could they possibly do? For all we know, the Mos Hadroch might be somewhere back in the Greater Magellanic Cloud – or might not even exist anymore. Maybe we should be trying to think of something new.'

'No, you don't understand. The Shoal abandoned a coreship before they left our part of the galaxy. What if there's some clue buried in its data stacks? Or in the wreck of the godkiller back in Ocean's Deep? There are navigators back home who've been flying their own Magi starships for a couple of years now. If I send them everything we know, they might find a correlation within minutes.'

I'm talking to myself, Dakota thought, as she studied the ghost. That's all he is: another part of me that thinks it's someone else. More evidence, if it were needed, that her mind was now unravelling.

'The risk of making contact with home is enormous, Dakota. It's suicidally risky.'

'How do you mean?'

The ghost turned towards her. 'Think about the energy cost of transmitting a signal across seventeen thousand light-years, all the way back to Ocean's Deep. Without enough power, it'll de-cohere into random noise before it even gets there. You're going to have to drain the drive's energy reserves to make sure they receive the message.'

'So?'

'It'll take the ship days to claw that energy back out of the vacuum, and until then she won't be able to carry out any superluminal jumps. We'll be at the swarm's mercy, if it decides to turn on us.'

'We're at a dead end here, anyway,' Dakota insisted. 'We have to act now.'

'It's a mistake,' the ghost warned her.

'No. It's a risk, but one we're still going to have to take.'