Empire of Light

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 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 destroyed 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.'