Empire of Light

Chapter Nine

The sun was low on the horizon. Cool wind teased her dark hair, while saltwater foamed and splashed over her bare toes where she sat at the water's edge, her baggy cotton trousers rolled up above her ankles. She knew, without looking, that further up the beach behind her stood a single-storey cabin on stilts, with tatami mats scattered welcomingly on its floor and a futon rolled up in one corner.

None of it was real, of course, but she didn't know who she was, so it hardly mattered. She knew something had been threatening her because, when she tried to remember where she'd been before the beach, all that came to her was a sense of unease and foreboding.

In the meantime, she knew she could happily wait here on the beach for ever.

Sometimes she glanced down at her arms and legs and didn't recognize them. The knowledge that something was missing – that some essential part of her had been lost for ever – slowly formed in the back of her mind, but somehow she didn't seem to feel anything about it: no anger, remorse or bitterness. Only the awareness that something that should have been there, now wasn't.

After a long while she remembered a star, angry and red, reaching out to swallow her. She remembered there had been machines like dark metal locusts filling the universe like a plague.

A little while later, she remembered dying. What might have been hours or days or years later, her name came back to her: Dakota. She formed the sound with her lips, working her jaws around it in ways that felt unfamiliar, as if trying the vowels out for size.

She turned, seeing that a bamboo table laden with fresh fruit stood near the cabin, and in that instant it was as if a switch was thrown inside her. Sudden hunger overwhelmed her, and she stood and walked over. Once she'd eaten her fill, she crawled inside the cabin, unrolled the futon and went to sleep.

She dreamed she was a little girl again. The cabin's open doorway and the strip of beach it framed became a tall window looking out on cobbled streets lined with buildings made of brick and steel. She lay with her head in her mother's lap, listening to the gentle rhythms of her parent's voice, while flakes of snow drifted down from out of a sky so pale it was almost white. The next time Dakota opened her eyes, she was somewhere else.

She knelt naked on a rocky shore entirely unlike the one she had found herself on before. Faces and places that should have been familiar to her spun through her mind like pieces of a shredded book flung into the heart of a whirlwind. She was incomplete, an unfinished puzzle with missing pieces.

The air had a strange, coppery taste to it, and when she turned to look behind her, instead of a beach hut and table she saw only forbidding-looking cliffs topped with tangled blue-green flora. The roofs of buildings like gold-plated tombstones rose above the jungle, while the distant peaks of mountains were visible further inland.

She looked out to sea, and saw massive towers like minarets rising out of the ocean, several kilometres out from the shore. Something about them made her sure they were very, very old.

A Magi ship rested on the shore, looking as if it had been beached there. It dwarfed the nearby cliffs and towered far above her, its bulbous body angled upwards as it rested on its drive spines. Waves lapped against the curve of its partially submerged hull.

That was when Dakota realized the Magi ships were never going to let her die. She stood and stared up and down the beach, cold prickling her bare skin, and tried to remember what her mother's face had looked like. Nothing came to her except the memory of gazing out on to a snow-laden street. It seemed much of her life on Bellhaven had been reduced to that one sliver of memory; the rest was gone for ever.

Somehow, whatever essence – whatever fundamental core of self-identity – she had carried within her had been transported across the light-years and used to rebuild her. Her memories of a beach and a hut had been part of the process of integration, as they had started to put her fragmented memory back together. It shouldn't have worked, of course: she should have become a stumbling Frankenstein mess, a lopsided thing only half-alive, and yet here she was.

She heard whispering voices all around her, as if the beach or the waves or the sand itself had suddenly become conscious. It took her a moment to realize they were coming through her implants.

We had to make do with what we found, they announced.

The minds of the Magi ship, she realized. Not the same one that had carried her to the Maker; that was gone, turned to superheated dust and scattered across the cosmos, along with the original Dakota.

'But you didn't do it to help me,' she moaned. 'You brought me back because you wanted me to lead you to the Mos Hadroch.'

It had to be done, they replied. We want to help you, Dakota. You don't ever have to die if you don't want to, not really. Not any more. We made you whole again – or as whole as we could make you.

She wanted to wade out into the water, to let herself sink as soon as she could no longer feel anything solid beneath her feet, but soon realized she didn't have the strength or the will to do it. And even if she could, she knew the ship would just resurrect her again.

A bundle of what at first appeared to be rags lay close by but, when she stepped over, Dakota found they were clothes, identical to the ones she'd worn when she'd left Ocean's Deep a few years before. She picked them up, thinking that at least she wouldn't freeze to death if the nights here were as cold as the day was warm.

As she dressed, she glanced up at the curved underbelly of the Magi ship, and imagined it giving birth to her here on the shore, spitting the clothes out after her and watching over her until she blinked her eyes open for the first time.

She pulled the jacket around her shoulders. 'Why am I here?' she asked the air.

There was a message, the voices whispered in reply. It used Shoal protocols, and was directed to Ocean's Deep. Indecipherable to all but you.

They fed the message to her: a stream of data encoded using encryption techniques developed jointly by the Shoal and Magi – before one had committed genocide against the other.

The message was from Trader in Faecal Matter of Animals, and it concerned the Mos Hadroch. It detailed a rendezvous here on this world's shore, where dull grey waters lapped against broken shale.

What am I made of? Dakota wondered, panicked by the thought. She reached down and pinched the flesh of her forearm between thumb and forefinger. It felt like ordinary flesh and blood but, if she'd been remade, how could she be sure her knowledge of what flesh should feel like hadn't also been changed? After all, she wasn't even real, just a dead woman's memories prodded into life and given the illusion of independence.

Not true. You are alive, said the voices from within the starship.

'Shut up!' she yelled, her hands curling into fists by her sides. 'I didn't ask for this.'

She stepped closer to the waves and bent down, scooping some of the water up in the palms of her hands. Feeling experimental, she called on her filmsuit, and to her amazement it coated her flesh at once.

They had rebuilt more than just her body: she still had her filmsuit, even her implants.

Your ship calculated the precise phase state and non-arbitrary superpositions for every particle within your body, as well as gathering together the remaining fragments of your mind that were distributed throughout its neural stacks, said the voices. That way when it transmitted-

'I said shut up!'

The voices fell silent.

There was a disturbance in the ocean, and a moment later a submersible of some kind emerged, halting a few metres from the shore. Dakota saw its hull was covered with tiny waving strips like flagella, which presumably propelled it. A hatch opened on its upper surface.

He's waiting for you, Dakota heard the voices say.

She stared up at the starship one last time, with a mixture of unease and disgust, then waded out to the submersible.

The cilia began to thrash against the water as soon as she had climbed inside. She stared out through the submersible's tinted, transparent walls as the hatch closed above her. The craft soon began to sink beneath the ocean's surface.

Something else had changed, she realized. For all that she could still hear the voices of the virtual entities that occupied the Magi ship, that deep, near-instinctive grasp, the near-total symbiosis she'd felt with them, had somehow faded away to nothing.

The original navigators were born to their task, the starship's voices told her. They were created, their genetics manipulated so they could fuse their minds with their ships almost from the moment they came into life. Other Magi ships remade the physical structure of your cortex, but it was only a temporary measure, a stopgap whose consequences could never be precisely modelled. We…

Dakota ignored them, squeezing her eyes tight until the voices finally retreated once more.

When she opened her eyes again, bright beams of pale yellow light had flickered into life, radiating out from a dozen points around the submersible's hull and picking out ruins on the seabed.

The submersible diverted around a vast, weed-strewn hulk that must have been kilometres long. At first she thought it was a collapsed tower, but as the lights picked out the dark shapes of nacelles and heat-dispersal fins, she realized it was a spacecraft that must have plummeted into the ocean long ago.

The ocean floor gradually slipped out of sight, and the submersible began to thread its way between vast columns that Dakota guessed must be the towers she'd seen earlier from the shore. Eventually the submersible headed straight towards one, before passing through an oval opening in its side, which led into a shaft at least a hundred metres across. The submersible began to rise through that shaft, ascending before long into an air-filled cavity.

The hatch opened with a hiss. Dakota pushed her head out and saw that the submersible was now floating in a wide moat between the tower's outer wall and an enormous circular platform surrounding a column rising at the tower's centre. Windows made from some crystalline material provided a view of the ocean waves from a few metres beneath the surface.

The platform itself was quite wide enough to support a Shoal superluminal yacht, floating on a bed of shaped fields. Waiting next to it, as Dakota had known he would be, was Trader in Faecal Matter of Animals, safely contained within a field-suspended sphere of water.

Dakota pulled herself out of the hatch and jumped down on to the platform, which looked and felt like black glass as she reached down to touch it. Trader drifted closer, and she watched how his manipulators clutched and wriggled beneath the wide curve of his body.

When he spoke, the familiar tones of his synthesized voice seemed to fill that dank underwater space.

'Once again, mellifluous greetings,' he said. 'Did you enjoy your trip to the Maker? And don't say I didn't warn you.'

'F…' She cleared her throat with some difficulty, and dug her fingernails into her palms, then tried again. 'Fuck you, too, Trader,' she finally managed to say, and touched her throat with nervous fingers.

'I congratulate you on having survived your encounter, Dakota. Few ever do.'

She stared back at the alien and felt a familiar seething anger well up inside her. It was easier to give in to the feelings of the old Dakota – the real Dakota, as some treacherous part of her mind insisted on thinking of her.

'Yes, Trader. I survived, and I got your message. Now tell me how you know so much about what I found out there.'

'The Consortium is an open book to those with the means to decrypt its most secure transmissions.'

'Not good enough. I was only ever in contact with other machine-head navigators.'

'The Shoal could not have brought about the deaths of the original Magi navigators without having the means to intercept their communications traffic, a skill that remains with us. You can be assured, however, that the coordinates you recovered from the Maker stay a secret with me. Even the Shoal Hegemony remains unaware of the expedition.'

'What expedition?'

'The expedition your friend Lucas Corso recently sent out towards the coordinates associated with the Mos Hadroch, of course, Dakota.'

She nodded mutely, and realized she had no idea just how much time had passed since the red giant had turned nova. It might have been days, or weeks, or much more.

'I don't know what it is you want, Trader, but there are a thousand reasons why I shouldn't listen to anything you have to say.'

'And yet here you are.'

I didn't ask to come here, damn you. 'The last time I saw you was on Morgan's World. You already knew about the Mos Hadroch, didn't you?'

'In this I must confess my guilt,' Trader replied smoothly.

'You could have just told me, and then I never would have needed to go out there.'

'But I had little more than a name at that time, Dakota. You found out more than I ever did when I myself visited the swarm long ago. You even managed to find a possible location.'

Dakota felt her hands twitch with barely suppressed anger. 'If I could, I'd kill you, Trader. I'd…'

Her heart was hammering, and she felt on the verge of a panic attack. Too much was happening too soon.

She slumped down on the slick black glass extending underfoot, and listened to the wet slap of water against the platform's edge. 'Why here?' she asked, looking briefly around. 'I mean, what is this place?'

'This world?' Trader turned slowly within his sphere of water, glancing from side to side. 'Its occupants have long since passed on, as you may have guessed. There was a time when the civilization that built these towers strode amid the stars. They had an empire of a kind that stretched across thousands of light-years. Their name for themselves might be loosely translated as "Meridians".'

'So what happened to them?'

Trader's manipulators wriggled under his body. 'They never discovered a Maker cache until it was much too late and their culture had become terminally fragmented. Before that, they learned the secret of exceptionally long life and journeyed aboard ships that crawled between the stars at sublight speeds. One branch of the species became aquatic, while the rest remained air-breathers; the reasons why remain unknown. These towers are emblematic of happier times, when the two sides coexisted relatively peacefully, but eventually they tore themselves apart. They could not destroy stars as effectively as you or I might, but they certainly had the means to shatter worlds. If they had survived to face the Shoal Hegemony, they would have presented us with a formidable challenge.'

'So does that have anything to do with why you chose this place?'

'They left behind weapons of the most remarkable power. Weapons that we will need, Miss Merrick, when we begin our journey.'

Dakota stared up at the alien. '"Journey"?'

'First, my dear Dakota, let me recount to you the full tale of the origin of the Mos Hadroch, as far as it is known. It is said to have been created by a species who were forerunners to the Magi, and who saw several of their own worlds destroyed in the early centuries of the nova war that set the Greater Magellanic Cloud ablaze. This vanished race developed the Mos Hadroch as a means to counter the dangers inherent within the Maker caches, but were themselves destroyed before it could be implemented. The Mos Hadroch itself vanished for ever and, for lack of evidence that it ever existed, it became little more than a phantasm, a fable that gained credence through the simple accumulation of age.'

Beyond Trader, Dakota saw dark shapes with wide ragged fins passing slowly by the tower, bioluminescent algae making their skin glow with sinuous patterns of green and yellow.

'But you thought it was real enough to go after the Maker swarm yourself,' she said.

'Before you departed, I told you of my own journey to the Maker. Although ultimately disastrous, it was not entirely a failure. I came away with the knowledge that the Mos Hadroch was of paramount importance to the swarm. After the Maker turned on my fleets, I remained locked in time-stopped stasis for decades until rescuers found me cast adrift in a cloud of wreckage. All I retained for my efforts was that single sliver of knowledge, that somewhere out there existed a weapon that might be used to prevent the nova wars the swarms are programmed to provoke with their caches. But its location has remained elusive – until now.'

'There must be a reason why we're here talking, and you haven't just gone to get it for yourself.'

'Precisely, Miss Merrick! And in that simple statement lies the proof of your intellect.' The alien drifted a little closer. 'You see, it is one thing to have a weapon, but another to know how to pull the trigger.'

Dakota cocked her head. 'I don't understand.'

'Precisely how would you suggest the Mos Hadroch is activated and implemented?'

Dakota stared at him, mystified. 'I couldn't begin to guess until we actually find the damn thing, whatever it is.'

'Indeed,' Trader was saying. 'Beyond a name, you do not even know what it is we are looking for. You know that it has a location, and your own people have discovered that some connection exists between the race that created it and an isolated Atn clade. But you do not know its dimensions, its size, or whether it even has a material shape.'

'But if all you yourself managed to find out is its name, then you're no better off than we are.'

Trader's manipulators wriggled suddenly with what Dakota suspected might be delight. 'On the contrary, the means of operating the Mos Hadroch has been available to me for a very long time. I acquired that knowledge long ago, on a journey to the Magellanic Clouds. A most sorrowful place it is, too: a graveyard of stars, one might say. There is life there, though sparse, living amongst the ruins of dead empires whose descendants can barely perceive the heights to which they once aspired. How ironic that the weapon I travelled so far to find should turn out to be so close to our own territory.'

'You mentioned something about a "journey". But a journey to where?'

'Why, to the heart of the Emissary empire, of course. In order to implement the Mos Hadroch in the way for which it was designed, we must penetrate the Maker cache from which they have derived the majority of their power.'

This has to be one of his tricks, she decided. 'You're fucking kidding me.'

'An amusing conceit, is it not? You must excuse my lack of transparency concerning the method of its activation, but we find ourselves in a situation where each of us may gain from the other. You must believe me, Dakota, when I tell you the Mos Hadroch must be taken to a particular cache before it can be deployed. It then exploits what one might call certain weaknesses in the design of the caches in order to achieve its full effect.'

Beyond the tower, the sun was sinking towards the horizon. Dakota's buttocks felt numb and sore from squatting on the platform. 'This just sounds like more bullshit, Trader,' she told the alien bluntly.

'You are free to doubt my words, as you are free to fly off and never encounter me again.'

Trader's yacht pinged her with a request to pass on data. She accepted it, but not without aggressively filtering it first to make sure she wouldn't encounter any nasty surprises before accessing it.

She stared at him after she had finished studying the data contained. 'You're serious? That's what it can do?'

'Impressive, yes?'

'If it's true. Look, it's what you're nottelling me that worries me. Let's say, for the sake of argument, we get hold of this… this thing and fly it into Emissary territory. I've seen one of their godkillers in action, and I don't have any problem believing they'd wipe us out long before we got anywhere near one of their caches, even if we had a fleet of ships.'

'I've already mentioned the necessity of arming ourselves. The Meridians were most skilled in the art of war, and any one of their weapons would be a match for an entire fleet of human craft.'

Dakota stood up again. 'You haven't exactly made it clear what you're getting out of this yourself.'

'Why, an end to the nova war that threatens us all, of course.'

'A war you started, Trader. A war the Shoal is losing, last I heard.'

'The Hegemony desires a return to the peace we maintained for many tens of thousands of years, and I intend to facilitate it.'

'Why me, Trader? If you've got access to all this amazing firepower, why not just take it for yourself?'

'Because your Magi-mediated implants are ideal for their operation,' he replied. 'And you have proven yourself admiringly adaptable and even, dare I say it, strikingly callous in the heat of battle. It provokes a sense of admiration on my part that I would not normally experience in regard to a member of such a thoroughly retrograde and self-destructive species as your own. With an adequately equipped expedition, we could drive to the heart of the Emissary empire and still it for ever.'

Dakota shook her head. 'Here's what we're going to do, Trader. You'll give me access to whatever weapons the Meridians left here. Then I'm going back home to help out there in any way I can. Then, if I can't think of any other solution, I'll come back to you. Maybe. But I can tell you right now, nobody's going to take part in some kind of long-range expedition if they think you're involved.'

'And yet, without my knowledge of how to operate the Mos Hadroch, it's of no use to you. I fear this places you in an impasse.'

'I guess we'll have to see about that,' Dakota replied coldly.

Trader was silent for a moment, his manipulators twisting themselves into knots. 'There is one more matter which we have not yet discussed,' he said finally.

'Go on.'

'You set Hugh Moss on my trail. He dogs me even now. I have recourse to no other superluminal craft, and his urge to destroy me has not faded. He is a hindrance to our aims. And if he were to kill me, the path to peace would be eradicated for ever.'

'Not if you told me everything you know,' she said with a smile. 'If you really wanted peace rather than just to save your own skin, you'd do it immediately.'

'How well you know me, Miss Merrick,' he replied, his manipulators angrily thrashing the water under his belly. 'But it changes nothing. You will need my help, and we will need to journey together a long, long way. But as long as Hugh Moss is alive, he will seek to kill me.'

'So what the hell does that matter to me?'

'I have intelligence that currently puts him on Derinkuyu, a Skelite world close to the Consortium's borders.'

'No.' She turned away and walked back towards the submersible. 'I won't help you, Trader. Not after everything you've done. I'll find some other way.'

'Miss Merrick,' Trader called after her, 'you may believe you have a choice in the matter, but you do not. There is a reason, after all, that your ship chose to deliver you to me here. Or will you lie to me and tell me you came here under your own volition?'

She hesitated. How does he know that?

She stopped and turned. 'I have a choice, Trader. And I choose not to trust you.'

'Listen to the minds on board your ship. Listen to what they have to say to you. They understand the situation better than you do.'

'What?'

'The Magi ships have a primary purpose, Dakota, which is to track down the Maker and destroy it. And if it can't be destroyed, then they must neutralize it or render its caches ineffective, a task for which the Mos Hadroch is explicitly designed. If you move against that central directive, the ship you use will refuse to obey your orders.'

She took a step back towards him. 'I don't believe you. You're lying.'

'Ask them yourself, then. See what they say.'

Dakota licked suddenly dry lips. 'Bullshit.'

But a moment later she knew it was true. She reeled with shock as the Magi voices confirmed what Trader was telling her.

'I don't understand,' she stammered. 'How the hell could you know what they're thinking?'

'You were, I understand, incapacitated when I first tried to contact you. Your ship, however, responded and I offered it terms. I demonstrated that the knowledge I carry is too valuable to risk losing as a result of Moss's murderous actions. Therefore, Miss Merrick, you must protect me.'

She again balled her fists at her side, trying to comprehend what was happening. 'I take my ship where the hell I like, damn you!' she yelled.

'Yes, Dakota, you do,' Trader agreed. 'Except when that interferes with its core directives. By the time you return to your own ship, you will have full control of the Meridian weapons systems, as a gesture of good intentions on my part. I think, in time, you'll come to see that your ship's course of action has been by far the wisest.'

Dakota felt the sense of betrayal as a knotted cord in her belly, twisting and untwisting. 'You can't do this,' she seethed.

'On the contrary, I have done nothing, Miss Merrick, except help you towards your goal. We will meet again, and soon.'

'I won't let you do this to me!' she screamed, but Trader had turned away already. She lurched forward, clawing at the shaped field surrounding the Shoal-member. But the shock of contact repelled her, and she collapsed on the platform, staring after the alien as his bubble rose towards an opening in his yacht.

She continued to scream her rage and beat the surface of the platform with her open palms, weeping and angry. She reached out with her mind and tried to take control of the Magi ship, still waiting on its rocky shore, but all she got for her efforts was a wash of pain that made her double up.

Once the pain had passed, she climbed back inside the submersible and let it take her back to the shore. She stared out at the ocean depths, without really seeing them, then slid down on to the submersible deck, hunched forward, knees up against her face, and hands pressed against her eyes.

Her instinct told her that everything the Shoal-member had said was probably true. But Trader was also a master of manipulation; what had been left unsaid could easily prove to be just as important.

The submersible broke through the waves a couple of hundred metres from the shore. A low rumbling sound caused her to look back towards the towers, in time to see Trader's yacht lift out of the water and accelerate upwards. A moment later she felt the command structure for the Meridian weapons systems suddenly land in her implants. It felt like she'd instantly gained a couple of hundred extra limbs.

The submarine's hatch snapped open once it reached the shore, and she pulled herself out, moving carefully while her brain assimilated what felt like a staggering amount of data. She waded through shallow surf until she once again stood in the shadows of the Magi starship.

Dakota collapsed on to the rough shale and closed her eyes, playing around with the command structure. Almost immediately something rumbled in the dense jungle beyond the cliffs, and Dakota opened her eyes again just in time to see a dozen silver spheres suddenly shoot up into the air above the cliffs, pieces of rock and dirt and shattered foliage sliding off their featureless carapaces. More rose from further inland, ascending to hover hundreds of metres above the ground, scattering more debris.

She turned towards the sea and saw a considerably greater number of identical spheres climbing out of the deep waters.

She sat there for a few minutes while the Magi ship's minds analysed the complex subroutines and hard AI neural structures of the command structure. Then she played around for a while, making the weapons swoop and soar like balls thrown by a sky-high invisible juggler. One tore overhead at several times the speed of sound, the roar of its passing sending small winged creatures, too weird-looking to be called birds, scattering from their perches in great flocks.

If it was up to me I'd just fly away for ever and never come back, Dakota thought to herself. Her sense of resentment had grown rather than diminished and, despite the staggering levels of destructive power hidden beneath the smooth, featureless shells of the Meridian drones, she felt powerless.

The blank exteriors of the drones proved to be a form of shaped-field technology masking a convoluted nightmare of warped space and exotic matter. She caused a dozen of them to accelerate to hypersonic speeds in the blink of an eye, and a series of powerful thunderclaps rolled over the shore in response. She looked up, seeing bright flickers of light from low orbit, as the drones unleashed primal energies in an impressive display of focused power.

Trader must have feared she would turn the weapons on him. Not wanting to disappoint, Dakota directed the drones to lay siege to the tower from which she had recently returned, according to a preprogrammed plan of attack. Wave after wave of plasma energy smashed into the tower, turning it white-hot and shattering it. She watched as a great cloud of superheated steam and debris shot upwards, a grumbling tremor spreading through the bedrock underlying the shore.

But Trader was long gone, as the ship's minds soon informed her. The violent action made her feel better regardless.

She stayed there for a while, watching as the sun dropped towards the towers, then she turned back to the waiting Magi ship.

It was time to go home. But, whether she liked it or not, she was going to have to pay Hugh Moss a visit first.