by Gary Gibson
'Wait, you're with that thing that tried to kill us?' Corso slumped down onto the deck, then realized he was having a life-and-death conversation with a sex toy. 'And you destroyed the derelict.' He could say the words, yet couldn't bring himself to believe them. 'Then what the hell are we doing here?'
'I know this is complicated-'
'You're not kidding.'
'Just listen to me. I only just found out how Immortal Light discovered another Magi ship in this system, thousands of years ago.'
'Christ and Buddha, Dakota, how many of the things are there?'
'Just this new one that I'm definitely sure of. But I'm beginning to suspect there's more, Lucas. Maybe a lot more than even the Shoal know about.'
'Wait, you told me about the… the Librarians, some kind of controlling intelligence inside the derelict we found. Why didn't they tell you this before?'
The effigy's face crumpled, and it sat down heavily on the edge of Dakota's cot. 'I don't know. I… I need to work that one out. But we've got too many other things to worry about right now, and that's why I came looking for you. I got rescued – well, kidnapped might be a better term – by a rival Bandati Hive called Darkening Skies. They're working with the Shoal to stop Immortal Light from handing this last derelict over to a species called-'
'The Emissaries. Yeah, I know about them.'
The effigy glanced over at him with a startled expression.
'I just met an Emissary,' Corso continued, 'and I wouldn't wish the experience on my worst enemy. But I'm not sure how much better that makes the Shoal. What exactly is your friend Trader getting out of this?'
'It's partly an exercise in damage limitation. The Emissaries are pushing the borders of their empire closer and closer to our part of the galaxy, and they want to lure the Bandati over to their side. Darkening Skies and Immortal Light both want to trade on what they know to acquire more power, and the Shoal and Emissaries are happy to play each Hive off against the other. And then there's the more obvious incentive of not wanting the knowledge of the drive's nova capability to fall into enemy hands.'
'We ended up where we did because Trader wanted to kill us so badly he destroyed an entire system, but now you tell me you're working with him?' Corso reached up with both hands and grabbed at his hair, wanting to rip it out by its roots. 'Do you have any idea how this sounds?'
'I don't have any choice,' she answered, sounding defeated. 'He has me over a barrel. He wants me to get to that derelict before the Emissaries do.'
'Fine, then you could fly it out of here, and take it somewhere far away from either Trader or the Emissaries. Problem sorted.'
'No, I can't,' came the weary reply. 'He says he has the means to destroy my home world if I don't play things his way. And, before you ask, yes, I believe him. Like you said, he's capable of much worse.'
'Fine. All right.' Corso rubbed at his face, appalled by what he'd just learned. 'Listen, maybe you can tell me where I am?'
'You're on board the Piri, which is inside a Bandati warship. And that's inside something called a Godkiller-class dreadnought, an Emissary warship. It's not as big as a coreship, but it's big enough. Things are going to get nasty, Lucas. Can you stay inside the Piri for now?'
Corso shook his head. 'The Bandati made it clear they'd blow it apart, with me on board, if I didn't come back out quickly enough.'
'Okay' The effigy's head bent down as if thinking, then rose again. 'The main reason I came here is to make sure you understand how important it is that the protocols don't fall into the hands of the Emissaries. That's imperative.'
'I could have given them the full set of protocols, but I destroyed most of them, mainly to keep myself useful enough so they wouldn't just kill me once they got what they wanted.'
'Most of them? But not all of them?'
He shook his head. 'I kept enough to convince the Bandati that I could rebuild a working set for them soon enough.'
'Could you?'
'If I needed to, yes. What I don't have backed up is in here.' He tapped a finger against his head.
'And are you going to do it?'
'Yes, if I have to.'
'For God's sake why, Lucas? Don't you know what's at stake here?'
He made an exasperated sound. 'If I don't, I'm signing my own death warrant. Surely you realize that.'
The effigy's face suddenly slumped, the head tipping forward for a few seconds while the jaw hung moronically. It snapped back up after a few seconds of eerie silence.
'Shit. Sorry, but I lost contact for a second. We have to get to the Magi ship in this system before the Emissaries do. I'll be coming for you, Lucas, so be ready. If you need to speak to me again, you're probably going to have to find a way of getting back to the Piri.'
Corso licked his lips, suddenly nervous. 'There's other things to consider. What happens if you get to the derelict first and take it away? How far do you think anyone is going to want to trust you?'
'Lucas-'
'No, listen, damn it. We need to preserve the protocols, in some form, in case there are more Magi ships out there. This can't all just be down to you. With things like the Shoal and the Emissaries out here, humanity's going to need all the advantages it can get. I'll still rebuild the protocols, if I can.'
'No, Lucas, you don't understand-'
'No, Dakota, I think I do. Hey-!'
The effigy took a step towards him, but the mechanisms connecting it to its wall-slot kept it in check. After a moment, its mouth grew slack, and he realized the connection had been even more thoroughly broken. The effigy tilted forward, prevented from collapsing to the deck by its umbilicals.
Corso stared at the effigy, then took a step towards it. It didn't move. He picked up an arm and let it drop; no reaction.
As he found his way back through the ship, he wondered – not for the first time – if Dakota had it in her to kill him. They'd come a long way together: at first reluctant allies, then lovers – and finally, he realized with resignation, they had become enemies divided by what they each sought.
Remember you're the one who wound up pointing a gun at her. He shook away the memory of those last frantic hours before they'd escaped from Nova Arctis. All he could do was wonder if he'd ever see Dakota again – and what she might do to him if he did. Ocean's Deep Twenty Hugh Moss's yacht materialized in the Ocean's Deep system in a sparkle of exotic energies, far enough away from the forces gathering within the inner system that he was unlikely to rate a priority alert.
The yacht's interior was humid and misty, rivulets of moisture constantly cascading down the bulkheads. Every now and then, Hugh would feel a certain ache born of a previous life when he had breathed water and, to tell the truth, the means were there to re-adapt his body to do so once again; but that felt too much like an attempt to recreate something long dead and buried, and Hugh liked to pride himself on his forward thinking.
As the yacht began its long deceleration towards the inner system, Hugh took the time to study a map of Ocean's Deep that was overlaid with information regarding the observed or estimated composition of the opposing forces now gathering there. Much of what he knew had been gleaned from occasional unsecured tach-net bursts, and from these he managed to glean a tantalizing if incomplete picture.
In astronomical terms, Ocean's Deep had suffered considerable violence throughout its relatively recent history. A wandering dwarf black hole had drifted into the system some thirty thousand years before, and had already consumed one of the smaller rocky worlds. All that remained of it was a dense asteroid belt.
After that, the same black hole had gone spinning off in a new direction, finally encountering a gas giant known to the Bandati as Leviathan's Fall. Some of that world's moons had subsequently also been reduced to rubble, while the black hole itself had finally settled into a relatively stable orbit around the gas giant.
And there, in that most volatile of regions, the Queen of Immortal Light had found her prize and then built her secret colony and rese
arch facility.
It took no more than a few minutes for the computer systems on board Moss's yacht to leach the colony's full story from its own data stacks; for the encryptions were literally millennia out of date. The original materials and personnel for the colony had been shipped out on slower-than-light Atn barges, taking centuries to reach their destination. The colony – at that time jointly administered by the Queens of both Hives – had one single purpose: to study and, if that day ever came, defend the Magi derelict they had found.
When it had been discovered, the Ocean's Deep derelict was locked into an inherently unstable L2 orbit relative to the black hole and the gas giant, terrifyingly close to the black hole's devouring black heart. The derelict clearly still functioned on some level because, without the ability to adjust its orbit, it would long ago have drifted in towards the black hole and been destroyed.
The Bandati had moved it to a more stable L4 orbit nearby. They had then quite literally built their orbital colony around the derelict.
A tower of gas and dust rose from the upper atmosphere of Leviathan's Fall, before being sucked into the black hole's bottomless maw. As it was drawn inwards, the gas formed a halo of super-heated, stripped-down particles orbiting the black hole at a sizeable fraction of the speed of light. This conveniently generated enough energy to mask many of the colony's activities.
Moss's systems now showed that a coreship was decelerating towards Leviathan's Fall, its strategic systems guiding it towards an optimum location from which to engage Emissary forces already present there. The Godkiller was spewing forth a fleet from its own vast body, amongst which, Moss also noted, were several heavily armed Immortal Light cruisers ferried from Night's End.
He brought his attention back to the orbital colony, much of it airless and barely maintained, or rendered uninhabitable by the passage of time and gradual systems failures. Over dozens of generations, an original population numbering in six figures had dropped down to a bare few thousand currently. That surviving population was only very rarely replenished by new colonists from Night's End, and what passed for research staff had made no apparent attempt at studying the Magi derelict for the better part of a millennium.
However, all that effort expended in order to secure the derelict had little to do with the vessel's actual value. It had much more to do with one Queen having possession of something the other Queen didn't. The derelict was like a shiny toy, to be taken out of its box every now and then and paraded under the gaze of the Queen of Immortal Light's jealous and competitive sister.
And all far, far away from the Shoal's watchful eyes.
Moss fingered his brow and smiled to himself. It was proof, if proof were needed, that the Bandati were already in serious decline as a species. Another ten or twenty thousand years at the most and they would retreat to a few scattered worlds to engage in a slow collective senescence – or again fracture into entirely new forms.
But now the Queen of Darkening Skies Prior to Dusk had found a way to spite her sister and leverage greater influence for her Hive with the Shoal Hegemony – despite her clear complicity in keeping the derelict secret.
It was a clever plan, but not clever enough. The Queen of Darkening Skies, Hugh knew, had wildly underestimated the Shoal's capacity for treachery and deceit. After leaving Dakota in the viewing chamber, Trader in Faecal Matter of Animals had briefly returned to his own private yacht in order to prepare for a meeting requested by Desire. When he got there, however, his computer systems supplied him with potentially disturbing information.
Shoal vessels were designed to automatically form secure tach-net networks with any others of their kind once they entered a given system. Individuals could log into that network as well as ships, and as was the case with any kind of network, each individual node had a specific form of identifier associated with it that distinguished it from the rest.
Certain types of identifier were associated with particular types of Shoal vessel, and now Trader's own systems indicated that a second private FTL yacht, of similar design to his own, had unexpectedly arrived in the outer system.
There were very few such yachts in existence throughout the Hegemony, and each of them represented a rare and special privilege for those few that could be entrusted with them, given how deadly they could prove in the wrong hands. Throughout the Shoal's long history, on the rare occasions such ships had gone missing it had been a matter of serious and urgent concern. And, despite the very best efforts of those assigned to tracking such ships down, a very few still remained untraceable to this day.
So it was a matter of some equal concern to discover one of those selfsame missing yachts had now appeared, unannounced, in the Ocean's Deep system. This particular craft was known to have vanished from a Shoal outpost centuries before – and yet, here it was.
Long millennia of weary cynicism left Trader in no doubt that whoever – or whatever – was piloting the yacht, they would have a key role in coming events.
He guided his yacht back through the cold liquid depths at the coreship's centre, and soon picked up Desire for Violent Rendering's private trace-signal; the old bastard was waiting by a disused coolant system that projected from the coreship's interior wall, a vast and confusing tangle of half-rusted equipment, enormous valves and pipes that rose into the darkness all around. He exited his yacht once more while a cloud of microscopic sensors scattered over an area of several kilometres constantly kept pace with Trader, reassuring him that there were, as ever, no witnesses to this latest clandestine encounter with his direct superior.
And then there's the matter of the two Hives, Trader considered as he swam towards his rendezvous. The constant rivalry between them had made it easy to play one off against the other, but he'd been forced to share dangerous knowledge with them, which meant that some severe but very necessary exercises in damage control would be called for once the current crisis was past. He found Desire waiting for him in the darkness of an enormous disused pumping mechanism, its curving metal walls dense with ancient corrosion rising all around.
'Ah, Trader, so glad you could make it.'
'This isn't the time for niceties, General. You know how much I'm obliged to take care of. Why did you call me here?'
'Still busy saving the Hegemony, I see. Excellent, excellent.' Desire's upper fins flexed with a hint of sarcasm. 'You have Dakota Merrick well under control?'
'I believe so, yes, but she's not to be underestimated. We certainly mustn't make the mistake of regarding her as merely human anymore. Remote scans have made it clear she's become a Magi navigator.'
'I do hope you didn't tell her that?'
'Get to the point, Desire. Why am I here?'
'It appears there have been some developments with the Deep Dreamers.'
'Such as?'
'They appear to have predicted their own deaths.'
Trader stared at the other Shoal-member, then spurred himself forward hard and fast enough for the General to retreat instinctively. 'I've grown tired of your feeble-'
'I'm quite serious,' Desire said quickly.
Trader halted, remembering almost too late that Desire could be a vicious and deadly fighter when necessary.
'Explain.'
'As you're aware, the Dreamers' range of near-future predictions follows a bell-shaped curve when fully mapped out. Their least likely predictions are normally pushed far into the lower ends of the curve, while the statistically most probable range of near-future outcomes constitute a central range that-'
Trader's fins flicked in acknowledgement. 'I know all this. Get to the point.'
'The previously unlikely possibility that something could happen to the Dreamers – and therefore, presumably, to our own home-world – has started drifting further and further into that central range of predictions than ever before.'
'That isn't possible,' Trader protested.
'No, Trader, it's always been possible theoretically,' Desire countered. 'You should listen to the Dreamers' priest
s more carefully. Then you'd realize that one of their favourite thought experiments is to question whether the Dreamers could see beyond a point at which they themselves had ceased to exist. It seems, in short, that there is a very real possibility that what we do here and now might bring about our own destruction.'
'May I remind you, General, that I am acting both on your orders and your authority, however secretly I am briefed.'
'I appreciate that, Trader. However, listen carefully to what I'm saying. There have been significant changes since we captured that Bandati spy, and the Dreamers' predictions have been undergoing severe fluctuations by the hour. Whatever happens here within the next short while is going to change the face of our galaxy for ever – and there are too many unknown variables entering the equation. The Emissaries may be too strong, may be-'
'The Emissaries?' Trader signalled derision. 'Listen to yourself, you old fool. You play spy games with your little clique of ageing fish while I, General, I risk life and skin to keep our secrets secret. What are you saying now, that we should recall the nova mines?'
'Perhaps, yes. Perhaps we should.'
'General, General.' Trader swam yet closer. A formidable fighter Desire might be, yes; but the General was old, and had seen little in the way of direct action for several centuries. 'Neither of us is important in the grand scale of things, because all that matters is the survival of the Hegemony, and of the Shoal. If you try to prevent those mines from activating at the appropriate moment, I will hunt you down, and the rest of your miserable cadre, and kill you all. And if by chance I fail in that, I will make sure your conspiracy is exposed in full detail to the Hegemony'
Backing away a little, he took on a more conciliatory tone. 'You have a case of last-minute nerves, General, that's all. It's a momentous occasion. The Emissaries are our greatest challenge and, if you allow me to do my work, they will be beaten back. They're a race of congenital idiots – psychotic, murderous and swayed by some irrational religious impulse possibly only they themselves understand. They simply had the luck to stumble across a Maker cache – haven't you read the reports? It's the perfect demonstration of what enormous power can mean when it's placed in the hands of primitives who barely understand what they have. The chance they would have held back from revealing some secret advantage this long is ridiculous, given their brute-force tactics up to now.'