by Gary Gibson
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 h
er 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.
Chapter Ten
Ty was in a passageway just off of Shaft B when Cesar called in the warning.
The passageway terminated abruptly at a flat expanse of stone that differed substantially from the floor, ceiling and walls leading up to it. It featured none of the carved glyphs that covered almost every square centimetre of every other passageway throughout the abandoned clade-world. There was an unfinished quality to it, as if the Atn that had once made their home here had been interrupted in its construction.
Deep in thought, he crouched next to the unblemished wall of stone, a hand-held sodium lamp casting a sharp-edged pool of light around him. The comms indicator in one corner of his helmet visor had been blinking on and off for the past minute or so, but he had chosen to ignore it, suddenly certain that the last piece in a highly complex puzzle was about to slide into place.
Ever since the Mjollnir had brought them here, all the way from Ocean's Deep, Ty had wandered throughout the desolate shafts and passageways of the clade-world, convinced the Atn had left behind a message for those who knew how to read it – if not for him, then certainly for others of their own kind. There were hints, if you knew how to look, and careful study of them had drawn him to this particular passageway among all the rest.
The comms link continued to flash obstinately, and Ty finally activated it. In one corner of his visor an image popped up, of three interconnected white domes nestling together in a shallow crater. Digging equipment and spare parts for the spider-mechs were stacked out in the open. He noticed with a shock that at least one of the domes had been partly deflated.
'Nathan, you need to get back to the surface,' he was informed. Like the rest of the Mjollnir's crew, Cesar Androvitch had no idea of Ty's true identity. 'Nancy's come over to help us get packed. We're going back over to the frigate.'
'But why? There's still too much to-'
'Nathan,' another voice cut in; this time it was Nancy Schiller, the Mjollnir's chief of security. 'I'll explain everything when you get up here. Don't bring anything with you. Leave it all for the spiders. Just get here as fast as you can.'
She cut the connection, so that Ty hadn't even had a chance to tell her what he had found.
He pulled himself back along the passageway until he reached Shaft A, a borehole nearly thirty metres wide that cut straight through the heart of the asteroid, at which central point it intersected with a second shaft – Shaft B – running at a right angle to it. The asteroid itself was a little over thirty-five kilometres across; thousands of passageways, all identical in width but varying in depth, radiated outwards from each of the shafts.
He tapped at a panel on the arm of his spacesuit and, in response, one of a dozen spider-mechs that had been floating motionless near the centre of the shaft now moved towards him, propelled by tiny puffs of gas. The approaching device consisted primarily of a series of grappling arms that extended from a central hub a metre in diameter.
Once it had reached Ty, the spider rotated, presenting two handholds to him. Ty grabbed on to them, taking care not to look down the length of the shaft towards the asteroid's core as the machine carried him back towards the surface. Despite the minimal gravity, one such glance was sometimes all it took to send his suit's bio-monitors into high alert.
Instead he looked up towards a slowly widening circle of stars no more than a few hundred metres away – the white dwarf around which the clade-world had been orbiting for the last few billion years standing out clearly amongst the rest. A second dome had been deflated by the time Ty got back to the surface camp, which had been set up in a shallow crater a short distance from the mouth of the shaft itself. He let go of the spider-mech and allowed himself to drift slowly downwards, his boots kicking up a tiny puff of ice and dust. Then he made his way over to where Nancy and Cesar were working hard at packing the first dome back into its crate, under the harsh glare of an arc light. The Mjollnir was visible far overhead in the starry blackness, like a black and grey stick thrown high into the air, and which had never come down.
The frigate had taken a beating on the trip out, and it had not taken long for Ty to realize there was a very good reason why almost all the Shoal's superluminal craft comprised hollowed-out moons and adapted asteroids, since contact with the superluminal void put enormous stresses on the hull of any craft equipped with a faster-than-light drive.
The Magi starships were self-healing, but the Mjollnir wasn't built from the same pseudo-organic material. Along with the relatively few other human-built craft that had so far been converted to superluminal travel, the frigate was instead forced to undergo lengthy and difficult repair stops at the end of each and every jump it undertook. Outer hulls became corroded and damaged. Drive-spines required such constant repair and maintenance that onboard fabrication engines had to work around the clock to keep up with demand. While Ty and Nancy had been exploring the clade-world's passageways and caverns, Martinez and his crew had been striving to get the Mjollnir in full working order for the trip home.
One of the two helmeted figures now glanced up, and Ty's suit automatically projected an icon floating beside that figure, identifying it as Nancy.
'Merrick's swarm is on its way here,' she told him without preamble. 'Mjollnir's on full alert, and Martinez wants us out of here within the hour.' Ty was close enough now to see the worried expression through her visor. 'I'm sorry, Nathan. We did our best.'
'How do you know it's on its way?' he asked.
'The reconnaissance probes we sent out,' explained Cesar. 'One of them picked up a lot of drive-signatures no more than thirty light-years from here.'
'Drive-signatures?'
'Sure,' said Nancy
. 'Remember the briefing?'
Ty made an exasperated noise. 'There were endless briefings. Care to remind me?'
'Superluminal ships produce gravitational anomalies every time they enter or depart normal space,' Cesar continued. 'The probe's got tach-net monitors that can pick up short-range fluctuations propagating through superluminal space. So we know something just turned up.'
No more than thirty light-years from here, Ty reflected. How easily the words tripped off Cesar's tongue. They'd travelled a thousand light-years without any help from the Shoal, putting them on a par with the greatest explorers the human race had ever known.
'How could they get here so soon?' he demanded. 'I thought the best estimates gave us at least another month before they arrived here.'
'Nathan… Cesar… for Christ's sake, shut up and get packing, will you?'
Ty turned his attention to Nancy. 'Look, we can't possibly leave here with nothing to show, not after coming all this way. Tell me exactly how much time you think we have left, to the precise minute if it's at all possible.'
He could just make out her terse expression through the visor. 'Nathan-'
'Just humour me, okay?'
Nancy hesitated, and Cesar jumped in. 'I'd say anything from ten to twenty-four hours before they're right on our doorstep, Nathan. But I don't rate our chances of survival very high if we aren't ready to jump out of here before then.'
Ty thought hard for a moment. 'Okay, but once the swarm does reach this system, exactly how long do you think we have before they pinpoint our exact location?'
'Nathan,' Nancy spoke as if she were talking to a slightly dim child, 'if there was ever anything here, it's long gone now. Give it up.'
'Is that Martinez's opinion too?' he countered.
'Of course it is, otherwise we wouldn't be packing up, would we? Unless you've got any last-minute bright ideas.'