by Gary Gibson
'Got some news, Lucas. Commander Nabakov says the landing party should be here a little after noon tomorrow. When will you get back here?'
'I'm finished,' Corso replied. 'I should reach there just after they land. Thanks for the heads-up, Dan.'
Four and a half years before, the Mjollnir had limped away from the expanding nova, reaching a star system less than a hundred light-years away only after a difficult and hazardous six-month journey, their long-range sensors having picked up a potentially habitable world there. Its atmosphere had proved deadly, but it carried life in the form of hardy flora and small brown-pelted animals, even the largest of which had soon proved to represent no threat, as well as the scattered remnants of a long-abandoned Emissary settlement.
They had named the world Pit Stop, and started the work of repairing the Mjollnir 's drive system, but it soon became clear this was going to take longer – much, much longer – than any of them might have suspected.
Only lichenlike growths studded the sandy, gritty soil. The sun was far away and dim, even during summer, and at night the ground frosted over. It was nobody's idea of paradise, therefore, but – as Corso soon realized – it wasn't really so different from Redstone. He'd found himself getting used to the idea that he might have to spend the rest of his life here.
Once the exploration ship California had come within range of the Mjollnir 's transceivers, a few weeks before, Corso had known he should feel elated. But, instead, he had felt only an obscure sadness he couldn't begin to explain.
He got back in the truck, pulled the door shut, and waited for it to cycle out the toxic atmosphere and replace it with something he could breathe, before pulling off his helmet with a gasp of relief. The dashboard came to life, automatically downloading the new data he had imaged from the site of the ruins, and filing it along with the rest. He had recorded thousands of samples of Emissary glyphs and art, all gathered from a hundred different locations, and in the past year or two he had finally begun to make some kind of headway. For somewhere in Pit Stop's myriad ruins, he felt sure, lay the key to understanding the Emissaries.
Corso opened his mouth to tell his truck to get moving, then he paused, turning to glance out of the window once more at what he and the others had come to call the Lantern Constellation.
It was hard not to think of Dakota every time he saw it. Four stars, forming a rough rectangle, with a fifth and brighter star in the middle; and, slightly to the right and much fainter, the star system whose destruction they had barely evaded. It still shone as serenely as ever, and would continue to do so for nearly another century, when the light from the nova would finally reach Pit Stop.
In that moment the memory of Dakota was so clear and sharp that he could almost imagine her stepping out from amongst the ruins, as if everything that had happened all those years ago had been merely some kind of dream. He didn't like to think this way, even though he always did, because of the regret that inevitably followed. They had all found ways to keep themselves busy, as the years on Pit Stop stretched out. The Mjollnir 's entertainment systems had been stocked with centuries' worth of music and books and 'viros, but mostly they had each filled up their time with work and with personal pursuits.
Corso had returned to his academic roots in alien machine-linguistics, while Martinez spent most of his time up in orbit aboard the crippled frigate, directing an army of spider-mechs, sometimes with Lamoureaux's help. Perez occasionally joined Corso on field trips that could last for weeks, while they sought out derelict computer-systems and buried data storage-sites. At other times, Perez joined Martinez back on the frigate, and they would work together on patching the hull. Lamoureaux had meanwhile taken charge of setting up their tiny encampment, as well as refurbishing and repairing the frigate's long-range tach-net transceiver so that they could finally send out a distress call.
And now, at last, rescue had come, but Corso couldn't help wondering just what there was for them to go home to. Certainly, he wouldn't be returning to Redstone, and neither would Martinez or Perez. They had stolen one of the Freehold's major military assets, and people there had long memories.
The truck rolled on through the night, while Corso slept in its rear cabin. He woke late the next morning, less than fifty kilometres from home, and ordered his truck to a halt so that he could have breakfast, mostly consisting of supplies brought down from the frigate in orbit every couple of months by the one remaining lander.
While he was eating, he saw a light like a flare burning its way down through the atmosphere, and realized it was a lander dropping down from the California. 'Senator Corso.' The woman who had just taken a seat next to him looked impossibly healthy as she reached across to shake his hand. Pretty, too, with short dark hair and large round eyes. The skin of her hand felt silky smooth, so much so that he only just resisted the impulse to stroke it, like some love-starved prisoner on his first day out of jail.
'I've not been a senator for a very long time now, Miss…'
'Zukovsky. Meredith Zukovsky. I'm the liaison officer for the California.' The lander was clearly visible outside one of the prefab's windows, a massive, squat boulder of a ship resting on a dozen legs.
Corso could catch a strong whiff of himself after so many long nights sleeping in his truck's tiny cabin, so either Meredith had no sense of smell or she was doing a valiant job of pretending he didn't stink.
Apart from himself and his fellow exiles, there were a dozen members of the California's crew now gathered around a long table in the tiny settlement's largest enclosed space: a mess hall where the four of them would meet for meals whenever they were all down on the surface at the same time. But now the room could barely hold all sixteen of them – four times more people than it had seen in the last half-decade.
The table was covered with dishes of a variety that Corso had almost forgotten existed. The California's commander, a bluff, broad-shouldered man by the name of Casimir Anders, was meanwhile talking with Martinez and Lamoureaux.
'It's nice to meet you, Meredith. You'll have to excuse my manners and my body odour. I don't get to talk to people for long periods sometimes, and the bathroom facilities here still leave something to be desired.'
'But the main thing now is that you're able to go back to the Consortium.'
'That depends…'
She raised her eyebrows, tilting her head back slightly as if to get a better look at him. 'I'm not unaware of your circumstances, Mr Corso,' she said. 'The political situation on Redstone still hasn't stabilized, and you don't need to tell me it wouldn't be safe for you to go home. Not for most of you, either.'
He bit his lip and looked at her thoughtfully, then decided there wasn't any reason not to be honest. 'I'll admit that, in my more candid moments, I've wondered if there'd be any point in going back even if rescue did come. In a sense, this…' he waved a hand around the prefab, 'all this is my home now. And, besides, I've made real progress trying to decipher the records I've dug up. It's… hard to think I could end up just walking away from it all. But I'll have to, I realize that. I'm not some insane hermit. I don't want to stay here for ever on my own.' He could hear the sadness in his own tone.
Zukovsky nodded and smiled broadly, as if pleased with this answer. 'That's exactly why I came over to talk to you. How would you feel about staying here?'
He eyed her askance, as if she was kidding him.
'I should maybe be more candid,' she continued. 'We didn't just come out here to look for you, though that was part of it – in fact we also wanted to know exactly what happened to the Emissaries. It seemed prudent to try and assess whether they might still represent some kind of threat.'
'And do they?'
'What happened up there,' she said, shifting her gaze towards the ceiling as if she could look straight through it at the Lantern Constellation, 'wiped out most of their space-going fleets and crippled their empire, but it didn't put them entirely out of action. They have other surviving caches, so they could regroup and come
back at us – and we need to be ready for that.'
'So what does that have to do with me being here?'
'We've taken a look at the research you've done here, and it's obvious you already have a better handle on the Emissaries than most of the specialists back home. That counts for a lot when it comes to making the kind of assessment I'm talking about.'
'You want me to keep working here?' he said. 'Seriously?'
'You wouldn't be alone,' she replied quickly. 'We came here intending to leave a permanent outpost behind. There'll be other ships visiting after the California's returned, as we want to use this place as a stepping-off point for deeper exploration into the Perseus Arm. We've already talked to Ted Lamoureaux, who's willing to stay and help us set up the outpost, but I got the feeling he wanted to hear what you had to say first. We'll still be here for at least another six months, and in that time we'll build up what you've already established here, and then some of us are staying behind to get things up and running.' She smiled. 'I know it's a lot to ask of you, but nothing you say meanwhile would be binding. And if you ever changed your mind before we headed back, there'd still be a berth waiting for you.'
Corso cleared his throat and looked her in the eye, almost super-naturally aware of the proximity of her hand to his. There were glinting depths in her pupils, in which he saw himself reflected.
'What about you, Meredith?' he asked. 'Will you yourself be staying?'
She looked back at him with an amused expression. 'As a matter of fact, I will be, yes.'
Do it, he could imagine Dakota urging him. What else do you have to go back for? Your life is here now.
'I'll stay,' he decided.
Epilogue
Dakota drew in a sharp breath, filling her nostrils with the sickly-sweet scent of flowers in early spring, before opening her eyes and squinting into bright sunlight.
Fields of blossoms stretched out all around her, while the bright cerulean blue of the sky curved overhead like a ceiling. The sun was high, almost at its zenith. Tall, tree-like growths, at odds with the terrestrial flowers, formed a small copse nearby like great black squid frozen in the act of leaping out of the soil, their leaves wide and oval and glossy.
She stood up, uncertainly at first, and looked around. The breath caught in her throat as she sighted the cloud-breaching towers of a Magi memory-complex on the horizon, the soaring towers and great fluted domes of a deserted city surrounding its base like steel and concrete waves breaking on the shores of an island mountain.
She trailed her fingertips across the tops of the flowers around her, and tried to piece together her final memories. She had been in the vicinity of the red giant, with the swarm briefly at bay… the star had turned nova, and then…
And then she had found herself back here, in this place.
She gazed over towards those distant spires for a long time, remembering the conversation she'd once had in just such a building, with a Magi entity calling itself the Head Librarian. That had been during the heat of the battle for Ocean's Deep. One moment she'd been on board a ship with missiles closing in on it, the next she'd been here, in this otherworldly realm generated from the virtual memories of the Magi ships, and weeks of subjective time had passed.
She sat on the ground, her mind numb, and watched as the sky slowly darkened until the Milky Way came into view, the great cloud of the Sagittarius cluster spreading before her in all its glory.
And then, finally, she began to walk. When she finally reached the city, more than a week later, she found that the building under the onion dome hadn't changed since her last visit. A chair and a chaise-longue stood next to an orrery composed of oiled brass and copper. This time, however, an old man she had never seen before was sitting in the chair, watching her with amused eyes that looked out from amidst a mass of crinkles.
'Dakota,' he said, rising to greet her as she crossed the carpeted floor. She stared at his long white hair, neatly held out of the way with a small silver clasp. His face was a patchwork of lines, but the set of his mouth and the way he looked at her suggested he knew her from somewhere.
His voice was warm and firm. 'It's been…' He paused to shake his head and sigh in a good-humoured way. 'It's been a long time since I last saw you.'
'I… I don't recognize you. I'm sorry.'
'My name is Lamoureaux. You don't remember me, but I remember you.'
She couldn't think of anything to say, so she perched carefully on the edge of the chaise-longue. 'I don't understand how I could be here,' she said. 'I only remember I was at the red giant with the swarm, and then-'
'And then the star turned nova,' he finished for her.
Dakota nodded faintly. 'How do I know you?'
'We met after your first resurrection a very, very long time ago.'
'Resurr… how long ago?'
'Over three thousand years, Dakota.'
She stared back at him, too stunned to think of anything to say, or how to react at first. Lamoureaux, however, waited with apparently endless patience.
'I still don't… How can I even be sitting here?'
'That,' he said, 'will take time to explain. But I can tell you this much: the ship that took you to the swarm gathered and preserved your thoughts and memories, and transmitted them outwards in the last few seconds before the shockwave from the nova reached you. Another Magi ship much closer to home used these thoughts and memories to recreate you. But your mind was preserved in other Magi ships also, and they kept you in stasis for a long, long time. We didn't manage to retrieve a proper copy of you until close to the end of the Thousand Year War.'
She stared at him slack-jawed, then dropped her head towards her knees with a groan. 'I'm sorry, but it's so hard to take all this in.'
He smiled sympathetically. 'There's a lot more to explain, and we're going to give it to you gradually. But here's what you mainly need to know: the Mos Hadroch was discovered, and used to stop the war between the Shoal and the Emissaries. That was followed by the Great Diaspora, as the human race scattered across the galaxy.'
'So you brought me back,' she said, raising her head slowly up again. 'Why?'
'Because we need you. The Accord of Worlds is a successor of sorts to the Consortium, but it's facing its greatest threat since the Emissaries. A Shoal fleet is currently heading for the Greater Magellanic Cloud, intent on building an empire.'
'The Accord of what?' Dakota asked weakly.
'I played a small part in its creation, towards the end of my sixth iteration.' He pointed up: 'If you will.'
Dakota glanced up to see an image of the Greater Magellanic Cloud materialize overhead, filling the space directly beneath the onion dome.
'A few decades ago,' Lamoureaux continued, 'a small fleet, led by Shoal-members intent on recreating the Hegemony, left our galaxy on a secret mission for the Cloud. There's now reason to believe there's more than one Mos Hadroch. If they do find more, they'll have the means to cripple the Accord. So we have to stop them.'
'And what does this have to do with me?'
Lamoureaux smiled. 'If there was ever a time we needed you, Dakota, it's now.'
She felt like weeping. 'I can't tell you how out of my depth I feel, just being told all this. I mean, Jesus and Buddha…' She laughed. 'I don't know what else to say.'
'The Accord is something special. It's much more than the Hegemony ever hoped to be. And its name is no accident – would you like me to show you why?'
Dakota nodded warily.
A moment later she found herself bathed in the sound of a hundred trillion voices, all talking at once. But, rather than cacophony, it was more like a single, infinitely complex piece of music constantly mutating and shifting. She saw through a million eyes, heard a million voices. She felt the touch of an untold number of lovers, smelled the air of a thousand worlds. She felt alien limbs sprouting from her body; tasted the armoured chitin of her brood with her long tongue; swam through sentient corals, sniffing out delicious plankton with a nose rese
mbling a flower.
'There's a lot more I have to explain,' he said, reaching out his hand as he stood up. His movements were fluid, not at all those of an old man. And a lot for you to see. But, if we're going to get started, I don't see any reason why we should delay.'
She licked her lips and glanced around the onion dome, then reached out tentatively and took his hand.
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