by Gary Gibson
Unfortunately, it was not proving so easy to rid himself of Dakota Merrick. Rather than being safely dead and unable to interfere with his plans, she had once again survived – and destroyed the Nova Arctis derelict before he could take it instead.
But no matter: he was nothing if not adaptable. A Magi ship still remained a few light-years distant, in a system whose star the Bandati had named Ocean’s Deep. He would have to step up his original plans and travel there forthwith. And, given what he now knew – that Immortal Light had, against all sanity, engaged the aid of the Emissaries – things were clearly about to get interesting.
With so very much at stake it was impossible not to reflect back on the events that had brought him to this place; impossible, indeed, not to recall the act of rape Trader had performed on him – no, on what he had been, so many long years before.
They were events that had long since slipped into the past, but they stood as fresh and clear in Moss’s mind as if they had occurred only yesterday.
A few centuries before, and several thousand light-years distant, a tiny Shoal yacht equipped with its own FTL drive had materialized on the edge of a system dominated by a large red star. This system was close to the heart of the primary zone of conflict between the Emissaries and the Shoal; close to the point where the Orion arm ended and a relative wasteland of dust and stellar debris began.
The yacht’s sole inhabitant was a Shoal-member known to his own kind as Swimmer in Turbulent Currents. He had arrived at the prearranged coordinates several days in advance, eager to make sure there were no Emissary spy drones lurking in ambush.
But all that Swimmer in Turbulent Currents found there was death.
Before the destruction of the Long War, the system had been briefly colonized by an Emissary client-species known as the So’Agrad, now scattered through a dozen other systems. Shoal and Emissary forces had once engaged with each other on several occasions in this very system, and the result had always been the same; either the Emissaries were pushed back towards a band of dust-wisped nebulae several light-years distant, or the Shoal were forced into retreat. Inevitably one or the other would creep back once more, only to be challenged yet again.
Swimmer studied his instruments, waiting while his ship extracted information from data stacks buried kilometres deep beneath the surface of worlds whose atmospheres had been ripped away during those long-ago battles. In the meantime, he guided his yacht closer to the system’s star – he learned that the So’Agrad had named it Te’So – and soon found himself in orbit above what had been their primary colony.
The planet’s airless surface was pockmarked with massive impact craters, with only a few tumbled ruins left to testify to what had gone before. Swimmer toured the remains of one of the largest metropolises, guiding remote probes into darkened crevices and underground shelters, finding only silence and a few flash-frozen corpses that were miraculously intact despite the devastation.
It was a grim demonstration of the deprivations of war and yet, in the scale of things, the near-total annihilation of an entire civilization had amounted to not much more than a minor skirmish in the Long War.
Swimmer couldn’t have found a better testament to why the Long War had to end, and why some kind of peace had to be made with the Emissaries.
He now floated in the pressurized, water-filled centre of his ship, his thoughts full of death and decay as the yacht lifted off once more from a shattered plain. A while later it was accelerating, at a sizeable fraction of the speed of light, towards a new destination – and to a meeting with Trader in Faecal Matter of Animals.
A day or two after he had lifted off from the surface of the dead world, his yacht’s systems picked up something that looked like a jagged half-moon, locked into a long elliptical orbit around Te’So; the blasted, ten-thousand-years-gone remains of a coreship, victim of one of those ancient battles. Random lights glinted within its depths as ancient autonomous defensive systems, still functioning after all this time and against all the odds, targeted his ship on its approach.
Swimmer’s yacht, like Trader’s own, was a heavily modified personal craft rigged with advanced weapons systems, courtesy of their superiors within the Shoal Hegemony. That their ships were also equipped with superluminal drives stood as further testament to their joint standing within the Shoal hierarchy.
Swimmer’s yacht broadcast an identification code that hadn’t been used in a thousand years, and the coreship’s defensive systems stepped down automatically.
He meanwhile leached ancient video recordings from the coreship’s surviving stacks, and hence witnessed its destruction. An asteroid equipped with nuclear-pulse engines had slammed into the coreship, reducing half its mass to molten rubble and destroying every living thing inside it.
Swimmer directed his yacht towards the starship’s exposed core, watching as layer after layer fell away on either side. First he passed what was left of the outer crust, raised high on enormous pillars, and then the layer beneath, where vast populations had lived and finally died together. And then, lastly, he arrived in the empty hollow at the centre, where the vessel’s Shoal crew had lived within a lightless artificial ocean.
Trader was waiting there, in the ruins of the command centre, a pyramidal shaped building located on the curving inner surface of the central core. It was like a vast stele marking the grave of a giant – cold, empty and airless. Swimmer set his yacht’s defensive systems to high alert and scanned Trader’s own near-identical craft parked a short distance away before finally disembarking.
He found Trader waiting for him, his shaped-field bubble glowing faintly as it floated next to a window that had once looked out into ocean depths. He watched carefully as Swimmer approached.
‘You took your own good time,’ said Trader, guiding his field-bubble closer to Swimmer’s own. ‘I was waiting for—’
‘I’d prefer not to merge bubbles, Trader,’ Swimmer interrupted. ‘I’d also prefer to ask why all the skulduggery. And why’ – his tentacular manipulators wriggled for a moment as he searched for the right words – ‘why have you forced me to come here to this, this mausoleum?’
‘Why here? To remind us both of what we’re fighting for,’ Trader replied. ‘And I should point out I did not force you to come here.’
‘I have been barred from my rightful place within the Hegemony’s electoral council!’ Swimmer in Turbulent Currents exploded. ‘Accusations have been made. I barely held on to my personal yacht when they rescinded my privileges. Then I made inquiries as to who might have caused this, and those inquiries led me to you. You made the accusations, the lies, the—’
‘You met with the Emissaries,’ Trader stated.
It seemed to Swimmer in Turbulent Currents that the words somehow hung in the air between them, full of anger and accusation.
‘I met with one of their agents, yes,’ Swimmer stated, ‘on behalf of certain of our superiors who, you should know, are in agreement that peaceful negotiations are absolutely necessary. This ridiculous tit-for-tat aggression is beneath our kind. It’s the sort of primitive territorial tribalism our client species might engage in, but we—’
‘Did you meet an Emissary directly, Swimmer?’ Trader asked. ‘I mean face-to-face with an actual Emissary.’
‘Unfortunately, no,’ Swimmer replied. ‘As you know, they refuse to deal directly with the members of any other species.’
‘Precisely They use other races within their domain to communicate on their behalf. Creatures like the So’Agrad once were – artificial species whose sole purpose is to act as mouthpieces for them. They tricked you.’
‘They didn’t trick me, Trader. Mouthpieces or not, they still spoke for their masters. I was already aware of the nature of the So’Agrad before I met with them. And you must know that I acted on a far higher authority than that of the Deep Dreamers. You yourself rely on their half-baked predictions too much, Trader.’
‘Higher authority?’ Trader’s tentacles wriggled in am
usement. ‘Your superiors are under arrest, Swimmer. It was you that instigated the offer of negotiations, not them.’
Trader drifted a little closer. ‘Tell me something,’ he asked, ‘have you ever even been to see the Deep Dreamers? It’s a remarkable experience, the chance to see all the possible futures open to our kind. Do you know what the galaxy would have become if we hadn’t killed the last of the Magi? We’d have been just another client race, nothing more, begging for scraps at their table.’
‘And that would have been so bad?’
Trader’s fins stiffened in anger. ‘Reduced to servility in the shadow of another species? Listen to yourself! That was never to be our future.’
‘We were seduced by the Deep Dreamers, Trader.’ Swimmer had carefully studied the interior layout of the coreship’s command centre before departing his own ship. ‘They gave us our first taste of empire, but in reality we serve them, not the other way round. Your slavish devotion to their predictions is pathetic.’
‘I have no delusions about the Dreamers’ limitations, nor do I have the time for wishful thinking and fantasies. Don’t you even want to know why I brought you here?’
Swimmer in Turbulent Currents made a show of looking around him. ‘Why, to kill me, of course – far out of view of the Hegemony and our masters. Try anything, however, and my ship will destroy this building with both of us inside it.’
‘I wanted you here not because I think you’re a fool I can talk round, but because you can make others listen to you,’ Trader continued, more quietly this time. ‘That makes you dangerous. Choose to believe what you wish, Swimmer, but the Emissaries have no interest in compromise, regardless of what their servants might have told you.’
‘And yet the Emissaries are winning, Trader. They just keep coming, and we keep getting pushed back.’
‘Precisely! So we must use our nova weapons to—’
‘To what?’ Swimmer’s amusement was mixed with disgust. ‘To destroy not just the Emissaries with the one weapon we said we’d never use, but the entire galaxy as well?’
‘Listen to me.’ Trader’s tone became more urgent. ‘I’m offering you a chance—’
‘I already know what you want: a first strike against the Emissaries, to disable them. But how could that do anything but accelerate their own research into constructing their own nova weapons? How long before they realize they’d possessed the capacity to construct them all along?’
‘We’ll be overrun if we don’t act immediately.’
‘No, Trader, we won’t. We can still survive, even if we lose our Hegemony. Anything else would bring only untold trillions of deaths.’
‘We will engineer the war so that the Hegemony will survive.’
‘To rule what?’ Swimmer scornfully demanded. ‘The ashes of dead stars? I reject your offer, because to do otherwise would be to make myself as much a criminal as you are. I would rather die.’
Swimmer’s yacht informed him that other field-bubbles were now approaching the command centre. Long-dead power systems throughout the building were beginning to power up, demonstrating evidence of recent repair.
‘Listen to me, Swimmer in Turbulent Currents, and listen as you never have before. You betrayed us, and you were found out. It’s true that I was sent here to kill you, but I now have other uses for you.’
Go feed the Dreamers, Swimmer thought, and ordered his yacht to destroy the command centre.
Nothing happened.
Swimmer tried to bolt for an exit, but found to his horror he couldn’t move; his field-bubble refused to shift more than a metre or two in any direction, while Trader remained where he had been, studying him thoughtfully.
Swimmer panicked, slamming into the wall of his field-bubble as if he could push through it and into the vacuum beyond.
It took him a moment before he realized what Trader had done.
He noticed for the first time that a ring of shaped-field generators had been set into the ceiling directly above them both; more of them had been set into the floor. And the gentle shimmer of his own field-bubble had hidden from him a second, larger field enclosing them both.
‘Trader, it doesn’t have to be this way. The Emissaries say they are willing to share a common border, in exchange for a sharing of resources and access to our client species. I can—’
‘You can atone for your sins,’ said Trader grimly.
Further field-bubbles emerged from several entrances behind Trader, each one carrying a Shoal-member inside it. Some of these bubbles had the distinctive colouring that marked their occupants as priest-geneticists, the secretive fanatics who tended to the Deep Dreamers, for generation after generation.
Trader addressed him again. ‘You should be aware that our superiors met to pass judgement on you. On my advice, their sentence is one of Involuntary Re-Speciation.’
Swimmer in Turbulent Currents trembled with rage. ‘This is an outrage! You there!’ He barked at one of the priests. ‘I am a representative of the Hegemony Council! You will—’
‘The Hegemony is a long way off,’ the priest replied, then directed his next words at Trader. ‘Sir, we’ve managed to salvage some surgical units from the coreship, and we’ve supplemented them with our own, more up-to-date equipment. I should say, however, that it’s been a long time since an operation of this magnitude has been carried out—’
‘You have all the equipment and materials you’ll need for the Re-Speciation,’ Trader replied. ‘Besides, I’ll be most interested to see what you come up with.’
‘I must admit,’ the priest replied, now totally regardless of Swimmer’s presence, ‘I’m fascinated by the challenge.’
Swimmer listened aghast to this exchange, his fins stiff with terror. Re-Speciation was something out of the Shoal’s dim and distant past, a relic of much less civilized times. He slammed his personal field-bubble desperately against the much larger one surrounding both him and Trader, even though he knew he was trapped.
‘Re-Speciation is . . . is a damnable barbarism, an insult to all sanity and reason,’ he cried. ‘For pity’s sake, Trader, the practice has been outlawed for tens of millennia! I refuse to believe you would—’
‘Oh, but I would, Swimmer in Turbulent Currents, I would,’ Trader replied. ‘Re-Speciation doesn’t seem to have done the Bandati too much harm in the long run, although that was admittedly an entire species rather than a single individual. And as for legalities . . . well, I think we both gave up much concern over that a long time ago, didn’t we? Part of the job, and all that.’
‘Trader.’ Swimmer tried adopting a more reasonable tone. ‘There’s no possible way for you to profit from something like this. There’s no . . . no reason for it. In the name of the great Mother, kill me if you must. But to threaten something so obscene is beneath you.’
‘Yet necessary,’ Trader answered.
The priest who had addressed Trader earlier now moved closer, clutching a weapon resembling a spear-gun in his manipulators.
‘I need to set an example for anyone who might entertain similarly idiotic ideas in future,’ Trader explained. ‘I want them to be filled with terror when they hear your name spoken. I want them to know exactly what would become of them.’
The larger fields surrounding both Trader and Swimmer snapped off suddenly. The priest moved forward quickly, intersecting his own field-bubble with Swimmer’s and shooting him with a dart from his weapon before Swimmer could react.
A freezing numbness began to envelop Swimmer’s thoughts.
‘After all, it’s true there are worse things than death,’ Trader continued, twisting his manipulators together with sick glee. Swimmer barely heard his following words before consciousness finally abandoned him: ‘Being human, for instance.’
Hugh Moss stepped out from the tug and onto an airless plain on the surface of Blackflower. This plain was ringed by jagged mountains that delineated the outline of an ancient impact crater.
He was protected from the harsh vacuum of
space by a shaped field-bubble that had a minute but perceptible effect on the local gravitational field. Tiny energy spikes at different points in the sphere could impel it in a particular direction; so he now caused it to float towards the low foothills fringing the nearest peak, quickly picking up speed.
They operated on Swimmer in Turbulent Currents for several weeks continuously. First, they placed him in an artificially induced coma, then suspended his piscine form within a nutrient-rich soup of highly engineered bacteria that ate away first at his outer epithelial layers before attacking specific types of differentiated tissue.
Arrays of closely packed femtosecond-pulse lasers cut away at his fins, manipulators, and then much of the fleshy bulk of his body, before narrowing their focus to the cellular level, carefully removing minute fragments and pieces of flesh and muscle from around Swimmer’s skeletal structure and nerve cells.
Before long, his body had been reduced to little more than a naked bundle of ganglia and neuroglia, his nerves and cerebral tissue meanwhile suspended within a dense bundle of supportive meshes. The nutrient soup was then flushed, and replaced with a liquid suspension of nanocytes that had been specially tailored to his genetic material. These entered every cell, re-engineering him at the smallest possible level, while teams of Shoal surgeons relearned the techniques necessary to reshape his body into something entirely different.
By necessity, Swimmer in Turbulent Currents slept through much of this in a dreamless coma.
They rebuilt his skeleton into a humanoid scaffold of tissue, plastic and metal, meanwhile operating on his cerebrum until it could be squeezed into a tiny braincase without compromising the thoughts and memories it retained. New flesh was grown in layers over the top of the skeleton, while the framework supporting the naked nervous tissues shifted into a new alignment, micro-surgical instruments still cutting and pruning and reshaping what was then left into something that would fit inside re-engineered muscles and skin.