by Gary Gibson
Corso looked around at the muttering faces of the audience. Most of them were wearing military uniforms or the traditional dark-grey civilian attire of senior politicians and their administrative staff.
They were all staring resentfully at Dakota as if she’d chained them to their seats and was forcing them to watch her eat live babies.
‘I’d thank you all for coming,’ she said as the hubbub began to fade, ‘but very few of you have had any choice but to be here. So I’ll keep this simple and short. I won’t accept any more attempts at stopping potential navigators from making their way to Ocean’s Deep. Neither will I tolerate attempts at blackmailing them or threatening their families. Believe me when I say you need these people on your side. Any more such attempts will prove utterly futile.’
She scanned the room, from side to side. ‘I have ambitious goals, as you know, in order to save our civilization, and the creation of a superluminal fleet is only one of them. I can’t make this happen without your cooperation, but far too many of you seem intent on blocking me at every turn, while there’s a large, vocal minority which doesn’t appear to be interested in listening to reason of any kind.’
The screen on the wall behind her flickered into life, displaying a series of names, faces, and personal information. ‘Most of this stuff is highly classified,’ Dakota continued. She smiled. ‘The kind of information people like me aren’t supposedly meant to know.’
Corso instantly recognized the faces as the members of the assassination team who had recently tried to blow the colony to pieces.
‘The information currently on the screen has just been transmitted to all of your data-sheets,’ she explained to her audience. ‘You’ll find details there on how those members of the bomb squad were recruited, who did the recruiting, who ordered the mission – along with the planetary governments responsible for putting the plan into action.’
Corso pulled out his own data-sheet and studied the files that had just appeared on it. He glanced around and saw that most of the audience were also staring at their data-sheets. One individual in particular was gripping his sheet so hard his hands were shaking.
‘I’m introducing a temporary embargo against all those governments responsible for that attempted atrocity. Temporary, that is, until the new Authority decides otherwise. The colonies identified will not be allowed to continue participating in any negotiations, nor to elect their representatives to the Authority, and no ships of the Peacekeeper fleet will travel to their worlds until further notice.’
She stared around the gathered delegates, her hands gripping the lectern like she expected them to rush her. ‘Consider this a warning. Goodbye.’
She strode out of the room to a roar of unanswered questions, escorted by a security contingent.
Corso stared after her, wondering if this was really the same woman he’d encountered just a few weeks before: battered, uncertain and vulnerable.
But then he remembered what she’d told him on several occasions, how time wasn’t the same when you were linked into a Magi ship – how you could live virtual lifetimes.
Corso had one last encounter with Dakota before she departed.
Back on Redstone, and free from the threat of immediate Consortium intervention, the Uchidans and the Freehold had renewed their conflict. On other colony worlds, a dozen similar internecine struggles till now suppressed by the overwhelming military authority of the Consortium were either on the verge of breaking out into open war, or had already done so. And set against all this strife was a greater conflict, so far away still that it would be millennia before evidence of it appeared in the night sky . . .
The Long War.
Ever since Dakota had asked him to make public certain details of the Shoal-Emissary war, the tach-net news networks had been rife with speculation that the Long War was nothing more than propaganda invented to fuel support for the Peacekeeper Authority. Once again, Dakota’s criminal background was pored over in endless detail, as was her participation in one of Redstone’s bloodiest tragedies.
There was no doubt she made an unlikely saviour.
Dakota, meanwhile, had been true to her word: the Aleis system, fifty light-years from Earth, was the first to be shut out of any future discussions. The handful of representatives it had sent to Ocean’s Deep were placed under house arrest until it was decided whether or not they’d been directly involved in attempted sabotage.
In the meantime, Corso was left to manage a dozen staff who were busy juggling endless requests for meetings, clarifications, decisions and the occasional, inevitable threat. But at least his movements were no longer restricted, and he could now go where he pleased, escorted by a carefully vetted armed guard called Leo.
And so it went, on and on and on: meetings were held, arguments were made, positions were stated. Fist-fights were far from unusual. And during it all, Dakota seemed to fade into the background, rarely seen but always easily in touch.
As Corso became busier, he relied increasingly on proxies to handle the meetings he couldn’t attend. Thus the Peacekeeper Authority was finally taking shape, achieving the kind of solidity Corso hadn’t really believed possible when Dakota had first suggested it.
Machine-head candidates were still trickling into the system, but there were surely many more still too wary of risking public exposure, reprisals, or the unpleasant fate of Jim Krieger. Also, medical and technical facilities, donated by Bellhaven, were being built in order to create new machine-heads – for the first time in many years. Such candidates had to each undergo a severe psychological grilling to ensure they had no suicidal urges that might prompt them to fly their craft into a star.
And even though Dakota’s increasingly prolonged absences grew harder for him to explain away, Corso started to notice a shift in attitudes among those previously forced to report to him – a grudging respect that gradually became less grudging as further weeks passed.
Almost three months after the battle with the Emissaries, Corso woke with the realization he wasn’t alone. He sat up with a start to see a figure perched on the edge of his office couch, on which he’d fallen asleep.
He blinked in confusion, the silhouette leaning forward until the dim light from a still-active slate on the desk illuminated her features.
‘Dakota?’
She smiled. ‘Sorry for waking you.’
He pulled himself upright and reached up to rub at his tired eyes.
‘So are they still complaining that too many of the navigators are coming from Bellhaven?’ she asked.
Like you don’t know everything about that already. ‘Not as much as before,’ he confirmed unnecessarily. ‘You’ve been pretty scarce around here just lately’
She laughed. ‘True, it’s been . . . it’s been a while.’ Something in her expression when she said it’s been a while sent a shiver down his back. ‘I’ve been very busy. I’m leaving, within the hour. I don’t know when I’ll be back, Lucas. Maybe never, if things don’t work out.’
‘Oh.’ He leaned back, shocked.
‘It’s hardly unexpected,’ she said. ‘Is something particularly worrying you?’
‘One of the main things working to the Authority’s advantage is that so many of the people we deal with are scared of you. You’re like a bogeyman for the post-Shoal generation, flying into suns and destroying anyone who crosses you.’ He shrugged. ‘Without you around, it’ll be harder to keep them scared.’
‘Gee, thanks.’
Corso flashed her a placatory grin.
‘There’s some things we have to discuss before I leave,’ she said. ‘For one, I don’t know if the Shoal are ever likely to return, but if they do, it’s certainly not going to be on friendly terms, so you’re going to have to disabuse Greeley and Maknamuri and the rest of those idiots who think otherwise. All we are to the Shoal is a potential rival, especially once we start building our own drives. But meanwhile, as long as they’re caught up in this escalating war with the Emissaries, and as long as
they realize what I could do to them, they might keep their distance.’
‘What can you do them?’ He shook his head groggily. ‘Apart from the obvious, I mean.’
‘I have the coordinates of the Shoal home world, and that’s one of their most precious secrets. If the Emissaries knew just where to locate it, they could deal the Hegemony a killing blow.’
Corso sat straight up. ‘Or, they could destroy this entire system, and hope they kill you as well as the rest of us. That would solve their problem. Is that the real reason you’re leaving? To draw fire away from the rest of us?’
She nodded. ‘Ocean’s Deep is going to become more vulnerable to attack from outside the more time I spend here. But the Shoal don’t have a sun, Lucas. They’re moving their entire world into a region with very few stars at all, simply to minimize the risk of being destroyed. But if they do make the mistake of attacking us, I can then transmit the coordinates of their world to the Emissaries. And then they’ll really have a fight on their hands.’
So much power, he reflected. It was easier, he was finding, not to think of Dakota as quite human.
Corso rubbed at his face, not wanting to think further about galactic empires and exploding stars. ‘Well, I expect we can handle things okay while you’re away. We’ve got almost a dozen navigators out there already, and another couple of dozen new candidates Langley’s running through accelerated psych-tests. He’s suggesting we use a three-man safety system so that if any pilot goes crazy and tries to blow up somebody’s star, his ship won’t respond without simultaneous support from at least two other pilots.’
‘That’s a good idea,’ Dakota replied, her thoughts clearly somewhere far away. But her attention seemed to come back to focus fully on Corso once more.
‘You’re planning something,’ he said wearily. ‘Something you’ll want me to do.’
She shifted position on the couch and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘The one thing we both know, and that nobody’s really talking about, is that even a thousand Peacekeeper ships aren’t going to be enough to maintain some kind of unity throughout the Consortium. We need something more. We need to make our own coreships, but we don’t have the means to hollow entire moons like the Shoal do. What we do have are boosted worlds like Sant D’Arcangelo. There’s no reason we couldn’t install drive spines on it and fly it around the universe.’
He thought carefully for a moment before replying. ‘A lot of boosted worlds are nations in their own right, Dak. You can’t just march up, stick a pirate flag on them and sail off into the wide blue yonder.’
‘But we might have to do that, if we ever need to transfer large populations. Some of those worlds that had coreship populations dumped on them are only months away from disaster unless we can help them to at least alleviate the pressure.’
He stared at her incredulously. ‘And what kind of time-scale do you have in mind for all this? It was hard enough just to create the Authority, and now you’d like to re-create the Hegemony’s core-ship fleet?’
‘Too difficult,’ she replied. ‘Instead we’re going to steal one.’
‘Excuse me?’
Her lips twisted in a grin. ‘We’re going to steal a coreship. Maybe even more than one.’
‘Dakota—’
‘Listen to me. There are abandoned coreships to be found in a couple of systems close to the territories disputed between the Shoal and Emissaries. There’s another one a lot closer to home that got badly damaged. It barely got out of the Night’s End system before it went nova. That’s the first one we’re going to try for. It’s still carrying out extensive repairs in an uninhabited system about twenty light-years from here. I’ve already sent the coordinates to your data-sheet.’
‘Steal a coreship?.’ It was lunatic, desperate, inconceivable, and yet he found himself fighting to suppress a grin. ‘You’re even crazier than I thought. You seriously believe we can do this?’
‘No, Lucas, I believe you can do it. You and the Authority together.’ She smiled broadly. ‘And we both know your job’s actually going to be a lot easier without having me around for a while. They won’t keep treating you like a direct line to me any more. They’ll be asking you what to do next – and nobody else.’
At first, Corso couldn’t quite frame a reply, knowing what she said was true. Without Dakota’s presence, the Peacekeeper Authority might have a chance to come into its own, to make real decisions without constantly wondering if Dakota would object.
All right,’ he said finally. ‘In that case, we’ll have to decide on an official statement regarding your whereabouts – something the politicians and press can understand.’
‘Thank you.’
He settled back, feeling too tired to really think clearly. ‘Sometimes I don’t know whether I should hate you or thank you for making me take on this job.’
‘Nobody forced you, Lucas. Remember, I only asked. You could have just walked away.’
And left you the only one in charge?’ He grinned and shook his head. ‘Not a chance.’
‘You must know by now that you can do a lot more good here than you ever could have done back on Redstone—’
‘I know, I know,’ he muttered.
An awkward silence fell over them. This is it, he thought.
She stood up, looking momentarily awkward. ‘Goodbye for now, Lucas. Take care of things. Take care of the Piri Reis.’
He knew the Piri Reis was never likely to fly again.
‘Some people were talking about setting up a museum here on the station,’ he said. ‘Some subcommittee or other with too much time on their hands. We could probably put it there.’
‘Yeah?’ She brightened. ‘I’d like that.’
And then, with a smile and a brief wave, she was gone out the door, and Lucas Corso stared into the darkened silence around him for a long, long time.
Epilogue
Cold air tumbled down from high mountain peaks and across a barren plain that stretched out towards a distant horizon, stirring up little eddies of sand here and there and scattering the fragile, needle-like leaves of nearby porcupine bushes. A road cut across the plain in a long, straight line, before vanishing into an industrial haze that obscured the setting sun.
An atmosphere factory belonging to the House of Attar loomed out of the haze like an abstract sculpture of a toad rendered in steel and iron, belching out climate-altering quantities of gas, while administrative buildings and workers’ quarters, rendered in cheap concrete, clustered tightly around its base. Clouds tinged green from bioengineered algae stained the dusk skies the colour of pale lime.
Dakota stared on past the factory while her kukaman mount belched and shifted. She reached up and adjusted the neckerchief she’d pulled over her breather mask. The same gritty dirt that caked her face wherever it was exposed had a habit of clogging up her mask’s filtration systems.
The kukaman she rode on suffered no such inconvenience. It was not the product of natural evolution, and had clearly benefited from an excess of boar DNA.
Shortly after arriving on Morgan’s World, Dakota had been warned that in order to reach New Ankara – the besieged capital of the House of Attar – she would have to make her own way through a mountainous region notable for the presence both of Attar snipers and of the insurgents they doggedly hunted through a thousand hills and valleys. It was a trek by land of some two hundred kilometres, but anything taking to the air within a thousand kilometres of New Ankara was liable to be shot down by any one of a number of weapons platforms currently in orbit above the planet.
Despite the warnings, Dakota had purchased a balloon-wheeled transport and set off towards the distant mountains, the first hint of dawn glimmering beyond their peaks. Less than one hundred and fifteen kilometres later, she’d run straight into a night ambush.
The insurgents encountered had been armed only with primitive rocket-launchers and shotguns, but that was all they needed to blow out the front two tyres on her transport and send it skidding
into some nearby rocks, its front axle twisted beyond repair. Dakota had crawled out of the ruined vehicle and made for cover while a number of voices shouted in unidentifiable accents.
A few seconds later, the technicians and crew of an orbital platform maintained by the House of Attar were alarmed to find themselves losing control of their orbit-to-ground offensive systems. Pulse cannons mounted on the platform now began targeting the insurgents, incinerating them where they stood in a series of second-long pulses that lit up the sky for a hundred kilometres around.
And, meanwhile, Dakota hid in the deep shadow between two massive boulders with her hands clamped over her ears, wondering how the hell she was going to get to New Ankara now.
By the time it was all over, maybe four and a half minutes had passed. She had then found the kukaman tied to a post at what was clearly the insurgents’ encampment, its long lizard-like tail swinging from side to side in an anxious way, suggesting it hadn’t been fed in a while. Dakota dragged one of the burned corpses back to the encampment and then made friends with the beast while it chewed on the bones of one of its former masters.
Trader was there, in New Ankara, as Dakota had known he would be. His yacht had been like a beacon in the interstellar night, drawing her inevitably to Morgan’s World.
She had guided the kukaman, grumbling and croaking, past the factory without further incident, finally setting it loose near the crest of a hill that overlooked the city. Dakota had then made her way into a disused system of tunnels that led beneath the city walls while her ship, high in orbit and invisible to all observers, worked at subverting any local surveillance systems.
She emerged an hour and a half later, tired and sore and stinking of sewage, close to the centre of the city. Buildings surrounded her, their walls stained in pale agate tones by their edenwood resin coating. Long murals, here and there, depicted key battles from the earliest days of settlement, when the most powerful of the noble houses had battled each other for dominance. Soldiers moved regularly along the streets, maintaining a curfew, but they were too few in number and overstretched.