Nova War (40 page)

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.

All she had to do was wait quietly for a while, stay out of sight, and then move on.

Trader realized she was coming, of course, since his yacht’s onboard equipment had detected the Magi ship the instant it entered the system.

Finally Dakota came to a flat-roofed tower that rose high above the rooftops of the city’s Merchants’ Quarter. It had once been a water tower of enormous capacity, an ornate and rugged edifice for which the city had been rightly famous. Until just recently it had been long abandoned, but money had clearly been lavished on constructing the elaborate new pumping mechanism which now encircled its cylindrical wall, as well as on the discreet defensive systems positioned just shy of the roof almost seventy metres above her head.

From behind a corner, she observed three guards with their eyes adjusted for night-vision and carrying weaponry both visible and concealed.

Dakota watched them react as they each received a carefully faked alert. After they went dashing out of sight, she crossed the street quickly. Her implants reached out, through the orbiting Magi ship, and began to leach confidential files from stacks belonging to the House of Attar’s Ministry of Internal Security.

There was only one guard now remaining between her and Trader. His name was Murat Oran, and the families of the dozen men and women he had tortured to death would be celebrating his demise long into the night.

She entered by a narrow doorway set in the side of the tower, and saw Oran seated in the shadows, facing towards her but looking down at a book held in his hands. His eyes widened when he noticed her and he started to stand. She raised her pistol and shot him in the head and chest twice each. He slumped back into his chair without a sound.

Dakota pushed on, aware there were weapons systems hidden everywhere, targeting her from each moment to the next, but none of them firing.

Finding a stairwell that wound round and round the inside of the tower, she soon reached the top of the building. There she passed through several doors until she found herself on a narrow tiled lip surrounding the giant tank that filled almost the whole of the tower’s interior.

Looking up, she noticed how the iron plates of the flat roof overhead had been re-soldered in the very recent past. She then peered down into the liquid depths, where she could discern the outline of a superluminal yacht that barely fitted within the tower’s circumference.

Trader in Faecal Matter of Animals, now a fugitive from his own kind, rose through the waters towards her. Before he reached the surface, his field-bubble formed about him, trapping the waters around him, and lifted him into the narrow pocket of air between the roof and the water’s surface.

Piscine eyes regarded her blankly. ‘You have come to gloat, perhaps, Miss Merrick?’ he asked. ‘My host, the Caliph of Attar, has been most concerned to lose control of one of his orbital platforms.’

She hunkered down, placing her pistol flat on the tiles before her. ‘An exchange of information. That’s all I want, Trader. I tell you something, you tell me something.’

‘And what, enquiries rendered in due suspicion, might you possess that I could possibly desire?’

She raised her shoulders and dropped them again with a sigh. ‘Then I guess you’re not interested to find out that Swimmer in Turbulent Currents has tracked you down here to Morgan’s World. Whatever it is you did to stop him finding you this long, it isn’t working any more.’

‘And yet you are the one who loosed that abomination upon me. So why would I grant you an audience, given such foreknowledge?’

‘Because, in the end, we both want the same thing, Trader. We both want to keep our people safe.’

The Shoal-member drifted up closer, the stubby tentacles that dangled below the main mass of his body now writhing in anger. ‘How you must enjoy this, but I must inform you, Miss Merrick, that you are dead. All I see before me is a hollow shell filled with the beating heart of a Magi navigator. You are no more human than the creature that calls itself Hugh Moss.’

‘Let’s skip the philosophy lesson.’ Dakota stepped forward, tapping her forefinger against the faintly sparkling surface of the field-bubble. She felt a faint, tingling shock from the contact. ‘I want to know what happened when you went looking for the Maker.’

‘Then first I must ask to what ominous depths your understanding of my history extends, Miss Merrick.’

‘Deep enough.’

‘Retrospective endeavours lead me to think back upon the paths I have swum. I should have contrived to drown your species in lonely darkness long before such terrible damage could be done.’

Something shone in the waters far below Trader’s bubble, and she made out the outlines of his yacht’s drive spines as they began to charge. He was already preparing to leave. She had a good idea of the technological riches the Caliph had gained in return for providing this hiding-place, but wondered what Swimmer in Turbulent Currents might do to the House of Attar once he found his prey absent.

She fought back the urge to remind Trader precisely who had started the nova war. ‘The Magi came to our galaxy looking for a Maker they believed had laid the caches. Now I discover that you went in search of the Maker yourself. I want to know what happened.’

‘Oh, Dakota, how alike you and I once were; how joined by the urgent romance, the idealism of our respective youths. But you are still so young and eager, ready to charge off in search of adventure and honour.’ Trader swivelled in his bubble, his leathery fins manoeuvring gently. ‘How I miss Mother Ocean and her crushing embrace; how I regret my present state of exile. And yet I would do again all that I have done thus far, truly I would, all in order to preserve her chill dark depths.’

He pushed up against the side of his field-bubble that was closest to her. ‘I wonder to what allegiances
you
swear, however, or are those dissenting voices truthful when they say the only cause you serve is your own?’

‘My sole allegiance is to life,’ she replied. ‘And the right to it.’

His manipulators twisted in amusement. ‘The Emissaries are gathering their forces. I sense them sometimes, like dark sails upon a still sea, glimpsed over a far horizon.’

‘There’s a way to stop all this, Trader. The Magi Librarians tell me so, and the Maker – if it’s still out there – might have the answer. I want to know what it said to you.’ She paused, collecting herself. ‘I want to know why you failed.’

Ah.’ The waves beneath Trader trembled, interference patterns criss-crossing the surface of the waters. ‘I was found wanting, as surely as you will be.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Did you read no fairy tales, my dear child? Was there no parent to rock you to sleep, to tell you tales of derring-do? I confronted the dragon in its lair, my foolish girl, and found I was insufficiently pure of heart to gain access to the secrets it hoarded.’

He was taunting her.

‘I don’t have time for this bullshit,’ she snapped.

‘Then listen, and listen well. I travelled all across the face of the galaxy, to sparse regions almost devoid of the pulse of living stars. And there the Maker, to this day, still makes its long, slow progress through our universe. We had learned from the Magi that it held a secret they themselves sought; some undefined miracle that could end all troubles, still all conflicts. But necessity drove us to destroy the Magi before they could reduce us to little more than servants. We built our own starships and sailed them to those distant barren places wherein dwelt the Maker, but were met only with ashes and failure. We were rejected, turned back.

‘I took the helm of that great endeavour and, yes, I sought to wrest secrets from the very entity that long ago sowed the seeds of the Magi’s destruction. Few of my fleet returned to report on what had taken place. Instead, most were stranded there, their newly drive-equipped warships reduced to burned husks spinning in slow orbits around stars that had been dead a million years and more, drained by the Maker of the energies that had once burned bright within their cores.’

The waters began to foam, as a bass rumbling sounded from deep below. ‘You are no one’s saviour, Dakota Merrick,’ Trader continued. ‘You are a liar, a betrayer, a thief and a murderess, yet once again you delude yourself that you act out of the highest ideals. I cannot give you the answer I believe you seek. I can tell you only that the Maker nearly destroyed us when we attempted to destroy it. And so it may well do the same to you.’

Without a further word, Trader shot downwards. Blinding light shone up from the depths and the waves began to rise, smashing against the underside of the ceiling.

Dakota found her way back to the winding stairwell, cursing as she slipped on the waters now splashing down the worn stone steps. The entire building started to vibrate around her, the air filling with choking dust as bricks began working their way loose.

She ran past the slumped corpse of Murat Oran and out into the streets surrounding the tower. The roof of the tower exploded behind her, sending debris and foaming waters hurtling downwards, while the humming and shimmering form of a Shoal starship rose rapidly into the night sky, sending more water cascading down onto the buildings beneath. The vessel’s drive spines glowed a deep cobalt blue, the air around them curiously puckered and distorted.

Dakota kept on running, ignoring the cries of the three guards who were now returning. She ducked down some steps between tall buildings, making her way to a sewer entrance close by the river.

I need your help,
she had almost said to Trader, despite everything he had done to her. She remembered what the Shoal-member had said, that once he’d been like her, driven and idealistic. The notion that she might then become like Trader, weary, cynical and murderous, was one that appalled her. And yet the fear of what the power she’d gained might yet do to her remained in the back of her mind like a persistent whisper.