Empire of Light

Chapter Twenty

A little more than a day later, Dakota made her way to the Mjollnir's stern and towards the main hold, an enormous drum-shaped vault that took up nearly a fifth of the frigate's overall internal space. Taking a seat in an observation blister overlooking its airless interior, she saw the Meridian drones nestled amongst the drop-ships and cradles, and clinging to various bulkheads as if glued to them. Their perfectly reflective surfaces rendered them nearly invisible.

She watched the main doors of the hold swing slowly open, splitting into four quarter-circle slices and revealing a widening cross of starry black. Trader's yacht hung at the void's centre, growing slowly larger as it slowly manoeuvred itself inside the hold.

The yacht was the colour of parchment. Its drive-spines sparkled under the hold's powerful lights. It moved to one side as the doors began to swing closed again, waiting until the grapples took hold of it, pulling it in towards an empty cradle.

Dakota touched a comms terminal, and a moment later a soft chime told her a link had been established with the craft.

'Welcome aboard, Trader.'

'Greetings and felicitations, dear Dakota. Awareness comes upon me that the frigate is refusing to extend an airlock connection to my yacht. May I ask why?'

'You're going to have to stay where you are for the duration of the voyage. Senator Corso made himself very clear on that point.'

'Ah, Lucas Corso. I have heard news of his hard journey up life's stream these recent years. His teeth have grown; now become a predator rather than prey. I gather you've had an opportunity to use the Meridian drones already?'

'I did, yes. Are you sure you trust me with that kind of firepower?'

'I think of our relationship as symbiotic, Dakota. Our need for each other assures mutual trust. But even those drones aren't quite enough for our purposes. This frigate remains extremely vulnerable to direct attack, so I propose we acquire shielding of a far more advanced type than that currently available to you.'

'Where from?'

The Mjollnir's primary stacks alerted Dakota to new data, squirted over from the Shoal-member's yacht. She tested the data for traps, and, on finding none, dropped it behind a firewall within the terminal's memory. It turned out to be a set of coordinates for a system located a few thousand light-years further along their projected trajectory, close to the edge of the spiral arm and not far from the region of the Long War.

'The system in question requires a slight detour, but that shouldn't add more than a few days to our journey time,' Trader explained. 'And Dakota… please reconsider allowing me on board, as I would very much like to see the Mos Hadroch. I have waited a long time for that, and I want to demonstrate that I can be trusted.'

It was surely just her imagination that she detected a strain of wistfulness behind the machine-tones of his translation system.

'Not a chance in hell,' she replied. 'I had enough trouble persuading Lucas to let you even get this near.'

'No one enters the arena of battle without making sure their weapons are fully operational, Dakota. If the Mos Hadroch is a gun, only I have the trigger. We need to test it before we can implement it.'

The damn fish had a point, she realized. 'I'll talk to him,' she replied. 'That's all I can do. But he's still not going to go for it.' She shifted in her seat and waited for Trader's reply.

Corso had ramped the security systems up to full alert in preparation for the Shoal-member's arrival, and put Nancy Schiller to work at rejigging the primary command systems to make them even more hack-proof than they already were.

'Then it appears I am trapped between the crushing depths and the deadly air,' Trader finally conceded. 'You should be aware that when we reach our final destination, I won't be able to control the Mos Hadroch at a distance. Will you keep it from me even then, Dakota?'

'No,' she replied. 'Not when that time comes. Of course,' she added, 'you could just tell us how to activate it ourselves. Then you wouldn't need to come along at all.'

Dakota smiled to herself as a long pause followed.

'I believe we understand each other,' Trader finally replied. 'Goodbye for now, Dakota.'

'Wait.' She put out a hand, forgetting Trader couldn't see her. 'There's something I want to ask you.'

'Yes?'

'On my way to the swarm I came across hundreds of destroyed Atn clade-worlds. But most of them were destroyed long before the Mos Hadroch was supposedly created.'

'Your point?'

'At first I assumed the swarm attacked those clade-worlds because it suspected the Mos Hadroch could be hidden on one of them, but clearly the Atn and the swarm have been at war for much, much longer than that. Why is that? Or is the Mos Hadroch older than I thought?'

'We all live amongst the ruins of our predecessors, Dakota. There are wars that began when the first stars were young, and will not end even with the death of the last star. Both the swarms and the Atn began their own existence as weapons on either side of a long-forgotten war – but the Atn forgot their original purpose. Does this satisfy your curiosity?'

'Yes.' Dakota pushed herself out of her chair and took one last look out into the bay. 'Goodbye, Trader.'

'I have been monitoring communications traffic from Redstone, Dakota. I know that you destroyed your own ship.'

Dakota gripped the back of the seat she had just vacated. 'Yes, I had no choice. You already know why.'

'It is always better to be the master of your own destiny, is it not? And yet I imagine it must have been a painful decision. I imagine it must make you feel very lonely.'

She let go of the chair and drifted over to the window, suddenly breathing hard. She could just make out her reflection, floating like a ghost over the interior of the bay, and she fought an urge to activate the drones again, to burn Trader's ship in its cradle.

'More than you can imagine,' she replied, and left.