Empire of Light

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 resembling 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.