Empire of Light

Chapter Six

When the attack came, it was swift, brutal and very nearly deadly.

With time, Dakota came to realize she had failed to pay proper attention to subtle changes taking place within the captured swarm-component. That it was a Trojan Horse became evident only with hindsight, its outwardly simple structure belying a technology far more sophisticated than she had even suspected.

The component had responded to Dakota's careful probing of its memory banks by sending its own, undetectable feelers deep into the data cores of her Magi starship, entwining itself in the ship's neural networks like a hand taking a firm grip on a living heart. At the same moment the swarm turned on her, the captured component launched its own, primarily informational attack from within.

Dakota spun through the starship's limitless virtual depths, appalled by the wholesale vandalism the component had unleashed on her ship's femtotech arrays, until she found Josef's ghost waiting for her on the balcony of a library complex long since turned to dust and ruin.

'Look,' he said, gesturing at the sky.

Dakota gripped the balustrade and followed the direction of his hand, to see a black cloud of viral agents blotting out the sky.

She felt her insides grow cold and liquid. 'There wasn't any indication that the component was remotely capable of launching an attack like this! We analysed it inside and out. It just doesn't make sense!'

She shifted into another virtual environment, and sensed Josef keeping pace with her. The next time she looked at him, she was appalled to see his features grow suddenly blurred before snapping back into focus.

'We know now that the swarm can reassign each of its components to a new purpose at any time,' he reminded her. 'The component we captured was adapting itself to a new purpose from the moment we brought it inside the ship. We should never have let it remain in communication with the rest of the swarm.'

'But why did it wait so long?' she demanded. 'Why not just attack us when we first got here?'

'The only logical answer is that the swarm deliberately fed us the data about the Mos Hadroch. Notice, it didn't attack until Corso sent back confirmation that he'd found something.'

'The swarm used us to help it find the Mos Hadroch,' Dakota realized. 'It wants it just as much as we do.'

'Exactly And now it'll tear this ship apart until it finds those coordinates.'

Josef's face began to melt and Dakota spun away in horror. She found herself in an environment she had never visited before, and watched with sick horror as viral agents tore it to shreds, leaving her tumbling into a chaotic void where once there had been land and sky.

She shifted to another, more stable environment, where Josef's partly reconstituted form joined her after a little while.

'I don't know how much longer I can hold myself together,' he warned her, little more now than a voice attached to a blur of static. The blur then shifted and almost resolved into other faces from her past: Corso, Severn, even her mother, all drawn from her dreams and memories. 'The data cores are starting to purge themselves, shutting themselves down as a last-ditch measure. The swarm's almost penetrated the ship's command levels. You have to…'

Dakota watched as Josef dissolved into a cloud of random noise – dead a second time. She burrowed her way deeper into the starship's networks, hiding in realms as yet unaffected by the ravages of the viral agents. A silent battle raged for the next several days. Huge swathes of the ship's neural structure were destroyed, but eventually the balance tipped, and another forty-eight hours saw the last few surviving viral agents isolated and finally destroyed.

As soon as Dakota had regained full control over her ship, she sent the swarm-component spinning back out into space.

It was a pyrrhic victory at best. The swarm had learned far more from her than the reverse. In the meantime her ship drifted, silent and crippled, its self-repair mechanisms struggling to mend the worst of the damage.

Dakota watched helplessly as the swarm all around now entered a period of renewed activity. Thousands of its components were being refashioned into weapons, and it wasn't long before the first of these came vectoring in towards her with deadly intent. A dozen hunter-killer components made contact with the hull of her ship and began burning and drilling their way into its interior. She reached out with her mind and shut them down before they could penetrate too deeply, but there were legions more to take their place. Another dozen separated from the main body of the swarm and closed in for the kill.

Her only recourse was to jump as far away from the vicinity of the swarm as possible, but the battle for control of the ship had drained the energy reserves it needed to make a jump of even a few light-years. Then she recalled that the swarm had been observed to maintain a certain minimum distance from the near vicinity of the red giant.

She might not have enough power for a long-range jump, but a very short-range jump was another matter.

Before the next wave of hunter-killers could reach it, the Magi starship summoned up just enough power to jump a few AUs closer to the dying star. The star field beyond the hull remained unchanged, but the red giant grew huge and corpulent.

A storm of transmissions flickered back and forth through the vacuum around the ship. Dakota knew she hadn't escaped the swarm, but she had managed to buy herself a few hours of breathing space.

Her ship once again began the process of clawing energy out of the vacuum in preparation for its next jump. In the meantime yet more hunter-killer components vectored inwards, and Dakota tracked their progress with sick despair.

The ship managed to repel them, but not before serious damage had been inflicted on its drive-spines. It managed to carry out a second jump regardless, less than an hour after the previous one.

This time the red giant blotted out half the universe, and the swarm had become distinctly less numerous.

The ship's sensors picked up a cluster of several hundred swarm-components undergoing heavy modification, at a distance of a few million kilometres. Closer observation showed that drive-spines were being fixed to the hulls of these components.

Another attack. Dakota jumped her ship so close to the red giant that it was effectively inside the star, orbiting at the very outermost limits of its atmosphere: an attenuated red mist heated to a few thousand degrees Kelvin. There were limits to how long the ship could survive in such an intense environment, but Dakota was running out of options.

More importantly, it was too hot for the swarm, and for the moment the attacks ceased.

Hours and then days passed in the external universe, and Dakota watched as the swarm's newly constructed superluminal fleet jumped en masse out of the vicinity of the red giant.

She had little doubt they were making straight for the coordinates pinpointing the location of the Mos Hadroch. She had got what she wanted from the swarm, but it was a victory laced with a particularly bitter aftertaste. Dakota drifted on through the remnants of dead worlds, her mind filled with the confused whispers of terminally damaged Magi minds, their voices like ghosts in the ether, half-heard gabbles lost in hissing static.

There was a slim chance she could still make a long-range jump to safety before the star blew but, given that her starship had been almost terminally crippled by the swarm's concentrated attacks, there were no guarantees it would survive the attempt. Instead a plan slowly formulated in her mind: to use the remaining energy reserves to transmit a warning back to Ocean's Deep.

It was one of the hardest choices Dakota had ever had to make, but she came to a decision quickly. She fired off a single high-energy burst of coherent data towards Ocean's Deep, across the immensity of the galaxy, an act that left her starship nearly powerless and adrift.

And then something strange began to happen, over the following hours and days. In the face of its inevitable destruction, Dakota became aware the starship had spontaneously abandoned all efforts to repair itself. For reasons she could not yet understand, it instead began working at reintegrating whatever scattered fragments of her mind hadn't been compromised or destroyed by the swarm's vandalism.

The star itself entered a period of increased activity during this time, sending great fiery gouts of plasma sailing out across the void. Meanwhile her ship picked up major disruptions in the heat-flow at the star's core. There were, perhaps, only a few hours before the star went into terminal collapse and shrank, before ejecting its outer layers. There was enough energy to make a short-range jump, but she already knew she could never outrun the impending nova.

In the last few moments before the end came, Dakota found herself in a room full of objects that might have been mirrors – mirrors capable of capturing the light from several more spatial dimensions than her mind was capable of perceiving.

She saw reflections of herself, of other lives she might have lived if she had only made the choices that led to them. They were hazy reflections at best, might-have-beens and never-weres, glimpses into worlds that never quite became solid enough to be real.

Dakota found her attention drawn to one particular such vision, clearer than all the rest. She saw herself as she had been before the swarm attacked, when most of her memories had still been intact.

She never had a chance to find out why the ship had shown her this. The red giant's core chose that moment to collapse, releasing all its energy in a titanic blast that would, with time, become visible throughout the entire galaxy.

In her last moments of awareness, before the wave-front tore the ship apart, Dakota saw the billions of swarm-components nearest the expanding wave-front suddenly focus and direct the explosive energy of the nova in a way she couldn't even begin to understand.

A few seconds later, there was nothing left of Dakota or the starship itself but a whirl of superheated plasma, carried onwards and outwards.