Empire of Light

Chapter Eight

A holographic simulation of the Milky Way filled the shallow dome of the debriefing room as Corso entered, angled so that the wispy trail of a spiral arm hovered just a few metres above the floor. The air inside the room felt pleasantly chilly, the atmosphere in the rest of the Bandati orbital station being too warm and humid for his comfort. He had only just arrived back at Ocean's Deep aboard a transport called the Kilminster, along with more than a hundred newly recruited technical specialists who would continue on to the research base at Tierra.

Lamoureaux stepped towards him from out of the gloom. 'Senator.'

Corso nodded and dropped into one of twenty chairs arranged around the circumference of the room and facing towards its centre. 'I literally just came down the spoke. I got your report about White-cloud. Where is he now?'

'Still up at the hub, on board a ship. Ray and Leo both felt it was safer keeping him there.'

Corso nodded tiredly and glanced towards the glistening star-simulation. 'Fair enough. How about we get started?'

Lamoureaux nodded and stepped back towards the centre of the room. 'This is where we are,' he said, turning slightly to regard the simulation.

A minuscule ball of light representing the Consortium blinked into life deep inside the Orion spiral arm. It was easy to miss amongst the surrounding starscape.

'I can never get over how tiny it looks,' Corso muttered.

'It is tiny,' Lamoureaux agreed, 'on the galactic scale of things. Now, remember some of what I'll be showing you consists of best guesses and conjecture.'

'That's fine.'

Half a dozen yellow pinpricks, their brightness oscillating rapidly to make them stand out from the surrounding starscape, appeared at various points scattered through the Orion Arm and beyond. Lines representing trajectories connected each pinprick to the ball of light representing the Consortium.

'The yellow dots represent the furthest points reached by our experimental probes,' Lamoureaux explained.

'I thought we sent out more than this,' said Corso with a frown.

'We did. We lost contact with some, particularly the ones we sent in the direction of the Emissaries. They might have been captured or destroyed, but they managed to return useful data before they disappeared.'

Corso grunted. 'What about the Magi ships we sent out to reconnoitre?'

'We suffered some losses, but there are others out there trying to trace the progress of the war. The probes are a lot more disposable, and even with just this many we've managed to identify the location of quite a few of the Shoal's tach-net transceiver relays. The relays boost transmissions around the Shoal's territory, and their signal strength is uniform. As a result we were able to work out the rough shape and size of the territory covered by the relays.'

As Corso watched, a roughly ovoid section of the Milky Way, encompassing a large chunk of the Orion Arm and reaching in towards the core, changed in colour to a uniform magenta.

'And that's the Hegemony?' he asked, not quite able to keep his voice under control. An empire made of light, he thought to himself.

'So we think.' Lamoureaux glanced over at Corso and smiled on seeing his expression. 'There's some guesswork involved, like I said, but we're still looking at a region several thousand light-years across at its widest point.'

'It's incredible, but it's still not quite the galaxy-spanning empire they sold themselves as.'

Lamoureaux nodded. 'Not quite, no. But huge enough.'

'And the Emissaries?'

Lamoureaux nodded. 'Coming up next.'

Another region of space, immediately adjacent to that representing the Hegemony, now changed colour. It reached towards the rim of the galaxy, and encompassed an area roughly half that of the Hegemony itself.

'You can see the galaxy's outer rim puts a clear boundary on their expansion,' said Lamoureaux. 'So, unless they want to stick to the halo stars, they have to pass through Shoal territory in order to access the rest of the Milky Way.'

A translucent blue panel appeared in the simulation, placed between the two empires and brushing against the outer rim of the Orion Arm. Corso recognized it as the region of the Long War.

'We think their conflict with the Shoal has forced the Emissaries to expand sideways, up and down the outer arms,' Lamoureaux continued. 'But with the escalation to using nova-class weapons, they're clearly pushing the Shoal's fleets back towards us and deeper into the Orion Arm.'

'And how long before the fighting actually reaches us?'

'Based on the latest analyses, not long. We may have less than six months before they arrive here in force. Most of the strategic analysts I've spoken to think the Shoal are preparing for a major retreat in order to bolster older, better-defended systems closer to the heart of their territory. That way they sacrifice us as well as a lot of their other client species, but stand a much better chance of either surviving the war with their culture intact, or more likely – judging by how it's playing out so far – reaching some kind of detente.'

Corso shook his head and quietly swore under his breath. A tightness in his scalp heralded an oncoming migraine. 'So exactly where was Dakota last time we heard from her?' Her garbled warning had been forwarded to him on board the Kilminster less than twenty-four hours before.

'Over here,' came the answer. Another brightly coloured pinprick appeared far around the curve of the galaxy, between three and three and a half kiloparsecs distant – a little more than seventeen thousand light-years from Ocean's Deep. The simulation of the galaxy rotated rapidly until the icon representing her last-known location was directly overhead, while the Consortium now hovered just underneath the ceiling.

'As you can see,' said Lamoureaux, 'she's gone a long, long way.'

'Show me the coordinates Whitecloud dug up. Draw a line from here to there.'

Lamoureaux nodded, and a single pale line reached out from the Consortium towards a sparse stellar region not much more than a thousand light-years away.

Corso let out a sigh and stood, before walking around under the simulation and peering up. 'All right,' he said, reaching up with both hands and wiping them across his face as if he could scrub the fatigue away. 'What do we have that's ready to travel to Whitecloud's coordinates and see what's actually there?'

'There are five Magi starships here in Ocean's Deep, but the only currently available navigators were all supplied by the Legislate. That means I can't guarantee any of them aren't supplying information back to the Legislate security services.'

'That's all?' Corso snapped, sounding scandalized. 'What the hell about our own people?'

'They're all either out on relief missions or they've been hit by neural burnout. The way things are going, we're going to need more of our own ships to be equipped with superluminal drives than we thought. But in terms of our present situation…' Lamoureaux hesitated.

'What?'

'Even if a Magi ship was available, it's going to have to tow a ship with enough room for an expeditionary crew. There aren't any big enough, apart from the Mjollnir, and she already has her own superluminal drive. But, as you know, she's being prepped for a relief expedition to Ascension.'

'Really?' Corso thought hard for a moment. 'Put her up there, Ted.'

Lamoureaux complied, the galaxy fading to be replaced by an image of the Mjollnir, a colony-class frigate belonging to the Freehold. She was similar in appearance and construction to her sister-ships Agartha and Hyperion, both long since destroyed within the Nova Arctis system. She was also one of the few vessels in existence with the capacity to carry a significant proportion of Ascension's trapped population to safety, a task for which she was currently being readied at Ocean's Deep. Her maiden faster-than-light voyage had brought her here from Redstone to be refitted just for that purpose.

'The Mjollnir could do it, then?' said Corso, staring up at the floating image. 'How long before she's ready?'

'She's ready now,' Lamoureaux replied. 'Senator… at the very least, you'd need to get the authority of the Consortium's Central Trade Council as well as the Freehold Senate. And the fact is, they're not going to give it to us. If you think things are looking shaky for us now, I don't even want to think about what's going to happen if we commandeered the Mjollnir.'

'Screw the CTC,' Corso replied. 'And the Senate. I don't need to ask anyone's permission to commandeer her.'

Lamoureaux looked doubtful. 'How does that come about?'

'There are specific clauses relating to overriding emergencies. Just look them up. I think that beating Dakota's swarm to the Mos Hadroch, assuming that's really where it's headed, fits anyone's definition of an emergency.'

'It's going to break the Fleet Authority's back, if you do this,' Lamoureaux warned.

'Let me worry about that. How soon could we reach those coordinates with the Mjollnir?

Lamoureaux made a resigned sound. 'Two weeks there, more or less. And the same again to get back home.'

Corso stared back at him, thunderstruck. 'That fast? It's taken Dakota, what, two years to get seventeen thousand light-years?'

Lamoureaux shrugged. 'She didn't go in a straight line, Senator, because she had to hunt far and wide to find the Maker's trail. We've been sourcing data from the Magi ships that's helped us greatly increase the efficiency and reach of the drives coming out of the Tierra cache.'

'Then there's no other recourse. Who's in charge of the Mjollnir?'

'Eduard Martinez.'

Corso nodded, recognizing the name. 'I've met him,' he replied. 'Good, that might make things easier.' Martinez was very much a progressive in Freehold politics, which meant Corso might not have to replace him in command.

'But the Ascension relief operation?' Lamoureaux reminded him. 'The Mjollnir 's scheduled to be going there in the next couple of days. How are you going to square that with the Legislate?'

'It's a short-term loss for a long-term gain,' Corso replied.

Lamoureaux gave him a strange look, and Corso realized just how cold-hearted he'd sounded. 'If we save some people at Ascension instead of heading straight out to those coordinates, we might lose something that could save us all from the Emissaries,' he explained. 'If the Legislate doesn't want to think ahead, then I'm going to have to do it for them. Get hold of Martinez for me, and set up a secure, one-on-one tach-net link to Akiyama at the Office of Representatives while you're at it, and route it to my quarters. Flag it urgent and top-priority.'

'Senator, with the very greatest of respect, do you really think we can pull this off?'

Corso glanced back at Lamoureaux, as he headed for the door. 'You'd better hope we can, Ted. Because if we can't, we're screwed.'