Stealing Light

The recesses of the derelict’s information stacks were near infinite in their storage capacity, far surpassing just the satisfaction of mere curiosity. Within their depths Trader had discovered the accumulated knowledge of a culture that had undergone endless expansions and contractions within the Magellanic Clouds for very nearly two million years. Their empire had ruled countless worlds before collapsing into half-remembered dust, only to rise again with passing aeons, and spreading yet further outwards.

The humans liked to call the cloud-dwellers ‘Magi’, and it was as good a name as any, given the miracles of which they were capable. But even so, some things had yet remained far, far beyond them. Their empire had been built with excruciating slowness, taking hundreds of mille

In the meantime, the derelict hurtled towards its destination deep within the heart of Nova Arctis. The virtual Trader felt no concern, no sense of loss, and no fear over its own imminent destruction.

Here I am, embodied, within the mind of this craft, contemplating the end of my existence in a very short time indeed. Does that lack of concern deny me as a true thinking being, or is my ability to be aware of myself- to exist -suggest that I am just as alive as the original me?

When these philosophical questions grew tiresome, Trader dived deep within the derelict’s stacks and the endless realms contained therein-fully-fledged interactive environments representing a million worlds over a spread of uncountable aeons. He lived virtual centuries within these environments at an accelerated pace, while in the greater universe outside the derelict crawled towards its ultimate destination.

The tragedy was that the flesh-and-blood Trader would never know of the rich experiences being partaken of by his doppelganger. All evidence that the Magi culture had even existed had been deliberately destroyed some mille

The Magi had been seduced into destroying themselves.

They had stumbled across a hidden cache of high technology in much the same way as the humans had stumbled across their derelict starship. It had been buried in the heart of an asteroid, within a chamber of clearly artificial origin, seemingly a gift of sheer providence.

Trader idled a century away in the abyssal, kilometres-deep chambers of a world-library the Magi themselves had called Sadness of Lost Memories Recovered from Damaged Media. Therein he found the stories of a hundred mighty interstellar civilizations to rival the Shoal and far beyond, of their rise and fall and rise again, like the steady beating of a god’s heart-all lost in the depths of ancient time.

Of all the theories Trader had heard, ranging from the drily sober to the irredeemably insane, one appealed above all others. Not because it appeared to have any greater validity than any other theory, but because it scared him more than any other.

The theory held that the transluminal drive had been created by a race of beings responsible for the construction of the universe itself-a race generally referred to by the Magi as the Makers. The drives appeared to tap into the same infinite energy that fuelled the primordial chaos from which all reality had sprung: therefore it was not unreasonable to assume the drive had been a means by which those ancient godlike beings could tour their creation.

Unfortunately, after some billions of years had passed, the Makers found rats in the cellar: life, in all its astonishing fecundity.

And so they had set out traps, nets cast wide and deep in the hopes of snagging the unwary.

If some of those ancient Magi cultures had bothered to check the records lost deep inside their own world-libraries, they might have been able to prolong their existence by the simple expedient of hunting down those carefully hidden caches of dangerous technology and destroying them before they were found by others, much as the Shoal had now been doing for almost the entirety of their recorded history.

It was only stu

Trader had been present during the Twelfth Schism, some seventeen mille

And if this star and all the ancient Magi ships hidden among its worlds were destroyed, how long before some other species discovered an actual Maker cache, before the Shoal could get to it first? This was the wearying reality-that the Shoal were only delaying the inevitable, galaxy-spa

Let the stars die, Trader thought, drifting aimlessly through the long-dead shadows of a forgotten race. Let it all start again, until, a few billion years from now, other species rise from our ashes and wander through our own discovered memories and ancient ruins, wondering how we came to destroy ourselves so quickly, before themselves re-enacting that same history.

And then came a signal, disturbing its long years of idle wandering.

Finally it was time.

The Shoal AI prepared itself for non-existence.

The Agartha was closing on them, shadowing the Piri Reis’s cross-system vector. Dakota had altered their trajectory so that they kept Ikaria between them and the star it orbited. This helped prevent the Piri Reis’s external systems from becoming overwhelmed by Nova Arctis itself as it spread across their viewscreens.

They were deep into deceleration now, the last of the Piri’s fuel blasting towards Nova Arctis, and bringing them into an insertion point for orbit around Ikaria.

As the hours had finally become days, Nova Arctis began to appear on their screens as a ball of yellow incandescence with a dark blemish at its centre. This blemish gradually grew as the hours passed, turning the star into a halo of fire around the circumference of Ikaria as it grew larger and wider.

Long-range telescopes threw Ikaria’s mottled, broken surface on to the Piri Reis’s screens as they dropped towards it, using filtering technology to pick out a visual map of a vast chasm on the approaching planet, the result of a massive impact some billions of years before. It was a crack ru