Nova War

'We have been assured that you are far more valuable than Corso, whatever the Queen of Immortal Light may believe.'

'You have no idea what you're doing. You're… you're playing with fire!'

'According to our intelligence, you and the starship arrived here from the Nova Arctis system,' Roses said by way of reply. 'It's a system widely known to have recently turned nova, something that should be entirely impossible. Simple logic demands that these two events must be related.'

'Maybe it's just a coincidence,' Dakota replied.

Roses didn't answer.

'Fine,' she snapped. 'So you know that much. A completely stable star at the midpoint of its life ups and goes boom and, the next thing you know, here I am with a starship that's even older than the Shoal, carrying who-knows-what inside it. Did I do that? Is that what you're wondering? Do I have some kind of super-secret technology that can blow up stars? Maybe you're thinking about the power something like that could give to your Hive.' She raised one hand in the air. 'Maybe all I need to do is snap my fingers, and Night's End goes boom, with you and me in it, and both your precious Queens! How about that?'

Roses still didn't say anything. She waited, imagining wheels turning in the alien's head while it tried to work out if she was bluffing or not.

She kept her hand in the air. Then Days of Wine and Roses abruptly turned away from her, spreading his magnificent wings wide and soaring upwards and out of sight through an access tube, leaving her on her own. Dakota slumped to the floor and cradled her head in her hands, grateful for the sudden silence. And, besides, there was nowhere else for her to go. A few members of the crew passed through, using their wings to make short hops from passage to passage, but none of them paid her attention.

Her stomach rumbled, but it was getting easier to ignore the signals from her body: hunger, pain, fear. They were all symptoms of her too-frail human body. If only she let herself slip inside the mind of the derelict, she could ignore them – it was that easy. There were entire worlds to see, all hidden within the derelict's stacks.

At least the terrible headaches were finally gone.

But in their place something much more frightening was begi

At first she had dismissed this as some form of hallucination, perhaps some by-product of her interaction with the alien processes contained within the Magi derelict. But it was becoming clear that it involved much more than that. She could… sense things, out on the edge of the Night's End system: remote probes and sensors lost in the starry darkness, their attention focused outwards. And when she followed their gaze into that darkness, it was as if something was waiting for her there, like some lone beast far outside the bright light of a campfire, something waiting for the flames to die.

But when she opened her eyes again, it was gone.

She had some idea what the derelict intended for her. It wanted her to help it resume its ancient mission of hunting down and destroying the Maker caches. That was the reason for these disturbing changes in her skull.

It wasn't a role she had asked for, and it was one she was far from sure she wanted.

And yet there was an addictive quality to the power and knowledge concealed within the derelict, which reminded her of how it had felt to have her original implants installed. To give up what the derelict held within it would feel like losing much more than a limb. It would feel like losing a substantial part of her mind.

The derelict was still waiting for her orders. Meanwhile the crew of the Blackflower facility apparently still hadn't noticed that she'd shut down half the power systems around it.

She had been about to destroy it – destroy the derelict. There was good reason to do so, because it represented enormous power for whoever – whatever – controlled it. Getting rid of it was surely the best solution all round.

Yet the personal sacrifice involved was so enormous she could barely contemplate such an action. It would leave her trapped in her own body for ever, without recourse to the derelict's timeless virtual realms.

And not only that, she would be destroying what might very well be the last remaining memories and records of a long-dead galactic empire. But not to do so would be to risk the outbreak of precisely the kind of war that had destroyed the Magi in the first place.

And yet, and yet…

And then she realized she was ready, at last, to do what had to be done. The Blackflower facility was much more than a holding pen for spacecraft and robot atmosphere dredgers. Away from the docks, the facility – more of an orbital city – boasted a population of more than four thousand Bandati, all employed in the extraction of helium three from the upper reaches of the gas giant called Dusk. Refineries, transport hubs and industrial complexes were woven around the docks and bays.

Suddenly, without warning, a pulse of incandescent destructive energy radiated outwards from the derelict's skin. The vast steel ribs surrounding it tore apart in an instant in a stupendous flash of heat and energy. A large chunk of the facility's superstructure was destroyed in the process, leaving a gaping hole with the derelict at its dead centre.

The derelict began to move, rapidly picking up speed and accelerating away from the ruins of the facility. The blast continued to ripple through the rest of the city's superstructure, shattering transport systems and sending large-scale pressurized habitats crashing into each other, their atmospheres spilling out into the vacuum.

From the viewpoint of the very few survivors of this cataclysm, the derelict dwindled rapidly from sight, boosting out of Blackflower's gravity well, and towards Dusk's swirling clouds of hydrogen and helium. Dakota floated, loose-limbed, close to one curving wall of the garden-room. The vast bulk of Blackflower filled her mind's eye, the slow whirl of the moon gravity as the derelict accelerated away feeling like the insistent tugging of a child at its mother's sleeve.

I just killed all those Bandati, Dakota thought. Everywhere I go, there's a trail of death, and I can't make any excuses for myself this time. I'm the one responsible – not the Freehold, the Uchidans or the Bandati. Nobody but me.

She tried to tell herself it was better to lose a few thousand lives in order to get rid of the worst threat to life the galaxy had ever known, but her own words sounded just as ridiculous, just as hollow as she'd expected them to. The knowledge was an acid sensation in the pit of her stomach, and she had to struggle not to throw up.

The old religions of Bellhaven came back to her, with their prophecies and prophets, stories and fables. Maybe, after she was long dead, she'd become one of those stories, a kind of warning to future generations – or more likely something to scare children with. Do what you're told, or Dakota Merrick will come and kill us all.

And now, with any luck, Days of Wine and Roses would kill her for what she had just done. He returned some time later, just as the derelict began to dive down towards Dusk's upper atmosphere.

Roses' wings beat spasmodically as he alighted in a crouch beside her. She opened her eyes and watched with casual interest as he pulled his shotgun loose from his harness and pressed its barrel firmly against the side of her head.

His interpreter glowed softly in the subdued light of the garden-bubble. 'Whatever you're doing, if you're responsible for this, stop it now,' he told her.

She smiled. 'I can't stop it. Even if I wanted to, I can't.'