Nova War

So when Dakota and her own derelict starship had suddenly appeared in this very system as if out of nowhere, it had appeared to be overwhelmingly fortuitous. His original plan to steal the one derelict Immortal Light had found could safely be put to one side. It had also become necessary to discard Bourdain, who had long since outlived his usefulness: the siege on the restaurant had supplied him with the perfect opportunity to rid himself of Bourdain while appearing blameless in the eyes of Immortal Light. He had slashed the wings of the Bandati agent responsible for tracking Bourdain down, knowing the little alien would discharge his weapon into the worm's tongue, triggering a violent reaction.

Unfortunately, it was not proving so easy to rid himself of Dakota Merrick. Rather than being safely dead and unable to interfere with his plans, she had once again survived – and destroyed the Nova Arctis derelict before he could take it instead.

But no matter: he was nothing if not adaptable. A Magi ship still remained a few light-years distant, in a system whose star the Bandati had named Ocean's Deep. He would have to step up his original plans and travel there forthwith. And, given what he now knew – that Immortal Light had, against all sanity, engaged the aid of the Emissaries – things were clearly about to get interesting.

With so very much at stake it was impossible not to reflect back on the events that had brought him to this place; impossible, indeed, not to recall the act of rape Trader had performed on him – no, on what he had been, so many long years before.

They were events that had long since slipped into the past, but they stood as fresh and clear in Moss's mind as if they had occurred only yesterday. A few centuries before, and several thousand light-years distant, a tiny Shoal yacht equipped with its own FTL drive had materialized on the edge of a system dominated by a large red star. This system was close to the heart of the primary zone of conflict between the Emissaries and the Shoal; close to the point where the Orion arm ended and a relative wasteland of dust and stellar debris began.

The yacht's sole inhabitant was a Shoal-member known to his own kind as Swimmer in Turbulent Currents. He had arrived at the prearranged coordinates several days in advance, eager to make sure there were no Emissary spy drones lurking in ambush.

But all that Swimmer in Turbulent Currents found there was death.

Before the destruction of the Long War, the system had been briefly colonized by an Emissary client-species known as the So'Agrad, now scattered through a dozen other systems. Shoal and Emissary forces had once engaged with each other on several occasions in this very system, and the result had always been the same; either the Emissaries were pushed back towards a band of dust-wisped nebulae several light-years distant, or the Shoal were forced into retreat. Inevitably one or the other would creep back once more, only to be challenged yet again.

Swimmer studied his instruments, waiting while his ship extracted information from data stacks buried kilometres deep beneath the surface of worlds whose atmospheres had been ripped away during those long-ago battles. In the meantime, he guided his yacht closer to the system's star – he learned that the So'Agrad had named it Te'So – and soon found himself in orbit above what had been their primary colony.

The planet's airless surface was pockmarked with massive impact craters, with only a few tumbled ruins left to testify to what had gone before. Swimmer toured the remains of one of the largest metropolises, guiding remote probes into darkened crevices and underground shelters, finding only silence and a few flash-frozen corpses that were miraculously intact despite the devastation.

It was a grim demonstration of the deprivations of war and yet, in the scale of things, the near-total a

Swimmer couldn't have found a better testament to why the Long War had to end, and why some kind of peace had to be made with the Emissaries.

He now floated in the pressurized, water-filled centre of his ship, his thoughts full of death and decay as the yacht lifted off once more from a shattered plain. A while later it was accelerating, at a sizeable fraction of the speed of light, towards a new destination – and to a meeting with Trader in Faecal Matter of Animals.

A day or two after he had lifted off from the surface of the dead world, his yacht's systems picked up something that looked like a jagged half-moon, locked into a long elliptical orbit around Te'So; the blasted, ten-thousand-years-gone remains of a coreship, victim of one of those ancient battles. Random lights glinted within its depths as ancient autonomous defensive systems, still functioning after all this time and against all the odds, targeted his ship on its approach.

Swimmer's yacht, like Trader's own, was a heavily modified personal craft rigged with advanced weapons systems, courtesy of their superiors within the Shoal Hegemony. That their ships were also equipped with superluminal drives stood as further testament to their joint standing within the Shoal hierarchy.

Swimmer's yacht broadcast an identification code that hadn't been used in a thousand years, and the coreship's defensive systems stepped down automatically.

He meanwhile leached ancient video recordings from the coreship's surviving stacks, and hence witnessed its destruction. An asteroid equipped with nuclear-pulse engines had slammed into the coreship, reducing half its mass to molten rubble and destroying every living thing inside it.

Swimmer directed his yacht towards the starship's exposed core, watching as layer after layer fell away on either side. First he passed what was left of the outer crust, raised high on enormous pillars, and then the layer beneath, where vast populations had lived and finally died together. And then, lastly, he arrived in the empty hollow at the centre, where the vessel's Shoal crew had lived within a lightless artificial ocean.

Trader was waiting there, in the ruins of the command centre, a pyramidal shaped building located on the curving i

He found Trader waiting for him, his shaped-field bubble glowing faintly as it floated next to a window that had once looked out into ocean depths. He watched carefully as Swimmer approached.

'You took your own good time,' said Trader, guiding his field-bubble closer to Swimmer's own. 'I was waiting for-'

'I'd prefer not to merge bubbles, Trader,' Swimmer interrupted. 'I'd also prefer to ask why all the skulduggery. And why' – his tentacular manipulators wriggled for a moment as he searched for the right words – 'why have you forced me to come here to this, this mausoleum?'

'Why here? To remind us both of what we're fighting for,' Trader replied. 'And I should point out I did not force you to come here.'

'I have been barred from my rightful place within the Hegemony's electoral council!' Swimmer in Turbulent Currents exploded. 'Accusations have been made. I barely held on to my personal yacht when they rescinded my privileges. Then I made inquiries as to who might have caused this, and those inquiries led me to you. You made the accusations, the lies, the-'

'You met with the Emissaries,' Trader stated.

It seemed to Swimmer in Turbulent Currents that the words somehow hung in the air between them, full of anger and accusation.

'I met with one of their agents, yes,' Swimmer stated, 'on behalf of certain of our superiors who, you should know, are in agreement that peaceful negotiations are absolutely necessary. This ridiculous tit-for-tat aggression is beneath our kind. It's the sort of primitive territorial tribalism our client species might engage in, but we-'