Nova War

And there, in that most volatile of regions, the Queen of Immortal Light had found her prize and then built her secret colony and research facility.

It took no more than a few minutes for the computer systems on board Moss's yacht to leach the colony's full story from its own data stacks; for the encryptions were literally mille

When it had been discovered, the Ocean's Deep derelict was locked into an inherently unstable L2 orbit relative to the black hole and the gas giant, terrifyingly close to the black hole's devouring black heart. The derelict clearly still functioned on some level because, without the ability to adjust its orbit, it would long ago have drifted in towards the black hole and been destroyed.

The Bandati had moved it to a more stable L4 orbit nearby. They had then quite literally built their orbital colony around the derelict.

A tower of gas and dust rose from the upper atmosphere of Leviathan's Fall, before being sucked into the black hole's bottomless maw. As it was drawn inwards, the gas formed a halo of super-heated, stripped-down particles orbiting the black hole at a sizeable fraction of the speed of light. This conveniently generated enough energy to mask many of the colony's activities.

Moss's systems now showed that a coreship was decelerating towards Leviathan's Fall, its strategic systems guiding it towards an optimum location from which to engage Emissary forces already present there. The Godkiller was spewing forth a fleet from its own vast body, amongst which, Moss also noted, were several heavily armed Immortal Light cruisers ferried from Night's End.

He brought his attention back to the orbital colony, much of it airless and barely maintained, or rendered uninhabitable by the passage of time and gradual systems failures. Over dozens of generations, an original population numbering in six figures had dropped down to a bare few thousand currently. That surviving population was only very rarely replenished by new colonists from Night's End, and what passed for research staff had made no apparent attempt at studying the Magi derelict for the better part of a mille

However, all that effort expended in order to secure the derelict had little to do with the vessel's actual value. It had much more to do with one Queen having possession of something the other Queen didn't. The derelict was like a shiny toy, to be taken out of its box every now and then and paraded under the gaze of the Queen of Immortal Light's jealous and competitive sister.

And all far, far away from the Shoal's watchful eyes.

Moss fingered his brow and smiled to himself. It was proof, if proof were needed, that the Bandati were already in serious decline as a species. Another ten or twenty thousand years at the most and they would retreat to a few scattered worlds to engage in a slow collective senescence – or again fracture into entirely new forms.

But now the Queen of Darkening Skies Prior to Dusk had found a way to spite her sister and leverage greater influence for her Hive with the Shoal Hegemony – despite her clear complicity in keeping the derelict secret.

It was a clever plan, but not clever enough. The Queen of Darkening Skies, Hugh knew, had wildly underestimated the Shoal's capacity for treachery and deceit. After leaving Dakota in the viewing chamber, Trader in Faecal Matter of Animals had briefly returned to his own private yacht in order to prepare for a meeting requested by Desire. When he got there, however, his computer systems supplied him with potentially disturbing information.

Shoal vessels were designed to automatically form secure tach-net networks with any others of their kind once they entered a given system. Individuals could log into that network as well as ships, and as was the case with any kind of network, each individual node had a specific form of identifier associated with it that distinguished it from the rest.

Certain types of identifier were associated with particular types of Shoal vessel, and now Trader's own systems indicated that a second private FTL yacht, of similar design to his own, had unexpectedly arrived in the outer system.

There were very few such yachts in existence throughout the Hegemony, and each of them represented a rare and special privilege for those few that could be entrusted with them, given how deadly they could prove in the wrong hands. Throughout the Shoal's long history, on the rare occasions such ships had gone missing it had been a matter of serious and urgent concern. And, despite the very best efforts of those assigned to tracking such ships down, a very few still remained untraceable to this day.

So it was a matter of some equal concern to discover one of those selfsame missing yachts had now appeared, una

Long mille

He guided his yacht back through the cold liquid depths at the coreship's centre, and soon picked up Desire for Violent Rendering's private trace-signal; the old bastard was waiting by a disused coolant system that projected from the coreship's interior wall, a vast and confusing tangle of half-rusted equipment, enormous valves and pipes that rose into the darkness all around. He exited his yacht once more while a cloud of microscopic sensors scattered over an area of several kilometres constantly kept pace with Trader, reassuring him that there were, as ever, no witnesses to this latest clandestine encounter with his direct superior.

And then there's the matter of the two Hives, Trader considered as he swam towards his rendezvous. The constant rivalry between them had made it easy to play one off against the other, but he'd been forced to share dangerous knowledge with them, which meant that some severe but very necessary exercises in damage control would be called for once the current crisis was past. He found Desire waiting for him in the darkness of an enormous disused pumping mechanism, its curving metal walls dense with ancient corrosion rising all around.

'Ah, Trader, so glad you could make it.'

'This isn't the time for niceties, General. You know how much I'm obliged to take care of. Why did you call me here?'

'Still busy saving the Hegemony, I see. Excellent, excellent.' Desire's upper fins flexed with a hint of sarcasm. 'You have Dakota Merrick well under control?'

'I believe so, yes, but she's not to be underestimated. We certainly mustn't make the mistake of regarding her as merely human anymore. Remote scans have made it clear she's become a Magi navigator.'

'I do hope you didn't tell her that?'

'Get to the point, Desire. Why am I here?'

'It appears there have been some developments with the Deep Dreamers.'

'Such as?'

'They appear to have predicted their own deaths.'

Trader stared at the other Shoal-member, then spurred himself forward hard and fast enough for the General to retreat instinctively. 'I've grown tired of your feeble-'

'I'm quite serious,' Desire said quickly.

Trader halted, remembering almost too late that Desire could be a vicious and deadly fighter when necessary.

'Explain.'

'As you're aware, the Dreamers' range of near-future predictions follows a bell-shaped curve when fully mapped out. Their least likely predictions are normally pushed far into the lower ends of the curve, while the statistically most probable range of near-future outcomes constitute a central range that-'