Nova War

'Perhaps you'd rather things hadn't gone quite so badly with Yi and her brother,' the Librarian said. 'You might have been able to quietly retire, as you'd been hoping. Isn't that so?'

Dakota felt tears trickle down her cheeks as she sobbed quietly. Get out of my head, damn you.

'Would you like to see how your life would have been instead?'

Dakota sniffed. 'You can do that?'

'There are higher and lower probabilities of outcome but, yes, I can show you the most likely turn of events. Observe.'

Dakota looked up, and saw a world melting as the fires of a dying star reached out to consume it. A fleet rushed away from the nova, slipping into superluminal space a moment before its shockwave caught up with them.

It took a moment for her to understand that she'd just witnessed the destruction of Bellhaven.

'They-'

'Were Freehold ships,' the Librarian finished for her. She'd recognized the red phoenix symbol emblazoned on the hulls of the attacking ships. 'A fast strike against the system responsible for producing the vast majority of machine-heads. Within a few weeks, another occupied system is destroyed, and the Consortium capitulates to the Freehold's demands.'

The Librarian shrugged with an affectation of world-weary cynicism. 'But, of course, things didn't actually turn out like that.'

Dakota lowered her gaze, her throat dry. 'And what would have happened to me?'

'Dead by now, I fear. At first there would have been an amnesty for machine-heads as the Consortium desperately tried to muster a military response to the Freehold. You yourself would have taken up arms, driven to fanatical anger by the destruction of your home world.'

'And the Shoal – what would they have done?'

'Against a fledgling would-be interstellar empire on their doorstep, but without the resources and reach of the Emissaries?' Another shrug. 'Wiped your entire species out of existence, of course.'

Dakota sat very still. 'I don't need to believe any of this. You could make me see anything you wanted, and you assume I'd just believe it. You're saying that if I hadn't taken that derelict out of Nova Arctis, this is what would have happened.'

'Tell me then, Miss Merrick, if Senator Arbenz, instead, had retrieved the derelict, what do you think would have happened?'

'Let me out of this chair,' she whispered. 'Give the job to someone else.'

'I can do that,' the Librarian quietly replied, 'if you really want.'

Then she remembered. 'You said… there were other candidates. Who?'

'You already know who they are. One told you himself, and the other's presence you sensed only quite recently.'

'Tutor Langley.'

'And Hugh Moss, of course.'

'You can't let him-'

'If you refused to merge with me – to become my navigator – I would have little choice.'

'Why?' Dakota screamed. 'Why wouldn't you have any choice?'

'The answer to that requires another history lesson. Look-'

'No! Just tell me why you-'

More images suddenly filled the air above them. Some, demonstrating the Magi empire at its prime, were already familiar to Dakota; but for the first time, as fresh knowledge dawned, she realized that some avenues had previously been closed to her. She was now seeing and discovering things the Magi entities had never revealed to her before.

She saw how the Magi ships had originally been nothing more than weapons – autonomous, intelligent, and highly destructive. They were the last terrible legacy of the Nova War that had consumed the Magi, and they had roamed the Greater Magellanic Cloud in search of inhabited systems simply to destroy them. But eventually these star-killers had been retooled to a new purpose by the very minds they had been created to destroy, reprogrammed to become utterly dependent on the presence of a conscious, biological mind to guide them.

The myriad images began to fade, till Dakota was once more alone with the Librarian. 'We each need a navigator,' the Librarian insisted. 'Without a guiding mind – a conscience, if you will – we are entirely unable to act. With a guiding mind, however, we are compelled to obey. But you could not have controlled the Nova Arctis ship in the way you did without first physically bonding with it. That means you have an immediate advantage over men like Moss or Langley, who are unable to speak to me in this ma

Dakota suppressed a shiver. 'Maybe you'd be better off with Langley. He couldn't possibly make a worse mess of things than I already have.'

'Are you certain of that?' asked the Librarian. 'I can show you the most highly probable outcomes of either option.'

'All right.' Dakota felt something lurch deep within her chest. 'Show me.' She remembered Langley less well than she was prepared to admit even to herself, as obviously she'd blocked out a lot of her old life – those happier days before the massacres on Redstone.

It hurt to watch what the Librarian now showed her. She saw her old tutor successfully retrieve the Ocean's Deep derelict on behalf of the Consortium – and as a result, all the settled worlds of mankind were smoking ruins within a century.

And as for Moss… that was a unique nightmare all on its own.

'You mean he's not even human?'

'The Shoal have a somewhat whimsical term for it: "Involuntary Re-Speciation".'

'Christ and Buddha, it's…'

'Barbaric, indeed. Trader in Faecal Matter of Animals was very insistent about reviving the techniques involved. I believe he wished to make a very visible and powerful statement to his detractors.'

Minutes earlier, Dakota had watched as Moss flew the Magi ship right to the heart of the Emissary empire. Within months the Shoal home world was destroyed, followed by a thousand-year war during which these two rival powers finally succeeded in destroying each other – along with most of the Milky Way.

'And me?' she asked, when the last of the visions had faded. 'If I make it to the station before them, what's going to happen?'

She imagined the shadowed face was smiling as it framed its reply. 'I can't show you that, Dakota. You'd change your own future just by looking at it.'

'But you know how things will work out?'

'I still can't help you with the decision you need to make. It has to come solely from you.'

This isn't what I want, Dakota thought miserably.

'All right, say I win the day, and nobody else gets near you. Does that stop a full-blown war from starting?'

'The war has already started, and millions of lives are already gone. The conflict will inevitably spread, and trillions will die.'

'Then what's the point of any of this?' she exclaimed.

'To limit the ultimate damage,' the Librarian replied. 'Trader has already launched an illegal pre-emptive strike he believes will bring the war to an acceptable end.'

'Then maybe we should be helping the Shoal.'

'An acceptable end for the Shoal; a disaster for everyone else. Much of the galaxy would be left uninhabitable – and humanity extinct. The Shoal would rule over an empire of ashes.'

'How can you know all this?' Dakota demanded.

'I am as powerful in my own right as any Shoal-level civilization. I have found my way into every part of the colony at Leviathan's Fall. I have penetrated the coreship that brought you here, along with every Shoal craft, every Consortium or Bandati vessel throughout Ocean's Deep. Before long I will have penetrated to the core of the Emissary Godkiller. I am a powerful and dangerous weapon, Dakota, so be careful how you use me.'

'The Shoal wanted to wipe you out because you were too powerful?'

'They infected our navigators with a deadly phage. Some few survived, but their minds were enfeebled by the disease. We ourselves were each programmed to run and hide in the event of our navigator's death… and that's what we did, but not before the last of the Magi raised the Shoal out of their oceans and gave them the stars. They were already civilized, but primitive in the technological sense – trapped by their own evolution.'