Nova War

'No. The Shoal will still take him back,' Moss replied, a faraway look in his eyes. 'He's stayed alive this long. Now they'll need him to survive this war.'

'Not from what I've found out. They're actively hunting him down.'

Moss was looking at her with, Dakota realized with amusement and not a little horror, a certain respect. 'All that power in your hands, all those secrets. And they could have been mine.'

'It's not for you, Hugh. There are things you don't know – things neither the Shoal nor the Emissaries are even aware of. Things that will make all the difference. The outcome of this war isn't decided. I couldn't stop it starting, but there's a chance I can help bring it to an early end with minimal devastation and loss of life. It would, however,' she added, 'be at enormous cost to the Hegemony'

'Is that so.' He smiled thinly, pale skin stretched tight over hard bone. 'The yacht is recalled. Now tell me what I need to know. Tell me how I can find Trader.'

Dakota nodded faintly, and the knowledge he needed was suddenly there in his head. 'His yacht's ident,' she added. 'Trackable across light-years, if you know how to look.'

'I will hold you to your word, Dakota Merrick,' Moss said. 'But if you ever stand between me and Trader, I will hunt you down. And when I find you, I will make a symphony of your pain.'

Dakota smiled thinly. 'There's a small dock nearby with some escape pods stored in it. Use your field-bubble if the air runs out before you get there.' Before very long, an escape pod launched from the ring-segment, burning hard g's to put distance between itself and the blaze of radiation that surrounded the black hole. Far below, but looking close enough to touch, continent-sized clouds drifted around the equator of Leviathan's Fall.

Just as the escape pod accelerated away, the ring-segment blew apart, transformed instantly into an expanding cloud of debris. A second and far larger ship, with long spines spreading out around its body, emerged from the cloud, picking up speed as it too accelerated away. Just south of the Seven Stars of Evening, though invisible from the surface of Bellhaven, a starship materialized several AUs out from the sun. It had a lozenge-shaped body with long, curving drive-spines that lent it a sinuous appearance, and it carried precisely two passengers.

Dakota gazed towards the distant light of her home world and felt a burst of nostalgia, promising herself in that moment that, yes, she would return to those familiar rain-slicked and cobbled streets. One day.

But first she had to make sure she'd still have a home to return to.

Lower equatorial orbital space around Bellhaven was, as Trader had pointed out, thick with junk, some of it potentially deadly, some of it still active. Surveillance satellites in higher orbits, and around other planets in the system, picked up the Magi ship's gravitic pulse immediately, and started firing alerts back to their respective governments on Bellhaven, a

The primary question in Dakota's mind was whether Trader would activate the nuclear platforms still floating high above the surface of Bellhaven. The Magi ship, after all, could hardly be of use to him any more, not now he was almost certainly being hunted for starting a war he was supposed to prevent. Dakota knew the Shoal-member well enough, however, not to give him the benefit of the doubt.

She got her answer before long. All around Bellhaven, military spaceports and air bases went on full alert as orbital platforms supposedly long since decommissioned suddenly came to life, launching missiles towards the cloud-streaked skies below. The missiles were linked both to each other and to their respective launch platforms by a series of dedicated tach-net transceivers located in unma

At Dakota's command, the Magi starship penetrated Bellhaven's military security networks with ease, locating the network of transceivers in a matter of seconds. New override commands began firing out towards the missiles, deactivating them before they could reach their targets.

One missile thundered across the damp morning skies above the city of Erki

The Magi ship, meanwhile, began to accelerate once more, swinging past a small green-grey gas giant ringed by a dozen small rocky moons, and boosting on a long curving trajectory that would have carried it out of the ecliptic plane if its superluminal drive hadn't engaged once more, sending it back to Ocean's Deep. Autonomous hunter-killers were meanwhile still tracking each other through the asteroid belts of Ocean's Deep, their numbers gradually dwindling through a process of mutual attrition. Localized defensive units orbiting the coreship dealt with anything that came too close, while Shoal drones dived in turn towards the God-killer.

Encounters between ma

And then, something remarkable happened.

A few minutes after the Magi ship rematerialized in the Ocean's Deep system, as mysteriously as it had departed the better part of a day before, the Emissary attack drones scattered for more than a light-minute's distance around the Godkiller all shut down at the same time, leaving the Godkiller itself wide open to direct attack. The nearest of the Shoal's hunter-killer drones launched towards it unchallenged, immolating itself in a strategic strike against a jump-spine.

More such strikes quickly followed.

The Godkiller began to accelerate in the direction of the outer system, trailed by a wake of offensive drones boosting to catch up with it. Ma

The Emissary vessel was exhausting its fuel in a desperate bid to achieve jump speed, despite serious damage to several of its spines. The Shoal drones came in firing, their particle beams and pulse-lances raking the remaining jump-spines and leaving the target crippled and venting atmosphere. More drones struck fragile plasma conduits and sun-hot energy spilled out, consuming the Godkiller from the inside out. Light blazed from deep within its hull.

But it wasn't quite over.

A single, unma

At that time, none of the forces in the system could have guessed where the drone might be heading. But when comms traffic from Night's End fell abruptly silent several hours later, it didn't take long to realize what had happened. Monitoring systems dotted around Ironbloom picked up a sudden gravitic pulse, rapidly triangulating the location, trajectory and speed of a superluminal drone that had materialized barely half an AU out from Night's End's sun.

The drone took a few minutes for calibration and navigational checking before initiating a chain reaction deep within its drive, then it briefly slipped back out of normal space. It rematerialized near the star's core, protected for a few millionths of a second by a shell of exotic energy surrounding it.