Nova War

'Fu

'Tragic would be more like it, Dakota.'

'I don't know,' she replied, and went to stand by the door. 'Where I'll be going is a long way away from here, and after a quarter of a million years there might not be anything there to find.'

'Before you go. A question I've been meaning to ask you.'

She eyed him expectantly.

'The Emissaries brought this ship we're on and an entire Immortal Light fleet to Ocean's Deep, and then turned on Immortal Light almost as soon as they were out of the Godkiller.' He shook his head. 'Why? I mean, at first, I thought I might be responsible.'

'How so?'

'Immortal Light took my incomplete protocols and managed to create a full working version of them in very little time.' He shrugged. 'But the protocols apparently didn't work and, no matter how I look at it, that doesn't seem enough of a setback for the Emissaries to suddenly turn around and destroy first Immortal Light's fleet, then the entire Night's End system.'

'I wondered about that too,' Dakota replied. 'At first we all assumed the Emissaries were here to discover how to build nova weapons, except it turned out they already had a pretty good idea of how to do that, right?' Corso nodded. 'I didn't manage to get as deep inside the Godkiller as I would have liked, but I found enough to make some educated guesses.'

'Go on.'

'They destroyed Immortal Light not just because of what the derelict carried within it, but also because your protocols could grant them the same kind of power. They were just stringing Immortal Light along until they could be sure. They don't want other species competing with them directly any more than the Shoal do.'

When she smiled wryly, Corso knew how appalled he must look. Just then the door slid open again to reveal the three men still arguing in the corridor outside. All three halted abruptly, and turned to stare at them.

'Thanks,' Corso whispered, 'for saving my life. I know I didn't get myself in that medbox on my own.'

She merely nodded, the door sliding shut after her as she stepped out of the room. He'd half expected her to vanish in a puff of green smoke.

For a long time, Corso sat staring down at his slate. Then he shook his head angrily and deleted the single line of text he'd managed to produce.

He had other things to take care of now. Over the following weeks, the surviving crews of the Darkening Skies fleet gradually subdued the rich jungles of the orbital station and set about repairing its crumbling towers. Dakota, meanwhile, was frequently to be seen moving from meeting to meeting within ships belonging to both Bandati and human. And wherever she went, she went unchallenged. She was discreetly – or less discreetly – followed at every turn, the faces of her fellow humans now distrusting or angry or hateful, or frequently some combination of all three.

There were further meetings and conferences, many more of them; there were endless attempts to cajole, threaten, bribe or merely persuade her, but Dakota's position remained unchanged. The Magi ships would be coming to the Ocean's Deep system only; the arrival of the spreading shockwave from the destruction of Night's End was still years off, and here there were no fragile ecospheres to be damaged, no vast populations prone to attack – only lifeless worlds, a space station, and the growing fleet of Magi ships.

Every now and then she would direct her attention towards Ocean's Deep's star, which had been burning for more than seven billion years, a bright and serene presence in the night skies of other populated worlds far, far away. Now it seemed impermanent, even fragile; something that could be destroyed on a whim, or else sacrificed in the name of political or military expediency. Lucas Corso's life was becoming busier than he could have imagined. A third Magi ship soon arrived, and then a fourth, and a fifth. The second to turn up – now piloted by Langley – left shortly for the Consortium territories, taking with it most of the Casseia Andris's crew, and returning with a cargo ship and a fresh complement of military staff, bureaucrats, negotiators, engineers and politicians. The crews of the Darkening Skies fleet meanwhile took the orbital station for their own Hive. One ring of it was secured for the exclusive use of the Consortium, and Corso moved to private quarters there.

Almost a fortnight after Corso's conversation with Dakota in the medical bay, there occurred the first of several concerted efforts to kill both her and himself. It failed utterly, mostly thanks to Dakota.

A covert team that included at least one demolitions expert had arrived incognito, mixed in with a fresh detachment of Consortium peacekeepers who had just arrived from Galileo. All six members of the team had been transferred into the detachment at the last minute, and once positioned at the orbital station they hadn't wasted any time in laying explosive charges at key points so as to cause the maximum damage to the already weakened station. Their apparent intention was to destroy the colony while both Dakota and Corso were engaged in talks with senior Consortium representatives, all such negotiations having now been shifted to the station itself from the Casseia Andris.

Something apparently went wrong, though, for when the report on the incident finally arrived, Lucas found that the remote detonators for the explosives had all failed mysteriously. Within minutes, joint Consortium and Darkening Skies security teams had been able to track down most members of the assassination team, after their cover identities and current whereabouts had been revealed anonymously. It was, of course, far from difficult to detect Dakota's own hand in arranging this last detail.

Two of the would-be assassins made a last stand in a loading bay, apparently preferring death to capture. They turned out to be Freeholders who had previously worked as mercenaries for the Consortium Legislate's special security services.

As for who had recruited them, and why, that remained a mystery. Those responsible had gone out of their way to avoid leaving any kind of electronic paper trail that could link them to the squad-members. There was, however, no lack of potential suspects. Over the next several days, there were two more failed attempts on Dakota's life. One involved an engineering consultant called Gloria Kjel, whose father had been working for Legislate business concerns in Darkwater's human quarter when the Night's End system had been destroyed. By the time Kjel had been apprehended, again thanks to an anonymous tip-off, Dakota's idea of going away for a while was starting to seem like a pretty good idea to Corso.

The other assassination attempt was nastier. Tracking down machine-heads to enrol as navigator-candidates presented its own unique set of hurdles, since the machine-head tech in itself was still illegal, presenting difficulties for any potential candidate wanting to make himself publicly known. Dakota herself, with an extensive criminal career behind her, would have had difficulty qualifying according to the tangled mess of regulations and specifications being hammered out by committees day and night. Yet the fact remained that, without navigators able to fly the superluminal Magi ships, the Consortium could not hope to survive as a cohesive entity.

One such candidate was a man called Jim Krieger, a Bellhavenite like Dakota, who'd also gone underground shortly after the Redstone massacres. By the time he found his way to Ocean's Deep more than a dozen Magi ships had arrived there, with new navigators currently being trained for each.

Krieger got close enough to Dakota to slash at her with a knife on their first meeting. Subsequent interrogation showed that he was being blackmailed over his young daughter, who'd been taken hostage by someone determined to destroy Dakota's plans. Krieger's child turned up dead less than a week later, in a Bellhaven city called Morningside.