Empire of Light

Another attack. Dakota jumped her ship so close to the red giant that it was effectively inside the star, orbiting at the very outermost limits of its atmosphere: an attenuated red mist heated to a few thousand degrees Kelvin. There were limits to how long the ship could survive in such an intense environment, but Dakota was ru

More importantly, it was too hot for the swarm, and for the moment the attacks ceased.

Hours and then days passed in the external universe, and Dakota watched as the swarm's newly constructed superluminal fleet jumped en masse out of the vicinity of the red giant.

She had little doubt they were making straight for the coordinates pinpointing the location of the Mos Hadroch. She had got what she wanted from the swarm, but it was a victory laced with a particularly bitter aftertaste. Dakota drifted on through the remnants of dead worlds, her mind filled with the confused whispers of terminally damaged Magi minds, their voices like ghosts in the ether, half-heard gabbles lost in hissing static.

There was a slim chance she could still make a long-range jump to safety before the star blew but, given that her starship had been almost terminally crippled by the swarm's concentrated attacks, there were no guarantees it would survive the attempt. Instead a plan slowly formulated in her mind: to use the remaining energy reserves to transmit a warning back to Ocean's Deep.

It was one of the hardest choices Dakota had ever had to make, but she came to a decision quickly. She fired off a single high-energy burst of coherent data towards Ocean's Deep, across the immensity of the galaxy, an act that left her starship nearly powerless and adrift.

And then something strange began to happen, over the following hours and days. In the face of its inevitable destruction, Dakota became aware the starship had spontaneously abandoned all efforts to repair itself. For reasons she could not yet understand, it instead began working at reintegrating whatever scattered fragments of her mind hadn't been compromised or destroyed by the swarm's vandalism.

The star itself entered a period of increased activity during this time, sending great fiery gouts of plasma sailing out across the void. Meanwhile her ship picked up major disruptions in the heat-flow at the star's core. There were, perhaps, only a few hours before the star went into terminal collapse and shrank, before ejecting its outer layers. There was enough energy to make a short-range jump, but she already knew she could never outrun the impending nova.

In the last few moments before the end came, Dakota found herself in a room full of objects that might have been mirrors – mirrors capable of capturing the light from several more spatial dimensions than her mind was capable of perceiving.

She saw reflections of herself, of other lives she might have lived if she had only made the choices that led to them. They were hazy reflections at best, might-have-beens and never-weres, glimpses into worlds that never quite became solid enough to be real.

Dakota found her attention drawn to one particular such vision, clearer than all the rest. She saw herself as she had been before the swarm attacked, when most of her memories had still been intact.

She never had a chance to find out why the ship had shown her this. The red giant's core chose that moment to collapse, releasing all its energy in a titanic blast that would, with time, become visible throughout the entire galaxy.

In her last moments of awareness, before the wave-front tore the ship apart, Dakota saw the billions of swarm-components nearest the expanding wave-front suddenly focus and direct the explosive energy of the nova in a way she couldn't even begin to understand.

A few seconds later, there was nothing left of Dakota or the starship itself but a whirl of superheated plasma, carried onwards and outwards.

Chapter Seven

He had sheltered within a dozen systems scattered across the great starry whirlpool of the galaxy, some of them inhabited, most long abandoned but still filled with billion-year-old ruins; and yet no matter how far Trader in Faecal Matter of Animals fled, the creature that called itself Hugh Moss always found a way to track him down.

He had almost been caught in the ruins of a vast dome rising from a plain of ashes, all that was left of a vast repository of knowledge left behind by a civilization that would have dwarfed the Shoal Hegemony, had it not immolated itself a hundred million years before. Trader had sought shelter in the cold iron ruins of a star caught for eternity in a temporal loop, now home to insane AIs imprisoned for crimes long forgotten; and yet Moss tracked him down even there.

He had been sheltered for a while by the Ascended War-Minds that ruled a dozen systems hard by the great black hole at the galaxy's heart. Moss had fallen upon him once again, and Trader again fled for his life with mocking laughter ringing in his ears.

Centuries before, Hugh Moss had begun life as a Shoal-member called Swimmer-in-Turbulent-Currents. He had been made an example of by Trader as punishment for his attempt to broker peace with the Emissaries by having his body radically altered, cell by cell, until he was transformed into something neither human nor Shoal.

The process had driven Swimmer insane, and towards the end of the battle for control of Ocean's Deep, Dakota had given Hugh the means to find Trader, regardless of how far he fled across the face of the galaxy, so that he could exact a terrible revenge upon his tormentor.

But now, at last, Trader would be free of the monster.

Trader had parked his yacht in orbit around the moon of a gas giant, in an unoccupied system no more than a few hundred light-years from the Hegemony's borders. Within a few hours, a Shoal coreship had appeared within range of his yacht's sca

When the arranged hour of the meeting arrived, Trader departed his yacht and dropped towards the moon's dense atmosphere, protected from the hard vacuum of space by a shaped-field bubble that surrounded him and contained the liquid environment he required for breathing. A cloud of machines the size of dust-motes followed him down, spread out around him for kilometres.

Trader directed his descent with gentle pulses of energy applied to different points around the spherical field's surface. Before long he was dropping down through a near-impenetrable layer of cloud until, at last, the darkened oceans beneath were revealed to him, and the great towers that rose from their liquid depths.

Trader guided his field-bubble below the surface of the waters. He had been one of the Shoal Hegemony's most adept agents for more than a hundred mille

Trader made his way towards a cathedral-like building, its apex long ago drowned beneath the waters, and made his way inside. He soon found himself within a high-vaulted space and set about deploying the microscopic defensive units he had brought along in preparation for this meeting.

Through the lenses of more devices seeded through the ocean surrounding the tower, Trader watched the descent of Commander-of-Shoals's own private vessel. Its belly cast a deep shadow across the ocean, before plunging deep beneath its surface. It came to a halt on a sub-aquatic plain a few kilometres distant before disgorging its sole occupant.